It was the journalist Julia Baird who wrote on Twitter: “YOUNG FEMINISTS: What do you think older feminists don’t understand or get exactly right, or just might miss about #metoo, if anything? Am curious to hear.”

Baird’s question appears in the context of high-profile disagreements about #MeToo between some young and older feminists. A few weeks ago, French actor Catherine Deneuve and 100 co-signatories of a letter claimed #MeToo was fostering a “new Puritanism” – a position from which she has since somewhat backed away. Since then, a widely-reported interview with Germaine Greer has appeared, in which the Australian feminist accused the #MeToo movement of “whingeing”.

Germaine Greer criticises 'whingeing' #MeToo movement Read more

There is – of course, and as always – more nuance to Greer’s position than her gruff soundbites suggest. Greer’s analysis remains one of unequal power between the genders and the patriarchal structure and domination of power systems such as the law. In the context where “powerful men ... are already briefing their lawyers”, her stated fear is that “the women who have given testimony now will be taken to pieces”.

Her anxiety here is not unique. But those women already feel taken to pieces also by Greer, who said: “if you spread your legs ... it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.”

Greer and the Deneuve group are #notallolderfeminists. Baird’s question, however, is a useful means to explore not only some contrast in inter-generational feminisms, but the vast experiential differences between the generations themselves.

The Deneuve/Greer analysis originates from a period in which having casual sex, multiple partners and sex outside of marriage were acts in defiance of old patriarchal taboos. We forget, in the west, just how transformative the past few decades have been.

Consider that when Deneuve appeared onscreen as the curious bourgeois sexual day-labourer in 1967’s Belle Du Jour, representations of sex itself were considered so scandalous that Britain was still operating under full theatre censorship. In Australia, sexy books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover were subject to an import ban. On American television, even married couples on TV sitcoms were depicted in separate beds.

Sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer.

The right for women to escape the passive sexual role obliged of them by culture – the imperative to do so in the cause of women’s liberation – is at the heart of Greer’s demands in her 1970 manifesto, The Female Eunuch. In the world the book depicts of the lonely housewife “staring at the back of her husband’s newspaper”, a realised female sexuality is a militant act of revolt.

The restrictions placed on female agency at the time – especially through the institution of marriage, which women entered younger and were less enfranchised to leave than now – are staggering to imagine. Only in 1965 did married women in France obtain the right to work without their husbands’ consent. In Australia, married women could not apply for passports without their husband’s approval until 1983. Britain did not make marital rape illegal until 1991.

For feminists who survived those generations, it must seem extraordinary to have battled at such risk for liberation to hear younger women discuss sexual contracts, a desire for boundaries, a wish not to be sexualised by men in their lives. Given the emergence of their generation from socially-enforced cocoons of sexual repression, where actual laws existed to culturally erase women’s sexuality, it must look like regress to older women.

But what has happened in the intervening decades is that sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer. As soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation, patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men. Writer David Quinn was actually having a pop at #MeToo feminism in The Times when he stumbled onto an eloquent truth: “The only sexual rule today is ‘consent’, and men have been taught that women are potentially always sexually available because that is what ‘liberation’ means.”

Where once the patriarchal structures of cultural production were censorious of women’s sexuality in film, art, literature, now the depiction of it is hypersexualised and explicit – but the structures of production remain just as patriarchal.

The flipside to the destigmatisation of sex for women has been a sense of patriarchal entitlement to sex with women, which is why the painful conversation about consent in our new era of “freedom” must be confronted. One in 10 women, as opposed to one in 70 men, report they’ve been coerced into sex, the vast majority by an intimate partner.

Those doubting the assumptions informing the delicate and dangerous reality of the new sexual era need only read the studies quoted in Lili Loofbourow’s recent chilling analysis in The Week: the price of male pleasure is indeed the value of female pain.

And ubiquitous female sexualisation has manifested a reality in which young women find themselves in unwittingly sexualised situations all the time. Young women are right to feel that destigmatised sex has enhanced their traditional patriarchal status as sex objects, not liberated them from it.

Joan Bakewell on feminism in the 1970s: ‘Might a woman read the news?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely not’ Read more

“To all the grown men out there,” CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was obliged to instruct in the wake of another GOP sexual harassment scandal last week, “the younger women who work for you don’t want to date you; do not want to be your soul mate; do not want to go to icecream with you; do not want to be your partner.”

Is it the pervasiveness of these assumptions and the lived reality of their consequences that, perhaps, some of our feminist antecedents don’t understand? If we know the power systems that exist are gendered, unequal and unfair, it’s idealism or madness to forget that they yet dog our beds and jobs too.

They will until the systems themselves are upended and transformed. We need an army to do it. #MeToo has enabled a moment of global feminist awakening. YOUNG FEMINISTS, OLDER FEMINISTS – let’s apply our empathy and analysis to one another in both generational directions to keep moving forward.

The patriarchal backlash is already mobilising its lawyers, and defenders. The fight ahead wants unity, not a failure to either remember women’s past, or apply imagination to their present.