Joanna Williams

It had all been going so well. Coverage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s tour to South Africa kicked off with footage of them dancing, before moving on to feature their work promoting the importance of gender equality in education and the horror of violence against women. We’ve been treated to rare pictures of baby Archie being introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And who doesn’t love a cute baby – especially one dressed in £14.99 chain store dungarees? So right on, but so relatable. We know all this because the press have been there, dutifully on message, diligently recording every royal smile. And the reward for this slick, glossy loyalty? Prince Harry has now made a no-holds barred attack on ‘this specific press pack’.

The film awards season is over and Cannes has been handed back to wealthy holiday-makers, yet the #MeToo movement shows no signs of slowing down. Morgan Freeman is the most recent addition to the ignominious list of film producers, directors and actors who have had accusations of sexual harassment made against them since #MeToo took off in October last year. Allegations against the 80 year-old Freeman, star of The Shawshank Redemption, emerged last week on the day before Harvey Weinstein handed himself into police in New York on charges of rape. The charges against Weinstein are serious; he should stand trial and, if found guilty, face a lengthy prison sentence.

They may have perfected the sexy selfie and a nonchalance about internet porn but millennials are just not that into sex. The guilty secret behind today’s swipe-right hookup culture is not promiscuity but abstinence. Research out this week suggests that one in eight 26-year-olds have never had sex, up from one in 20 a generation ago. According to Steve McKay, professor in social research at Lincoln University, the true figure may be even higher; if those who refused to answer the question were also virgins then the number of abstainers rises to 16.4 per cent, or one in six. Last year’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles revealed a similar story, showing that 23 per cent of 16-24 year-olds had not had sex in the past year.

David Willetts, one time minister of state for universities and science turned chief spokesperson for baby boomer self-flagellation, is clearly troubled by the year of his birth. Since his 2010 book, The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future and why they should give it back, he’s been desperately seeking atonement for the privileges that happy date accrued. Now, thanks to a report from the Resolution Foundation, we know the precise cost of easing Willetts’s conscience: £10,000 – to be made payable to every 25 year old. A cheque for £10,000 landing on the doormat will no doubt make hitting the quarter of a century milestone a little sweeter for Britain’s put-upon millennials.

School girls have a new heroine this week. Tammie Jo Shults was the pilot onboard Tuesday’s ill-fated flight from New York to Dallas. She safely negotiated an emergency landing after one of the aeroplane’s engines broke up, throwing debris into the fuselage. One passenger died after being partially sucked through a broken window. This could so easily have been a much bigger tragedy. That no one else on board that plane died is thanks to the skill and bravery of Shults. The audio of her calmly informing air traffic controllers, ‘We are single engine. Descending,’ followed by: ‘There is a hole and someone went out,’ is astonishing to hear. Her name should be echoing around assembly halls and her image adorning classroom posters.

I’ve never shied away from discussing sex with my children and they’ve always been precocious enough to ask probing questions, usually in public. So when the letter came home from school announcing sex education classes for my then ten-year-old, I was relaxed. And when I later asked him, ‘Did you learn anything you didn’t already know?’, I expected a bored ‘no’. In fact, he said, ‘Yes. Oral sex and masturbation.’ Clearly sex education has moved on since I was at school. Schools have traditionally covered reproduction in science lessons and, since the 1960s, sex education as a discrete subject has dealt with contraception, sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy.

The never-ending churn of stories explaining why it is awful to be a woman has a new focus. A survey of workplace ‘decision-makers’ published this week has exposed the shocking news that some employers think maternity leave can be a bit inconvenient. That’s right: some sexist and uncaring bosses do not feel delight when mum-to-be announces her plans but instead worry about the impact on the bottom line. A poll conducted for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has revealed that almost 60 per cent of employers think a woman applying for a job should disclose whether she is pregnant.

Today's centenary of the Representation of the People Act is in danger of becoming a rose-tinted celebration of votes for women. But it’s worth us remembering this historic legislation with more clarity, so that the anniversary does not get used as an excuse for curtailing democracy once more. For a start, the Act only extended the franchise to some women – those over the age of thirty, who were occupiers of property or married to occupiers. Younger women still had to wait another decade before they could enjoy the same rights. What’s largely forgotten today is that the 1918 Act newly enfranchised more than five million men, mainly working-class men without property. As a result, the electorate tripled from 7.7 million to 21.

As surely everyone must by now know, 2018 marks the centenary of women securing the vote in Britain. This monumental event represented a giant leap forward for sexual equality and is truly deserving of commemoration. There will, rightly, be television programmes, books column inches and tea towels marking the anniversary. Everyone should know about Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Davison, Millicent Fawcett and their comrades. But there is a danger with every national commemoration that history is rewritten: in the retelling, some facts are conveniently forgotten and others distorted.

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.