We now need the data to know the extent of what is happening, and what we are hearing from police who are doing it is that it transforms the way they deal with violence against women, because it makes the link between misogyny and violence.

One of the things that the show did for me was bring up so many women’s issues and the notion that homophobia is a form of misogyny. The women’s community and the gay community are interrelated, whether you’re straight or not. It also made me realize how connected women are everywhere. Women who are gay are repressed in similar ways as women who are straight.

We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it’s a slippery slope. That’s why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole.

Misogyny, as we’ve seen, is multifaceted and polices different people and different kinds of bodies in different ways: all must be resisted in order for feminism to truly challenge patriarchy.

I’m not going to defend misogyny in hip-hop. But it didn’t affect me the way, say, Hustler magazine did. It’s very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it’s interpreted in some way.

When women talk about any kind of misogynistic abuse, three things happen. We are told that we should stop making a fuss. We are told that it could be worse. We are told that other issues are more serious. At the Hay festival this week, Germaine Greer told us all three.

I believe we can change laws, but the important thing is to change our psychology to empower women, to tell the society that we can do what we want to, whether it’s getting an education, choosing to stay unmarried and so on.

[W]e should all welcome the protection from sex-based harassment in a public bill. It echoes the way that hate crime legislation penalises those who target certain groups based on their identity, by using an existing offence used to prosecute harassment – from the Public Order Act 1986 – and applying a harsher sentence to those whose motivation is shown to be about the sex or perceived sex of their victim. It is the first time the statute book will recognise how misogyny drives crimes against women.
Yet, as ever, nothing is straightforward. Public order offences allow the accused to claim a defence that they thought their behaviour was "reasonable", even if no one else would. This contrasts with other legislation that also covers harassment in English law, and only allows a defendant to claim their behaviour is reasonable if others would agree; that they "ought to know" if their conduct was unacceptable. Without changing this element of the forthcoming public harassment bill to be consistent with how harassment operates elsewhere, this new law – while well-intentioned – risks giving perpetrators the opportunity to claim "she just can’t take a compliment" as an actual defence to a criminal offence.

I have been thinking a lot about #MeToo and thinking, What if we look at it as something that is not done to "bad people?" What if it is actually a way to understand the ways that various forms of violence actually shape our lives? If we could see it as a way to understand how deeply enmeshed we are in the very systems that we're organizing to transform, then I feel like it's a movement that will allow us to move a step toward transformation and more justice.