As with most popular movements, what starts from good intentions frequently spirals out of control – or beyond what its originator intended. Many men, for example, already experience not only sexual harassment, but also physical abuse at the hands of women. And Western men, especially white males, have already long been under attack by fanatical feminists, weathering unwarranted abuse simply because of their gender. Those of us with sons, brother, husbands, friends who are far from being predatory males have reason to be concerned about the excesses the MeToo movement is likely to lead to. One of these is the clamour for very young children to be given much more explicit sex education – although studies show this is not in the best interests of vulnerable children. The removal of innocence, and the arousing of sexual curiosity among the young, can be emotionally not only distracting, but damaging.

Many conservative women have also been at the mercy of the sisterhood. ‘Feminazis’ are equally and as nastily antagonistic to their sisters…to family women, to pro-life women in particular. Every pro-abortion rally brings out the angry faces chanting ‘a woman’s right to her own body’ when it is demonstrably not her own body, but that of an entirely different little human being that so many desperate women are encouraged to dispose of.

The sexual revolution did neither men nor women any real favours. Arguably, it assisted the Harvey Weinstein Syndrome. But has the entitlement too many much-feted or wealthy men feel they have to expect sexual favours from women persisted – because it has been allowed to? After all, it takes two to tango.

The now conveniently indignant Hollywood female glitterati, late banding together to condemn Weinstein and Hollywood powerbrokers, have long been arguably derelict in acquiescing to the casting couch syndrome. Well-known as the place where sexual favours were demanded by powerful film producers or directors, it was first reported in the 1930s. All Hollywood was aware of it: some fine actresses opposed it, warning others. Ambitious women may well have been aware of the probable consequences of resisting – or of speaking out. Yet so many did not – with prominent stars such as Meryl Streep now defending themselves against accusations that they stayed silent.

It is not so much whether we are now a sick society – but whether its illness is terminal. Who could deny it has become sex-obsessed? The now, too-late recognised long march through our institutions, advocated by the Italian communist Gramsci as the best chance of white-anting the West, has achieved much of what it aimed for. The shocking targeting, even, of school children, even at kindergarten level, has reached fruition in the Safe Schools programme. Advocating homosexuality, transgenderism, queerism, and all the special demands from the radicalised agenda-driven, it has adopted the now tattered cloak of liberalism to conceal its increasingly extreme onslaughts against rational thinking.

The attack on basic human biology, on nature, on DNA, can well be argued to be a delusional form of thinking, in which individuals claim they can choose what sex they want to be – and that anyone who wants this current faddism objectively debated – or who objects to children being propagandised by the rainbow coalitions – is homophobic. Using the usual tactics of bullying, of harassment, the blacklisting of businesses or of court attacks on those claiming a legitimate right to obey their conscience, its success is considerable. It takes a great deal of courage to confront bullies, especially when free debate is punitively classified as ‘hate speech’, and, appallingly, even open to prosecution.

Is all this, including the nonsense of gay ‘marriage’, symptomatic of a civilisation in decline? Who could have foreseen the rapid flowering of the obnoxious, spoilt brats of an over-privileged class – the snowflakes? Too intellectually or morally fragile to endure debate, they have mounted an attack on those basic democratic freedoms for which so many preceeding generations gave their lives. Shamefully, they have flourished largely in those very institutions, our universities, which were once proud of their commitment to freedom of speech and thought.