Joanna Williams

It’s easy to see why the online dictionary Merriam-Webster chose ‘feminism’ as their word of the year. 2017 kicked off with women across the globe marching against Donald Trump and ended with Time magazine heralding the #MeToo ‘silence breakers’ as their person of the year. Every glossy double-page spread further established feminism as this year’s fashion. Head cheerleader Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian (naturally) is cock-a-hoop about feminism’s resurgence: ‘Now we just have to continue to make it the movement of the year (and next year, and the next) until women can start to feel safe in their own country.

In August 1988, after weeks of practice, I created the perfect Mr Whippy ice cream. I was 14 and I had a Saturday job in a cafe. When the sun shone I’d get to lean out of the serving hatch, chat to passers-by and sell ice creams. Rarely have strawberry sauce and sugar sprinkles been so lovingly applied to such gravity-defying cornets. Go to your local cafe this Saturday and the chances are you won’t be served by an over-enthusiastic 14 year-old. Figures released to the BBC this week, under the Freedom of Information Act, show the number of teenagers with part-time jobs has declined markedly in recent years. Businesses wanting to employ children under the age of 16 need to apply for a local authority work permit.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?

Almost a third of young women think that winking is a form of sexual harassment. Let that sink in. For 28 per cent of women aged 18 - 24 the merest flick of an eyelid, an action so small as to be barely noticeable, is considered to be unwanted sexual behaviour that violates their dignity, makes them feel intimidated, degraded or humiliated and creates a hostile or offensive environment. Now, I’m normally first in line to point out the flaws in surveys that tell us only the views of a small number of people motivated to answer questions about sexual harassment. But the YouGov research lands at a time when stories about sexual harassment dominate news coverage. It comes on the back of a BBC survey claiming half of women are sexually harassed at work.

Following a weekend crammed with ever more salacious revelations about Harvey Weinstein, hundreds of thousands of women have now taken to social media to share their own experiences of sexual harassment. This is called the ‘#MeToo’ movement, and it’s gone viral, in the way that these things do. According to Twitter, this reveals ‘the magnitude of sexual assault’. In reality, it does nothing of the sort. #MeToo tells us far more about the desire of some women to reach for victimhood status. The accusations against Weinstein include charges of rape; as such, they deserve to be taken seriously and tried in courts of law rather than by public opinion.

From Educating Rita and The Young Ones to the more recent Fresh Meat, social class differences among university students provide perennial dramatic inspiration. Working class students - what with their funny accents, strange diet and odd clothes - are simply a great source of comic relief. Now there’s a new stereotype for scriptwriters to get their teeth into: chicken. Fried chicken to be precise. Apparently the working class just can’t get enough of it. And luckily the working class students at Goldsmiths, University of London, have defenders on hand to ensure this cultural trait is neither mocked nor appropriated by their more middle class peers. Working class students: you can relax. Your fried chicken-habit is safely yours, and yours alone.

We now know that the video of a cyclist confronting a catcalling driver, which spent much of yesterday being circulated on social media and covered in the national press, was staged. Barely had viewers finished cheering on the woman as she tore the wing mirror off the side of her harasser’s van than the truth emerged. An eyewitness told the Sun, ‘They practiced the scene two or three times with the motorbike riding behind them. You could see there was already damage to the wing mirror, it was loose.’ The company that hosted the video, Jungle Creations, has now issued a statement claiming that although it was under the impression that it portrayed real-life events, it now realises the video ‘may be factually incorrect.

Forget Pimm's, sunburn and rain abandoned picnics. What really makes summer is a heap of outrage directed at an old white man for saying something feminists think is beyond the pale. Last year it was Sir Tim Hunt and his quip about the problem of women in labs. This time it is Kevin Roberts, chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi, who has suggested gender bias is not an issue in the advertising industry. For this crime against feminism, Roberts has been suspended and will spend this summer in his garden rather than in the office. Unpicking the obligatory social media bluster about ‘misogyny’ and ‘the patriarchy’ to work out where exactly Roberts went wrong is not easy.