I shake my head at a lot of what’s going on, here. It seems to me that so many promising movements are losing time and their way by concentrating too much on the historical. Surely it is more important to ensure that women now and in the future feel able to refuse unwanted advances, and confident in promptly reporting misconduct, assault or rape to the proper authorities, knowing that they will be taken seriously and investigated in a thorough and unbiased manner. To that end, examples of what has occurred in the past are indeed valuable, but there must be the caveat that not all accusation of historical offences are necessarily true. Too much time spent pursuing vengeance on (often elderly) men detracts from the more vital task of preventing future crimes. It puts me in mind of those Jewish people who singlemindedly pursue nonagenarian former SS men while the Israeli government practises ethnic cleansing on Palestinians -you’re looking in the wrong direction, people! What’s done is done: by all means talk about it, but with the aim of arming potential victims against future harm, not getting your personal revenge! There is abuse going on right now and while we can learn from what happened to you 10–20–30 years ago, it’s more important to deal with current offenders (whether or not they happen to be the same people).

The same applies to other movements. Person X was an important part of the history of your country/state/city/town/village -to pull down their statue and remove them from the history books because they owned slaves at a time when this was legal and normal, is to show yourself as small — minded and to retcon history in a very Orwellian fashion, creating an ‘unperson’. To rail against classics of literature because of their depictions of women or people of colour, which were in tune with the established thinking at the time of writing, is equally foolish and wilfully ignorant.

In the name of sanity, let’s concentrate on sorting out the present and the future — ‘correcting’ the past is neither possible nor desirable!