Forty years ago this month, Ms. magazine put sexual harassment on its cover for the first time. Understanding the sensitivity of the topic, the editors used puppets for the cover image — a male hand reaching into a woman’s blouse — rather than a photograph. It was banned from some supermarkets nonetheless.

In 1977, the term sexual harassment had not been defined in the law and had barely entered the public lexicon. And yet, to read that Ms. article today, amid a profound shift in discourse, is to feel haunted by its familiarity.

It describes an executive assistant who quit after her boss asked for oral sex; a student who dropped out after being assaulted by her adviser; an African-American medical administrator whose white supervisor asked if the women in her neighbourhood were prostitutes — and, subsequently, if she would have group sex with him and several colleagues.

Citing a survey in which 88 per cent of women said they were harassed at work, the author said the problem permeated almost every profession, but was particularly pernicious “in the supposedly glamorous profession of acting,” in which Hollywood’s casting couch remained a “strong convention.”

“What we have so far seen,” the article stated, “is only the tip of a very large and very destructive iceberg.”

Four decades later, as allegations against Harvey Weinstein and others continue to metastasize, it feels as if we have crashed into the iceberg. Disaster metaphors — tsunami, hurricane, avalanche, landslide — seem to be in endless rotation to describe the moment, but the point is that a great many powerful men have seen their careers disintegrate, and with astonishing speed.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein spanned three decades. His downfall came in three days. AP film writer Jake Coyle says Hollywood now faces fresh questions about gender equality. (The Associated Press)

A great many women — and some men, too — have also spoken out more openly and more forcefully than ever before about what happens behind closed doors or even in the open spaces of studios, newsrooms and other workplaces. Companies have rushed to reassert zero-tolerance policies and whipped together training programs.

We have seen this movie before. Sexual harassment complaints to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased 73 per cent in the year after Anita Hill’s televised testimony about Clarence Thomas’ behaviour in 1991. Still, Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, while Hill went quietly back to being a law professor in Oklahoma. In the ensuing years, the issue cycled between headlines and whispers in a seemingly endless loop.

But this sequel seems to have a surprise ending, or at least a plot twist: The public outrage is deeper and more sustained, and the dominoes continue to fall.

Maybe it’s that the accusers this time were famous, media-savvy and mostly white actors with more star power than the accused (unlike, say, Paula Jones vs. Bill Clinton). Maybe it’s reflective of a specific period in U.S. history, in which working women of a new generation — those who had grown up with working mothers — decided that enough was enough.

Certainly the endlessly expanding power of social media plays a role: The #metoo hashtag has been used in millions of posts over the past few weeks; been translated into Italian (#QuellaVoltaChe, or “that time when”) and French (#BalanceTonPorc, or “out your pig”); and inspired a congressional spinoff.

Several experts likened it to a dam breaking, the cumulative effect of harassment claims over decades and especially the last few years. Some see it as the other shoe dropping after Donald Trump’s taped boasting about offensive behaviour did not block his path to the presidency: He may have gotten away with it, but women were no longer going to let that boss, that mentor, that colleague get away with it, too.

“There is no doubt that having an accused sexual predator in the White House is hanging over this,” said Jaclyn Friedman, author of Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, scheduled for publication this month. “People feel like they can’t do anything about that right now, but at least they can do something about this.”

If you are a woman, or know somebody who is, it’s safe to assume you have talked about Weinstein at the dinner table, on the subway, in bed, at work, and any other place where people gather. Perhaps you’ve asked your partner, your mother, your boss or your friend for the first time, as I have, if she, too, is among this strange new tribe. (“Who was your Weinstein?” we all suddenly want to know.)

I’ve heard from women who said they’ve retroactively confronted their harassers and those who enabled them, and from men who are re-examining, perhaps somewhat nervously, their own behaviour. The new conversation goes way beyond the workplace to sweep in street harassment, rape culture and “toxic masculinity” — terminology that would have been confined to gender studies classes, not found in mainstream newspapers, not so long ago.

“In the women’s movement of the 1970s we had this phrase ‘the click moment,’” Barbara Berg, a historian and author of the 2009 book Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future, said. “This is the click moment. It’s like, ‘Enough.’ And then there’s a snowball effect: Once you see women speaking truth to power and not being told, ‘This is just what you have to put up with,’ then it encourages other women to stand up.”

