So. What is sexism? What is misogyny? What should we laugh off, what should we take seriously? Is every off-colour gag a contribution to rape culture or are jokes just jokes? Is it still true, in the age of the internet, that "women have very little idea of how much men hate them"? Or is everything online just empty posturing, meaningless banter? Can you safely make a remark, compose, distribute or receive a sexist image, or sing a song at the Oscars about actresses' boobs ironically? Are women attacked because they are equal and therefore fair game or is it a mark of their continued vulnerability? Should we worry about young people's exposure to endless pornography or computer games that add murdering hookers to their list of entertainments or grow thicker skins? Is the internet a parallel universe where different rules apply or part of real life, to be treated and censured as such? Are men suffering an identity crisis or are women suffering from mass oversensitivity?

It's a pulsing, slippery, knotted mass of problems out there but Kirsty Wark, presenting Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes (BBC2), took viewers firmly by the hand and marched them firmly round for an hour until we at least had a better idea of the monstrous size and shape of it all.

I'd have preferred a little more chasing down on some of the details by a presenter as intelligent, knowledgable and experienced as Wark. Brendan Burns shouldn't have been allowed to get away with an "explanation" as feeble as "Either everything's funny or nothing's funny" regarding the anti-women portions of his act. And Rod Liddle could rewardingly have been pursued further down the avenue of thought that began with the suggestion that the distaste for online and other abuse was a matter of class and politics, not gender. "I think it's the middle-class left, who can't stand having their views challenged, transgressed."

Discuss, animatedly.

But I do understand that Wark had only an hour and too much ground to cover to go spelunking at every opportunity. Blurred Lines covered the exclusion of women from debate, the perpetuation of male construction and domination of new art forms, entertainment and various public forums, the normalisation of sexual assault, the marginalising of women's sexual needs and desire, the brutalisation of sex, the sexualisation of brutality, the dizzying refraction of everything though the permanent postmodern and/or ironic lens, via examinations of the trolling of Professor Mary Beard, the rape and death threats against Caroline Criado-Perez, research into the empowering effect of sexist humour on those whose beliefs it confirms rather than shocks, the Steubenville rape case, whose details induce renewed despair every time you hear them, and talks with female gamers, students, public figures, disseminators and consumers willing and unwilling of potentially noxious material … It was a busy hour, but illuminating and stimulating where it could easily have become either baffling or simply a deadening roar of white noise. And I at least was left feeling slightly better armed for the battle to come. Because so far, according to the evidence piled up by Wark's film, we've had nothing more than a few minor skirmishes.

I'm going to turn to The Good Wife (Channel 4oD) now, and I am maintaining a carefully neutral expression as I ask all those of you who have not yet seen it simply to pretend that this page ends here. Turn it, and don't look back. Thank you.

Right. I'm still not going to include a spoiler, but I can't work out a way of avoiding at least a spoiler of a spoiler. So here goes.

Last night's The Good Wife was one of those episodes that makes you wish that the internet had never been born. Never mind mind-warping pornography, vicious abuse and trolls feeding on the black misery they create – spoilers are the great evil of our age. Imagine a world in which what happened in America stayed in America, unless it was big enough to warrant cabling to a little man in a booth somewhere in Westminster who would then write it out in curlicued script on parchment and deliver it to the Queen, prime minister and the editor of the Times who would then decide whether anyone else needed to know. What bliss it must have been in that unenlightened dawn to be alive and a regular viewer of quality imported drama.

For all my concentrated avoidance tactics, I knew what was coming, so the viewing pleasure for me lies not in the surprise but in the unfolding of its consequences. I have looked ahead (hey, in for a spoiler penny, in for a ruination pound, right?) and it is as meticulous, low-key and moving as fans of the show deserve and expect. Enjoy.