Remember #MeToo? How about #BelieveHer? Remember when, for a brief moment, it looked and felt like the world was committed to finally banishing the four horsemen, who have plagued every women to ever try reporting sexual assault?

My, how far we’ve come from there, as the Wi Spa incident shows.

Who’d have thought that in those days when we finally seemed about to let daylight into the murky world of male sexual aggression towards women that we were only a few years away from women being told they were bigots for being made uncomfortable or that they were siding with Nazis in wanting it to stop? Who’d have believed that the people saying that define themselves as feminist, or that they claim, straight-faced, that those who disagree with them are, by definition, not feminists.

Wi Spa has been a tremendous victory for the men who want to women to keep quiet about sexual violence, because it has perfectly demonstrated that all of the old weapons are oiled, loaded and in full working order, and that new arms have been added to the arsenal. Every woman has got to see that, even there, where the case turned out to be as cut and dried as one could hope for in such matters, the cost to the woman at the centre of it was terrible. They can all vividly imagine how things would go if their own case was even a little more marginal.

#MeToo felt like the start of the end of the easy ride for male abusers, instead they can now cite feminist scholars, saying that their accusers are no better than racists. Women were angry then, the best of them – the ones who understand how men have learned to use ideology to not only wound women directly but also to cut them adrift from feminist support – are furious now. Come and see.