Several months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke and the #MeToo movement got powerfully underway, Katie Roiphe, writing in the reliably liberal Harper’s Magazine, wrote an essay on what she called “The Other Whisper Network.” It was the sort of piece that took great honesty to write and greater courage to publish.

The original “whisper networks” comprised women quietly warning other women about predatory and abusive men in their work and social environments. But as a succession of #MeToo stories unfurled in the media — some of which seemed far more ambiguous and less egregious than the early headline cases — Roiphe noticed something else: Women were afraid publicly to second-guess aspects of a movement they felt had lost a sense of fairness and proportion, largely out of fear of social media’s Jacobin call-out culture.

“Can you see why some of us are whispering?” Roiphe asked about this new network. “It is the sense of viciousness lying in wait, of violent hate just waiting to be unfurled, that leads people to keep their opinions to themselves, or to share them only with close friends.”

In recent years, these whisper networks have only proliferated from one subject, one institution, one domain, to another. Is sex, biologically speaking, binary? A columnist for The Denver Post thought so and last month lost his job, he claims as a direct result. Should writers of one race or culture be able to create characters and inhabit cultures not their own? One such writer recently had her book tour canceled over safety concerns following criticism of her novel about the plight of Mexican immigrants.