I am not easily shocked. I lived through an era in which the lower-level intrusions, a hand on your knee, a comment on your appearance, were part of the everyday texture of working life, and I learned how to deal with them. I never thought of women as less strong, less capable or less powerful than men.
I certainly never thought of myself that way. I understood that many of the shifts I benefited from were the result of decades of feminist work, but they had settled into the background of everyday life. I took them as given.
Progress felt structural, embedded, something that would continue quietly as society evolved. Over time, though, and with increasing regularity, stories began to surface that unsettled that assumption. Not just Jeffrey Epstein, but a steady accumulation of revelations, weekly, sometimes daily, about women being weakened, coerced or exploited. Not just aberrations, but patterns. It became harder to treat them as isolated, and harder to look away.
This isn’t a manifesto. It comes from attention rather than expertise. I’m conscious of how quickly conversations about women and power can tip into absolutism. During the height of the #MeToo movement, that tension was hard to ignore. Its aims felt necessary, but the tendency to collapse very different experiences into the same moral frame often felt uneasy. Awkwardness is not abuse. Discomfort is not always harm. Those distinctions matter.
But something else was taking shape. Not a return to the old ways, but a colder imbalance, one that is harder to challenge precisely because it is so often denied. This isn’t one workplace or one story. It’s a pattern that surfaces in conversation, with friends across different industries, with women of my age navigating senior roles, and increasingly in what younger women describe as they try to find their footing.
Equality is now often spoken about as though it has been achieved. We point to representation, to women in senior positions, to balanced headcounts, and declare the matter settled. But the question that keeps resurfacing is where power gathers: whose judgement carries weight; where the consequential decisions are actually made. Presence is not the same as power.
What feels most unsettling is not the behaviour of older men, which at least follows patterns I recognise, but something more diffuse among younger ones. The expectation was that they would be more careful, more at ease with women’s autonomy. Often they are. But not always. There is, at times, a casual denigration of girls and women that feels oddly regressive. Its origins are hard to pin down. It may sit somewhere in the culture younger men have grown up in, the ubiquity of pornography, the online ecosystems that reward contempt, or in a backlash to a world in which women no longer need men in the ways they once did. There are no neat answers here. Only a sense that this isn’t what progress was meant to look like.
The Epstein story sharpens all of this because of how instinctively the narrative bends away from the women involved. Attention returns, again and again, to the men. Their reputations. Their embarrassment. Their proximity to disgrace. The women remain abstracted, pushed to the edges of the story, spoken about as a category rather than as people. Even now, even after everything, they are remarkably easy to forget.
Having a 19-year-old daughter brings this into sharper relief. She has been raised to be strong, to take no nonsense, to stand her ground. Conversations about confidence, boundaries and self-belief are part of daily life. Yet reading more and more about the women caught up in stories like Epstein’s exposes how those qualities can be dismantled.
Strength is often spoken about as though it were armour. But many of the women in these stories were not weak at all. Some were groomed so young they never had the chance to become strong. Others were already confident and capable, and were systematically undone. Drugs used to disorient. Coercion framed as opportunity. Isolation that erodes perspective. Confidence stripped away until resistance becomes impossible. This is not about women failing to protect themselves; it is about power finding ways to neutralise them.
The more of these stories emerge, the clearer it becomes how often women’s suffering is treated as incidental. The real story, we are told, is power, influence, networks, the reputational damage to important men. It’s hard not to ask how much has really changed if this remains the reflex.
There are no solutions offered here, and no claims to certainty. Even the language feels unstable: feminism itself appears fractured, easily caricatured, easily dismissed. For a long time, standing apart from its excesses felt possible. But that distance has become harder to maintain. Watching on these stories accumulate has shifted something. Silence now feels like complicity. Discomfort feels like something to sit with, rather than explain away. And that once these patterns come into focus, in news stories, in conversations, in the culture young people are absorbing, it becomes very hard to look away.
[Further reading: Pornhub’s harm will never be undone]
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