Tipping points can be hard to identify but there are abundant signs that women in political life have reached one.

Sarah Hanson-Young is riled enough to brand David Leyonhjelm’s lewd personal commentary “slut-shaming” on a national radio program – a phrase that will resonate with every young feminist activist in the country. Which is, of course, why she invoked it. It’s an implicit call to action.

Women in the Liberal party are not quite storming the Bastille but they are, increasingly, speaking up for themselves, and each other, and developing internal structures to support networking and advancement in a culture riddled with bias, both conscious and unconscious.

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Friends of mine who are professional women have made a conscious decision in the aftermath of #MeToo not to laugh off inappropriate behaviour by their male colleagues and to speak up when the default boys club culture closes against them.

I’ve also made a conscious decision to do more reporting on this issue rather than tell myself I don’t have the time and there are other issues more worthy of my attention.

Part of this is atonement for past mistakes. I’ve already acknowledged that while I didn’t ignore it, I didn’t do enough to call out the extraordinary sexism Julia Gillard faced during her prime ministership.

I’ve said this before: it’s not that I couldn’t see it, or I was intent on somehow over-complicating it, or excusing it, or I was afraid or ambivalent about critiquing the gendered dimension of the response to Gillard.

As a member of the (alleged) “progress” generation, with a lot of my own identity tied up in the belief that things were now different for women, I think my main problem was I couldn’t quite believe it was happening. The bitch, the witch and the chaff bag was cognitive dissonance that took some time to settle on me.

So this is a preamble acknowledging that in the world I inhabit, we’ve washed up in a significant moment, and a positive one, with women asserting their own agency rather than trying to blend into the boys club lest their presence arbitrarily offend or unsettle anyone.

Hanson-Young is absolutely right to object to unseemly trolling in her workplace in the strongest possible terms, and to use it as a case study to achieve change, given the default culture in politics leaves a lot to be desired.

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It’s also absolutely correct for media outlets to recognise this pushback and record this shift, because recognising and recording it is an essential part of making the change.

You can sense the “but”, can’t you, and sorry, there is a but, because there is another moment we need to acknowledge.

If we track back to the specifics of Hanson-Young versus Leyonhjelm, we also have to be conscious that this is a media moment.

Because the story is right on the zeitgeist, because it captures raw and relatable human experience in a profession that people outside it believe is largely populated with dullards, disappointments and talking point-spouting automatons – because it runs along a cultural fault line that yawned open post #MeToo – the content is hugely read, watched, shared across social media platforms and analysed around the water coolers.

If you’ve been watching Leyonhjelm with some bewilderment over the past few days – why is he doubling down, why won’t he apologise and move on – the answer to that is simple. He’s milking this moment for all its worth. He’s doing what politicians do in our disrupted age: he’s narrowcasting. He’s rallying his own supporters.

Play Video 1:10 David Leyonhjelm says levelling abuse is 'normal Australian behaviour' – audio

Politics as trolling is becoming hard-baked in our system, a means of rallying a tribe.

Given that Leyonjhelm doesn’t mind dishing out offence, I’m sure he won’t take any when I point out the obvious: this bloke is an obscure senator facing re-election.

He has to compete with other professional attention grabbers in the chamber of chaos. If that’s the imperative, wasting a good crisis would be unthinkable. Notoriety is currency.

If you set your jaw and keep talking to all these content-hungry platforms – drawing out Hanson-Young who has decided for the imperative of line drawing and to engage with you point-by-point – there’s a least a couple of days in your defiance before the waterfall news cycle eventually exhausts itself.

If Leyonhjelm didn’t intuit benefit in being the poor aggrieved contrarian set upon by aggro progressive feminists so wonderfully personified by Hanson-Young, he would have apologised days ago.

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That’s the crazy house of mirrors we all now inhabit. The first means of sustaining ourselves here is to understand that’s what’s happening – to be sharply aware of the underlying dynamics.

Understand this. The disputed media cycle amply rewards these kinds of sorties, and media organisations engaged in their own narrowcasting exercises for their own purposes are only too happy to keep the cage fights flowing.

This too. It’s deeply discomfiting as a journalist to understand that your core business of ensuring accountability is only ever, in these times, a heartbeat away from manipulation, from a concocted circus of rolling sensation – just ask journalists in the United States charged with recording the presidency of Donald Trump how they feel about standing on the frontline of that phenomenon.

There are no easy responses.

Ignore it? Not possible. We aren’t censors, and the day we decide we are, that’s the day to really start worrying. Report it a bit, but not too much? That’s hard too. Where do you draw those lines exactly when part of your public service is contributing the first draft of history?

The most discomfiting of all is it’s not yet clear whether we can reach a landing point where there is a better balance between informing the public and feeding the beast.

This is now the daily struggle of self-aware journalism – and its a struggle that consumers of information need us to win.