Harvey Weinstein is just a man being a man

On Wednesday's edition of Newsnight (BBC2) the veteran presenter Kirsty Wark somewhat abrasively interrogated Tina Brown, a media queen who runs publishing and TV companies and once worked for Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who we learn, is accused of expecting sexual submission as part of an unwritten job description.

What did Brown know? Why didn't she do anything? How could this have been allowed to go on? What took them so long? These are questions millions of us ask as top female stars and operators now come out and say what they never said before.

Thinking about it afterwards, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about the interview. Programme makers should have dragged in a male Hollywood actor and given him the third degree. Maybe matt Damon who, it is alleged, killed a newspaper story exposing the dirty old producer.

Newsnight did have a man, the stupendously gifted playwright, Jez Butterworth, who read an open letter to Weinstein reminding him that they both have young daughters, pulling at fatherly strings.

Wrong again and off-puttingly solipsistic. This is not about their daughters, it's about other people's daughters. But mostly, it's about vast numbers of men and their masculinity which carries on being gross and violently anti-female in this century of growing female confidence and entitlement.

It's as if feminism has to be slapped, pushed down and taken. A grotesque man like Weinstein is not a rogue but a pictogram of this gender vendetta.

Men being men

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, 24, an Italian model of Filipino descent, claims Weinstein groped her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt at his office in Manhattan in March 2015. Then 22, she reported this behaviour to the police.

The NYPD equipped her with a hidden microphone before she met Weinstein the next day at a hotel. She told him she was uncomfortable with him touching her; he replied, "I'm used to that", then swore on his kids that she would be safe with him. Two weeks later, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance decided not to press charges.

A year earlier, the producer had appeared on a live show. Howard Stern, a rich and famous radio and TV host, gaily asked Weinstein about wannabe stars giving him sexual thrills. Bashfully, Mr Big of Hollywood, denied such stuff happened.

So a liar as well as a fiend. Stern then teased him: "You can't just walk into a room, pull your pants off and say, Ok let's do business?" A female co-presenter timidly interjected: "Shouldn't women be able to get into the movie business without all that?"

"Hell no!" was Stern's fast comeback. Everyone was expected to laugh.

That's just our Harvey and Howard, men being men. This is the jungle which produces the conduct we are witnessing. Not all men are rapists and exploiters, but most men and boys do not examine or confront the masculine habitat.

Good, decent, egalitarian men need to gather and discuss this kind of animal behaviour. That never happens. It didn't happen after we discovered all about the adventures of Jimmy Savile. It isn't happening now as the inquiry into historical child abuse proceeds. Men's groups, such as they are, are full of miserablists banging on and on about their 'disappearing' rights.

Sexual molestation and rape is rife

Harvey Weinstein and his ilk are not that different from Shabir Ahmed, 64, the 'Daddy' of the Rochdale grooming gang which entrapped and used young white girls. And lest you think this is a last battle before surrender being fought by passing old misogynists, think again.

Sexual molestation and rape is rife though our universities, including Russell Group institutions. Young men do not understand consent, think young women are always gagging for it, or, most disgusting of all, that males can do as they wish with female bodies. The use of rape drugs is growing and young women and girls are, arguably, more in danger today than they were in the seventies.

That leads to the second, vital societal change which is rarely discussed or contested. Ours is a world of runaway freedoms. There are no agreed moral boundaries to temper behaviours. I have heard prominent men and women attacking 'snowflakes', blaming rape victims for not being resilient enough.

I daresay they will be defending the latest lech to hit the headlines and suggesting women should stop being babies and deal with male flirtation and lust. Though the majority of these pacesetting libertarians are men, some women are part of the unholy league.

Put it all together and you understand how oppression works. The powerful abuse their freedoms; the powerless feel they must submit; those who should and can, don't speak out because they know or owe the exploiters and also because they don't want to be seen as illiberal.

The game plays on and on and eventually you get Trump, contemptuous of females and a serial groper, voted in as US president. Weinstein just got unlucky. He has fallen, but the mauling and violation of females in the entertainment industry and elsewhere will not end any time soon.