Of course, #MeToo. From the time puberty hit, and for about two decades afterwards, the frequency tapering off with age. The family friend with octopus hands. The elderly neighbour who one afternoon caught me smoking outside my parents' house and sought to trade his silence for a tongue pash and God knows what else had I not dropped the fag, hands quivering, and rushed inside.
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The middle-aged man I hitched a ride with overseas – I should have seen it coming. Hard to say the same about that short guy who stood in front of me at a Midnight Oil concert in the mid-1980s, then swung his arm backwards and grabbed my crotch. As for the driving instructor with the trembling voice and sunken cheeks who, after I pulled the handbrake, leaned in, lips puckered – how could I have anticipated that one?
Easily, in retrospect. No way in hell will my daughters be getting in a car with a male instructor. No driving instructors: that should be protection enough, right? And no hitchhiking. No rock concerts. No family friends. No neighbours. Obviously, no workplace where a tyrannical, man-child with poor impulse control occupies the corner office. So no workplaces, pretty much.
One upside to the ubiquity of sexual violence in the lives of girls and women is that with so many and varied examples to consider it's easy to grade the transgressions.
The experiences I've listed are no more remarkable than the wrinkles on my face. They inevitably exacted a toll on my psyche, especially the incidents from my adolescence, but recounting them is only mildly unpleasant. This won't hold for every woman who has experienced what I'd call low-level assault or harassment, because responses to human vulnerability are as complicated as humans themselves – each time an epic sexual predator is unmasked we chip away at the simplistic assumptions about how victims respond to violation.
But what I like about the #MeToo tsunami, the global outpouring of anecdotes about sexual violence in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, is that the cumulative disclosure helps strip the offence of mystique. An individual who speaks out on a taboo subject is brave; once tens of thousands of women join a hashtag revolution to lay bare the scale of a problem, calling them "brave" only perpetuates the stigma around sexual assault that enables the likes of Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Donald Trump et al, and their equivalents lower down the food chain, to escape reckoning for as long as they do.
"Shame", with its attendant self-loathing, features over and over in the accounts of Weinstein's victims. "I just sort of gave up," one of them said. "That's the most horrible part of it, and that's why he's been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it's their fault."
Sexual violence haunts all of us – and in other news, tourists in Paris get pick-pocketed. We're talking about a public health crisis as old as civilisation – and it calls for a collective response, which is happening, slowly. Hard as these things are to measure, I believe that each generation of men has healthier attitudes towards women than the last.
This week the #MeToo earthquake had the French government announce new laws that will see men who wolf whistle or are aggressively lecherous towards women on the streets face fines. Imagine, cities without wolf-whistling, "aggressively lecherous" men? A bit like Paris without the pick-pockets.
Julie Szego is a Fairfax Media columnist.
