In late January, Lisandra Vazquez posted a two-character skit on TikTok in which Kristi Noem — still heading the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security at the time — finds herself in prison with Ghislaine Maxwell, who wants nothing to do with her. “Did you really think that leading the New Gestapo was just gonna be hunky-dory?” sneers the Maxwell character. “You and I both know how this works,” faux Noem starts to say before being aggressively shushed. “You and me? We are not friends,” Maxwell hisses. “In here, the only thing people hate more than a child trafficker is a puppy killer.”
There’s a lot that rings true in the satire — first and foremost, that Maxwell would absolutely not deign to admit she has anything in common with Noem — but the joke is that both women made the grave error of believing that they could throw in their lots with men who fundamentally do not see women as fully human, and their reward is being the fall gals for those men. Their stories demonstrate the instability of the patriarchal bargains women strike in order to gain some of the success, acclaim, freedom and rewards that otherwise accrue entirely to men.
Turkish feminist Deniz Kandiyoti coined the term “patriarchal bargain” in 1988 to describe the constellation of compromises and trade-offs individual women make in pursuit of safety, security, financial security and other benefits. Kandiyoti emphasized that a patriarchal bargain “isn’t a ‘good buy’, but it both creates strategic opportunities for women and invests women in patriarchy.” Such bargains take many forms: A woman in a majority-male workplace or academic sphere strikes one the first time she realizes that her career trajectory will go smoother if she laughs rather than scowls when her coworkers demean or sexualize her. A mother strikes a patriarchal bargain when she polices the clothing of her preteen and teen daughters. Women in high-control, male-dominated religions understand that their eternal lives in heaven depend on their ability to abide by strict gendered codes that circumscribe their lives.
These bargains aren’t choices, exactly; they’re more like survival adaptations, instinctive and reflexive. Claiming a nonexistent boyfriend so that a man will back off is a patriarchal bargain, dumbing yourself down to not to risk intimidating or competing with him is another. Another way to describe patriarchal bargains is going along to get along; a cruder way to explain them is: How much sh*t are you willing to eat in order to get what you need? There’s no reforming the system: The point of the patriarchal bargain is that it costs the patriarchy itself nothing.
Both women made the grave error of believing that they could throw in their lots with men who fundamentally do not see women as fully human, and their reward is being the fall gals for those men.
Maxwell was the beloved youngest child of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, who by almost all accounts treated his children with routine, performative cruelty. Petronella Wyatt, a former friend and fellow London society figure interviewed in Netflix’s “Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich,” recalled in a companion essay that the elder Maxwell’s love for his daughter didn’t stop him from believing “that women were mere vessels for male pleasure,” something Jeffrey Epstein would later echo by calling women “a life-support system for a vagina.”
Epstein entered Maxwell’s life shortly after her father’s suspicious death in 1991 (Robert Maxwell drowned under circumstances that became clearer after the discovery that he had embezzled a reported $460 million from his companies’ pension funds.) Almost overnight, she lost her beloved father and her financial security, and Epstein was able to provide one, and possibly both of the things she most needed; one source told Vanity Fair that Maxwell “was in love with Jeffrey the way she was in love with her father. She always thought that if she just did one more thing for him, to please him, he would marry her.”
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The Maxwell-Epstein partnership was transactional from the start: He had the money to keep her in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed, and she had the sprawling global network of potential clients for Epstein, including a rarefied inner circle of Oxford-educated friends and peers who Epstein would have had little chance of meeting on his own. The patriarchal bargain Maxwell accepted was that if Epstein didn’t love her in the same way she loved him, she would devote herself to recognizing what he wanted and providing it.
Kristi Noem’s relationship with Donald Trump, likewise, has been one of straightforward quid pro quo, defined by endorsements and defenses of one another as needed. His endorsement of her run for governor of South Dakota was critical to her win, and in the following years, she made it clear that she was willing to be whatever Donald Trump needed her to be. By early 2024, unignorable physical tweaks — longer hair, higher heels, new teeth — confirmed that she was auditioning for Trump, demonstrating that she was willing to give herself over to every part of his agenda, whether it involved insulting Joe Biden or performing her bona fides as an immigration foe.
The men Maxwell and Noem put at the centers or their respective lives were not Svengalis who directly changed or controlled them; they were more a case of game recognizing game. “Filthy Rich” makes clear that Maxwell had a flair for sadism long before she knew Jeffrey Epstein. Former friends recall that she seemed to delight in making people uncomfortable, particularly in sex-related ways; one tells the story of a night when Maxwell decided to turn a routine dinner party into a game that required the women in attendance to take off their blouses and bras and present themselves to the blindfolded men, who would try to guess whose breasts belonged to whom.
