What kind of a revolution is this anyway? As the news spread, commentators insisted that nothing would change. Rich men and young girls – what’s new? This is corporate entertainment, and it happens all over the City on a weekly basis. But hours later, the Presidents Club had been forced to close down. There’s a wild, giddy sense that the endemic but outmoded and tawdry tradition of powerful men groping subordinate young women has finally been shown the door. But has it? Even as we fight to overthrow tradition, history has lessons to teach us about thwarted revolution. So how do we make a success of an uprising?

First, choose your cause at the right moment. Among many, there’s a sense of creeped-out nauseous bafflement that powerful men require the attention of women in matching underwear before donating to charity. Socially acceptable sexual harassment has been around for a long time. From Hollywood to the Dorchester, we’ve had enough. Has gathering unrest brought us to the brink of real change? There’s a difference between cultural revolution and storming the Bastille, but historical parallels offer timely warnings. It feels like the time is now, just as it did nearly 200 years ago, when more than 60,000 people dressed in their Sunday best and gathered in Manchester. Less than 2% of the population had the right to vote, and repressive legislation had made bread unaffordable. People were starving. It was time for a change. Panicking local magistrates tasked yeomanry with dispersing the crowd, and a peaceful demonstration ended in the Peterloo massacre.

Second, why must we sacrifice our heroes? In 2018, Twitter gives a voice to the previously voiceless. We make ourselves heard, in force, in a matter of minutes. Men resign and apologies are made, investigations are promised. All this is real, and all this is valuable, but if Twitter is a weapon, it’s used by both sides. Standing up to demand a change, however peacefully, is a dangerous business. As Anita Sarkeesian learned, those who speak out are first to feel the sharp edge of the very weapon that enables us to do so.

Third, watch your back. In the wake of Peterloo, a small group of radicals conspired against those they held responsible for the carnage. They plotted to murder the entire cabinet over dinner at the Grosvenor Square home of Lord Harrowby. The plan was an extraordinary challenge to the traditional order. One conspirator, William Davidson, went to the gallows saying “I can die but once in this world, and the only regret left is that I have a large family of small children, and when I think of that, it unmans me.” Two hundred years ago, open revolution never came, and there was no total overthrow of the established order. Instead, Davidson and his co-conspirators fell victim to an extraordinary act of misdirection. Infiltrated by an agent provocateur who shaped and moulded the entire plot, they were betrayed.

Can social media act as an agent provocateur, capable of derailing a cause if not actually betraying it? Sometimes, our anger and horrified disbelief is so great that we believe things must change. Long after the death of Alan Kurdi, the refugee crisis is unresolved, and months after the fire at Grenfell Tower, what has changed? Does the lightning-fast pace of news scupper progress? Can online revolution become a distraction if we don’t also change our day to day lives? Many internet commenters still believe those women had it coming that night at the Dorchester.

Revolution is asking a child we know and love for a hug and cheerfully accepting no as an answer

In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K Le Guin, who died this week, leaves us with a brutal portrait of Omelas, a society of outward glamour with a dark secret. Her symbol of atrocity is an imprisoned child, either ignored by the people or accepted as a necessary evil. But some can’t reconcile the hypocrisy of superficial beauty existing alongside hidden injustice: “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Le Guin speaks of a quiet kind of revolution, one that consists of individual people making uncomfortable choices. Revolution is asking a child we know and love for a hug and cheerfully accepting no as an answer. This is not because innocent love and affection are now “not allowed”, as straw-man arguments about sexual harassment so often suggest but because an understanding of physical boundaries and how they change – our own and others’, platonic or sexual – should be as natural as breathing, something we all grow up with from our earliest youth.

Revolution is not reading Madison Marriage’s quietly furious exposé and saying, “What about Syria?”, because it is actually possible to care about more than one thing at a time. Revolution is not just having so many women in the boardroom that no one dares suggest using other women as entertainment, although that would be a good start. Revolution is men in the workplace vociferously treating this kind of corporate entertainment with the contempt it deserves, even if that means the office alpha takes exception. Revolution is in our hands.

• KJ Whittaker is a historical novelist. False Lights is published in paperback by Head of Zeus on 7 February