With Weinstein, the accusers were on the record, poised, and more of them seem to emerge each day, so no individual had to bear the burden alone, as Hill had. “When you have Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow in the same sentence, well, people take note,” sociologist Michael Kimmel said.

But behind these famous faces was an army of ordinary voices, too, using social media to collectively tell their stories — but also for action. In the case of Bill O’Reilly, remember, it was a co-ordinated effort, by groups that included the organizers of the Women’s March, that urged advertisers to #DropOReilly. They, and Fox News, ultimately did.

Another significant new element is the presence of what many have called silent co-conspirators: dozens of people, over dozens of years, who knew what was going on but did nothing.

“There is this web of enablers,” Kimmel, who runs the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, said. “Bob Weinstein doesn’t say to Harvey, ‘You better stop or I’ll kick you out of the company.’ Billy Bush does not say to Donald Trump, ‘That’s disgusting, not to mention illegal.’ In the sexual assault world we often talk about how we incorrectly interpret women’s silence as consent. Well we also mistake men’s silence for assent.”

If this is a moment of historical social change, it is worth looking at what led us here.

It was two years after that Ms. magazine cover, in 1979, that Catharine A. MacKinnon published a groundbreaking legal argument: that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was based on a legal theory she had developed while in law school.

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That legal argument was tested with Mechelle Vinson, one of a number of African-American women who were involved in early sexual harassment lawsuits — this one a bank teller who said she was repeatedly raped by her married boss. In 1986, her case, with MacKinnon’s help, was part of a Supreme Court ruling that enshrined the harassment-as-discrimination theory into law.

Then came Hill, whose televised testimony about Thomas, her former boss — at the EEOC, of all places — was, Berg said, in effect “home-schooling a generation of Americans in what sexual harassment was.” Almost immediately, the phone hotline for 9to5, a support group for working women, began ringing off the hook.

“People were almost bewildered,” the group’s director told The New York Times in 1992. “You mean this is sexual harassment? You mean I could do something about this?”

Berg said she remembers a former colleague calling to ask, of their former boss, “Did he proposition you, too?” (He had.) Kimmel said his mother told him over dinner that she was harassed in graduate school.

“It was literally water-cooler conversation everywhere,” said Freada Kapor Klein, who conducted one of the first surveys on sexual harassment in the 1970s.

But most of those stories were shared in private — in part because of what the world watched Hill endure. Before an all-male Senate judiciary panel, she was accused of bringing “sleaze” into the nomination process, portrayed as suffering from delusional fantasies, and famously called, by pundit David Brock, “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”

“I remember the anger of that moment,” Teresa Younger, then a 22-year-old nanny and now president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, said. “Anita Hill was the example of a strong, accomplished black woman, and if she of all people could be discredited then it seemed women, particularly women of colour, had no voice when it came to sexual harassment.”

It’s worth noting that the campaign slogan back then, on buttons and bumper stickers rather than Facebook and Twitter, was not “Me Too” but “I Believe Anita” — a message of solidarity, not self-exposure.

After Hill came Jones, whose lawsuit against Clinton was dismissed. Others won in court but struggled in the aftermath: Paula Coughlin, a Navy lieutenant who was sexually assaulted by drunken officers, was sidelined and ultimately quit her job. Rena Weeks, a law secretary who was harassed by a partner, never worked again.

“I think for a long time it shut women up, at least publicly,” Kimmel said.

In her 2017 book, Butterfly Politics, MacKinnon adapts a concept from chaos theory in which the tiny motion of a butterfly’s wings can trigger a tornado half a world away. Under the right conditions, she posits, small actions can produce major social transformations.

“Ashley Judd is the butterfly of this moment,” MacKinnon said of the actor who began the recent groundswell of accusations against Weinstein. “She is the one who broke it open, who has made this possible for so many other women. And so you have an explosion of it because it’s for so long been suppressed.”

Kimmel, the sociologist, said, “There comes a tipping point when the ‘frame’ changes.”

“One day, segregated water fountains seemed ‘normal’ if you were a white Southerner,” he noted. “It’s just how things were. Then they’re illegal, and a few years later you say, ‘Wow, how did we ever see that as OK?’”

Friedman, though, said she is waiting for an important moment: “When are we going to start believing people the first time?”

“When is it going to be that one instance is enough, and that you don’t have to find out 30 years later?” she asked. “I also worry that there is the possibility for this to be treated like a cancer, and now Harvey is gone so the cancer is excised. But Harvey is not the only cancer.”