I’m a long-term, and by this point longsuffering, Kanye West fan, and part of what’s made him so fascinating is that he, more than any other celebrity, has always caught the zeitgeist. Hell, the man even married a Kardashian, and you can’t get more zeitgeisty than that. Or so I thought, until he popped into the Oval Office last week. The man formerly known as Kanye, who once told the world “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, is now known as Ye and going around hugging Donald Trump, a man who spent years insisting the first black president wasn’t actually American. Perhaps “Kan” resigned from his name in embarrassment?

“I’m married now into a family that, you know… not a lot of male energy going on,” he said, by way of an explanation for his inexplicable support for Jabba the Trump. “[Hillary Clinton’s] campaign ‘I’m With Her’ just didn’t make me feel… like a guy that could play catch with his son. It was something about when I put this [Make America Great Again] hat on, it made me feel like Superman.”

Play Video 1:15 Kanye says 'I love this guy right here' as he walks over and gives Trump a hug – video

In other words, he might be one of the most acclaimed artists of all time, but being in a family with some high-earning women bummed him out a bit. So he looked for something that made him feel like a man again, and that thing was Trump. Feel the pride, founding fathers: America is now merely a macrocosm for the marriage of West and Kim Kardashian.

West’s outburst might not have been the most eloquent speech ever delivered in the White House, but it caught the era of new chauvinism, which is really just old chauvinism with added victimhood. What has the Trump presidency been but one long wail of aggrieved masculinity? So maybe West is now just another prat in a MAGA hat, but at least he’s still on the bleeding edge of relevancy. Um, yay? Or maybe just Ye.

He also (possibly inadvertently) nailed the double bind women find themselves in: we make a step forward and then comes a backlash that is as vicious as it is – we are told – inevitable, and maybe even – goes the stronger implication – deserved. See this giant orange misogynist now sitting in the White House, women? This is what you get for daring to support a female presidential candidate who used a female pronoun!

West may be eccentric, but he is just vocalising an attitude that is now fully mainstream. An estimated seven million of us went on women’s marches in 2017, and yet Roe v Wade could be overturned. Women enjoy sexual freedom, and are told they’re to blame for so-called “incels”, or involuntary celibates, furious young men who rage online and in some cases commit violence because they can’t get laid. They talk about sexual harassment, and are told the #MeToo movement has gone “too far”.

In February, after two aides left the White House, President Trump tweeted, “People’s lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation… There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing as Due Process?” I am friends with many good Guardian-reading men who would rather club a baby seal than be compared to Trump – and yet in recent months I have often heard variations on the president’s plaint from their own lips. Think of the powerless men, they say! Well, given that one man who bragged he could sexually assault any woman he wanted was elected president, and another, Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused by multiple women of assaulting them, was just put on the supreme court, it looks to me like the men might be… fine? Meanwhile one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Dr Christine Blasey Ford, is in hiding with her family because of multiple death threats.

Has #MeToo gone too far? I’ll take a “no” for 10 points, Bob. The real question is not whether women have gone too far, but how do we keep going? How to keep fighting when the fight seems so hopeless?

A former teacher gets in touch, nostalgic about the past. I remember it differently Read more

When I had twins, people kept saying they didn’t know how I coped, and I’d think, “I didn’t know I had a choice.” That’s what I think now. Some people say, sure, keep fighting – but maybe dial it back, ladies? And when I hear this argument I hear the same brain-splitting hammering in my head as when politicians, on the right or left, insist the only way to fight the far-right Brexiters is to appease them. Yeah, give the other side what they want – that’ll show ’em!

Instead, I look at all the young women who are so much more politicised than I was at their age. And I look at all the older women who were ready to put their feet up, but are now mad as hell. And I look at all the women who, like me, are exhausted by kids and jobs but will not shut up already. And then I go in harder than before. As US journalist Rebecca Traister writes in her excellent new book Good And Mad, women’s rage has driven important political change, from the suffragettes to #MeToo.

Kanye West is right: this is the age of aggrieved men. But women will keep fighting for their rights, because there is no choice.