As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations, a few thoughts occur.

The first and most obvious is (once again) the presumption of guilt on the part of the entertainment industry, a business entirely devoid of morals and managed largely by coked-up hypocrites. Obviously, for most human beings our repulsion at the immediacy with which Brand has been cancelled by these dreadful people is challenged by our collective detestation of the man himself – yet another of those ‘comedians’ who never ever said anything funny and whose shtick was simply to reflect the zeitgeist of the age by showing off. But still. The allegation of rape and sexual assault is of course very serious – but before a man’s career is destroyed, a little more evidence wouldn’t go amiss. That is, unless we do what we are enjoined to do and believe that the woman – whatever woman, every woman – is always incapable of lying, or dissembling, or exaggerating or misconstruing.

I am not saying this happened in Brand’s case, because obviously I have no idea. Nor do the TV bosses. Brand denies the allegations – but then, he would, so we have an impasse. I have to say I prefer the notion that someone is innocent until proven guilty – but those days seem a very long way distant, don’t they?

And then the inevitable pile-on, with more women coming forward, mostly alleging that Brand – gasp – wasn’t hugely chivalrous and seemed a bit manipulative. As ever, we are in the realm of liberal overreach. The #MeToo movement was motivated by genuinely wicked behaviour on the part of powerful men, such as Harvey Weinstein – but has subsequently deliquesced into a litany of gripes about questionable sexual etiquette. It may be irritating if your date, after a consensual and energetic scut, gets out of bed and skedaddles home – and then fails to send round a bunch of chrysanths the next day. A bit caddish, I suppose – but not yet against the law, so far as I am aware, and not necessarily immoral either. I will return to this particular issue later.

Then there is the propensity of left-leaning, liberal men to behave in the most grotesque manner towards the opposite sex. It is almost always the lefties who are outed for this sort of predatory behaviour – beginning with the great liberal Democrat Harvey Weinstein, of course.

The Daily Mail reports that another ten or so British comedians have been guilty of the same sort of behaviour as Brand, and I bet all of them would rather swallow acid than vote Conservative. When there is a predatory male-on-female sex scandal in the House of Commons, or the White House for that matter, it is usually the lefties in the dock. Why should this be? Is it because they are so puffed up and smug, replete with their impeccably pro-feminist credentials, that they expect all women to drop their drawers out of sheer gratitude?

I don’t wish to mansplain, but might I suggest to any women reading this that the more right-on a bloke assures you he is, the closer you should keep to hand your spray of mace – because within the hour he’ll be reciting Simone de Beauvoir while clawing at your tights with a very menacing expression on his mug. If you wear tights, obvs.

Or is it perhaps because left-wing men tend to date left-wing women, for whom almost every male action is the basis for some sort of embittered grievance and possible lawsuit? Hard to tell, isn’t it? Perhaps it is rather more the case that men who are socially conservative never really bought into the current paradigm which argues that when it comes to sex, men and women have precisely the same appetites and aspirations and so they instead behave in a way which respects the essential and eternal differences between the sexes. That is largely the point, I think – and it brings me back to that earlier paragraph about the #MeToo phenomenon and the degree to which it has become quite often a protest about men behaving in a rather, y’know, male manner.

The third wave of feminism would argue that there is no male manner. Women were just as gagging for sex – and especially no-ties spur-of-the-moment sex (the famous ‘Zipless Fuck’, as described by Erica Wrong, or Jung, I forget which) – as were men. Women thus had every right to be as predatory and libidinous and promiscuous as men, which is why, if you were a man, the 1990s were a magnificent time to be alive, like Christmas every day that God sends.

The ladette culture meant that, for the first time, women were no longer the ‘gatekeepers’ of sex. The gate was instead wide open and gaily flapping in the breeze, allowing in an untold number of chaps who, frankly, could not believe their luck. But it was always a lie and a delusion and is recognised as such by our legal system today: that it is men who are the predators, not women. That it is men who will get a woman drunk and then perhaps take advantage of her. That it is men who are in pursuit of sex and women who are charged with the duty of allowing or denying consent. And yet at the same time that our legal system recognises reality – a reality which has pertained in every civilisation since the dawn of time – we are expected, culturally, to believe the opposite: that the wishes of men and women, when it comes to sex, are the same.

They were never the same. Find me a bloke moaning about predatory women. ‘She demanded I have sex with her, m’lud! And she wouldn’t stop!’ It never happens. It was always a lie.