Phones can be used as digital pepper spray

ME TOO. You too. Her too. Us too. And probably all of them over there too as well. Grammar can suffer horribly when trying to make a point about sexual harassment. Seriously though — you too? 

Because to have ever been on the receiving end of unwanted attention, from creepy staring to violent sexual assault, all you need is to present as female. You don’t even need a vagina — you just need to look like you might have one in there somewhere. It’s not a crazed hypothesis to suggest that pretty much every woman has at some point been on the receiving end of uninvited male behaviour – from cheer-up-darling to unpleasant coercion to actual rape — during her lifetime.

My first experience of me-too was when a drunk tramp did a Trump and grabbed me right there as I walked past him on my way home from school. In uniform, in my early teens. Carrying a school bag. I was so shocked that I kept walking, and pretended it never happened. When I was older I used to fight back — when, in a rush hour Barcelona metro station on a hot day, a man yanked up my dress in front of maybe 10m commuters, I punched him in the face. Reflexively, without thinking.

Now I am older still, and get left in peace, but what about my teenage daughter?

Two things give hope.

Digital communication makes it much harder to hide, in an era of camera phones and instant uploads; who wants to be known all over social media as a sex pest? Who wants images of themselves being vile broadcast to an internet audience? The camera phone can — and should — be used as digital pepper spray. It’s depressing to even think like this, never mind having to deploy such tactics — but then women have always had to be supremely

practical and tactical when negotiating that toxic strain of masculinity intent on abuse.

It’s like football hooliganism — while the great majority are perfectly civilised, there remains a culture of male sexual predation which tarnishes the broader demographic. As one fed-up friend wrote on Facebook, “Can somebody explain why I should feel ‘partly responsible’ for what Harvey Weinstein did? If I have to read that I have to ‘do more as a man’ I will puke.” Understandably so. It must be infuriating, if you’re an ordinary man, to suddenly have to defend yourself during an outbreak of Weinsteinism — infuriating and grossly unfair.

How hopeful then, the continued evolution of our collective consciousness. With each generation, the gender divide continues to blur and weaken. Like good Darwinians, we are breeding out the recessive entitlement that allows one gender to harass, demean and threaten the other. Our kids are growing up with equality instilled as the norm, with the pink and blue bled out of them, so that future generations will not need to resort to sharing me-too experiences.

We will have evolved beyond that. Um. Won’t we?