The sense of superiority that Maxwell grew up with was key to success in procuring girls for Epstein to abuse. She spent her days being driven around New York City, scouting private schools for teenage girls, buttonholing sales associates at high-end shops and using her posh charm to convince them that she and her partner wanted to invest in their futures and fund their dreams. But, a former friend states in “Filthy Rich,” Maxwell was also disdainful: “They’re nothing, these girls, they are trash.’”
The men Maxwell and Noem put at the centers or their respective lives were not Svengalis who directly changed or controlled them, but a matter of game recognizing game.
Noem displayed a flair for dehumanization shortly after she was named secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in 2025. She knew Trump cared more about the optics of a strongman presidency than he did about what actions were either legal or accurate, and she understood the assignment.
She also understood what not to do, having learned from her major fumble in 2024 when she was hoping to be named Trump’s running mate and made sure to include in her autobiography the story of shooting her 14-month-old puppy. At a time when there were vanishingly few things people across the entire political spectrum can agree on, it was a relief to find that being against shooting puppies in the head was one of them. Still, the fact that Noem thought the story would give her traction with Trump in the first place is telling.
Noem’s reign at DHS echoed Trump’s desire to use social media to whip up outrage and loyalty using a campaign of shockingly tasteless online content. But this too seems like a variation on a theme: The social-media posts that went up on Noem’s watch, which included scenes of ICE agents reveling in violence, Batman memes, and more, seem like they could have been presaged by, say, the 2019 meth-prevention campaign Noem oversaw as governor of South Dakota, whose trolling tagline — “Meth. we’re on it” — made billboards across the state look like, well, advertisements for meth.
Both women flexed what power they held in very different ways. Maxwell was less inclined to seek out the spotlight once she became part of Epstein’s life, and apparently took a curatorial pride in being the one to find girls that she knew would (I regret having to quote this) “appeal to Mr. Epstein and his friends.” Maxwell wasn’t convicted of sexual assault herself, but the testimony of survivors identifies her as alternately a participant in the sexual abuse and a kind of den mother who would tell the girls how well they did and how much Epstein wanted them to return.
Noem’s inflated sense of her own importance, by contrast, eventually threatened Trump’s own ego. In the weeks before she was fired, Noem released a promotional video featuring herself riding horses, talking about the beauty of America, and issuing open-ended threats to immigrants, lawbreakers and troublemakers; when she was questioned about the $220 million it cost and the DHS’s exorbitant expenditures overall, she implied that Trump signed off on all of it. As W. Kamau Bell and Robert Reich noted, Noem’s use of taxpayer money to shamelessly enrich herself and her friends was ripped straight from Trump’s own playbook; her mistake was focusing more on herself than on him.
The problem with patriarchal bargains is that the women who make them aren’t the ones setting their terms. One of the most famous failed bargains in American politics was made by Phyllis Schlafly, who mobilized a grassroots coalition of conservative homemakers to block the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The success of Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign showed that conservative women were a key voting bloc, and Schlafly used her own high profile to help ensure Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. She believed that she would be rewarded with a position in his cabinet. She wasn’t. Writing a remembrance of Schlafly, who died in 2016, Sydney Weisman recalls her anger: “‘They should’ve put me in the cabinet. I could have been Secretary of Defense.’ She said that the men, and it was all men, didn’t want a woman, wouldn’t consider a woman. I just let it sit there.”
If there’s anything redeeming in the misogyny of Donald Trump’s administrations, it’s the confirmation that we can’t confuse the individual achievements and successes of women with the liberation of women as a whole. And yet women are still out there expressing that they feel let down by Kristi Noem and Ghislaine Maxwell, that women are supposed to be better than this. Donna Ladd, writing in the Mississippi Free Press, expressed disappointed in Noem, in Maxwell and in Pam Bondi because “women are supposed to be better than this.” She never articulates why she thinks this is true, or explains what in the objectively terrible, if not criminal, actions of Noem, Maxwell, and Bondi are beyond the pale, only that they have let her — and by extension, all women — down.
But I think there’s another way to look at the egregious male identification of Maxwell and Noem (and Bondi, should she end up thrown under the bus with them), a perspective memorably asserted by Bella Abzug’s declaration that “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” In an increasingly binary world, reckoning with patriarchal bargains requires holding contradictory concepts in mind. It’s not possible to talk about women like Maxwell and Noem without acknowledging the patriarchal bargains they struck; the fact that they made such bargains doesn’t excuse the things they have done. We need to get used to that contradiction.
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