Amanda Stoker’s willingness to talk about her bottom has given David Van the distinction of becoming Australia’s first real subject of bi-partisan harassment allegations – the only precedent being the indiscretions freely admitted to by the late Sir Leslie Colin Patterson. But Lidia Thorpe’s detailed description of Canberra interiors – the location of CCTV cameras and blind spots in the corridor outside her office – had already given her denouncement of Senator Van more than a frisson of verité. Thanks to the shonkiness of certain lawyers, politicians, and journalists we may never get to the respective bottoms of Bruce Lehrmann, Christian Porter and Alan Tudge. But however innocuous some of the smoke seen rising from the spire of Parliament House in recent years may have been, it is clear that there is something very like fire in the basement, and that no alarm should ever be dismissed as a drill. But it is equally clear that pundits who take the same default position on every sexual assault allegation, irrespective of its merits, don’t help their case by bolstering that position with unsubstantiated claims. I haven’t spoken to Walkley-winning author and Drum regular Jane Caro since the 1990s, but I remember her as a good-humoured, fair-minded sort of person. So I was genuinely shocked when I read a tweet she posted in 2021 in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment by a senior member of the Morrison government:

Women are cautious. If you even smile, meet the eyes of a bloke, or call a boss by his first name, that can be read as an invitation. So we don’t smile, keep our eyes down & never use a man’s first name until we know him really well. Power is using 1st names without fear

This was and is (since the tweet is still there at time of writing) a serious indictment of the quotidian status quo and not something an Order of Australia recipient would put and leave on the record if it was merely hearsay. By using the word ‘we’ Ms Caro was either claiming to speak on behalf of all working women, which seems presumptuous, or describing her own lived experience. Like the rest of her 3,000+ followers, I suspect, I assumed the latter. Which is where it got tricky. Because according to Wikipedia, the only workplace environments Ms Caro experienced prior to becoming the Australian media’s go-to feminist are the handful of ad agencies where she worked for thirty years and the one university where she worked for seven; the University of Western Sydney. Having delivered only one guest lecture at UWS myself I wouldn’t claim to know its HR protocols as well as she does. So it is entirely possible that the cheery, first-name familiarity with which I was addressed by everyone during my visit was an aberration, and that most of the time female faculty and students tiptoe from class to class with downturned heads for fear of triggering tenured predators. I have no idea if this is true of most Australian campuses; universities aren’t really my thing. But I probably know as much about advertising agencies as Ms Caro, and have been on the board of a few, and I can’t remember any woman working for me (or, for that matter, with or above me) ever addressing me by anything except my given name – or a less than respectful version thereof (‘Slimey’ springing irrepressibly to mind). Wary of trusting to a memory fogged by a thousand long lunches I have canvassed the opinion of not just other male agency management contemporaries, but also female agency employees of Ms Caro’s vintage. And not one of them ever heard anybody’s surname being used in this way in any agency – including the ones where Ms Caro worked. So what are we to make of her tweet? I cannot believe it was meant as an oblique swipe at an industry she believes not to have adequately appreciated her undoubted talents. Still less that it is the cynical, self-serving canard of a seasoned victimhood professional. Out of respect for the author I would much prefer to believe that it is true, and that she has at some stage had a job which is not mentioned on her Wikipedia page or LinkedIn profile. A job in an Australian industry where women really do routinely eschew, as a survival tactic, the use of first names and eye contact with their male bosses. So for the sake and safety of those women, if not for the edification of the rest of us, it is surely incumbent on Ms Caro not only to identify that industry, but to follow the courageous example set by Senators Thorpe and Stoker, and name and shame the alleged offenders.