In the two years since #MeToo reshaped the public conversation around sexual assault, my friends and I have begun to whisper among ourselves – what if the exposure of predatory behavior by Harvey Weinstein had not raised our standards for men’s behavior, but actually lowered them? After all, Weinstein was routinely held up as an example of what kind of sexual abuse was unacceptable, but not in such a way that acknowledged the prevalence of his sort of exploitation and abuse of power, but in a way that seemed to suggest that anything short of his level of high-profile, organized, serial rape and assault wasn’t really so bad.

“He’s no Harvey Weinstein,” we were told of the men who “merely” harassed, or “merely” groped. “He’s not that bad.” How bad does he have to be to be worth talking about? The threshold kept rising. “There is a difference between a Harvey Weinstein and an Aziz Ansari,” we were repeatedly warned by critics of the #MeToo movement, and yes, there is. But the implication seemed to be not that there was a difference in the quality of the harm these men did, or a difference in the ways we should seek justice for the women they hurt. The difference, these critics seemed to imply, was between what women could reasonably complain about and what they should be expected to just shut up and endure.

I thought, in other words, that the forces of misogyny were willing to make Harvey Weinstein something a sacrificial lamb, a man they were willing to concede was an abuser, so long as they could also maintain that none of the innumerable less brazen or egregious offenses other men commit are worthy of censure. I thought that they were willing to concede, at least, that a man of incredible power who allegedly used that power to coerce and force sex from dozens of unconsenting women was unacceptable, that he should not be welcome in the community. I was wrong.

I was proved wrong on Thursday night, when Harvey Weinstein, still a free and very rich man, made an appearance at a club called the Downtime Bar, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was there to see the club’s monthly showcase for young talent, Actor’s Hour, and he arrived with an entourage, sitting in a prime booth to watch the set. Understandably, performers were uncomfortable with his presence. “I didn’t know we had to bring our own mace and rape whistles to actor’s hour,” joked the comedian Kelly Bachman during her set. In a video of her performance, men’s voices can immediately be heard booing her once she voices discomfort with Weinstein’s presence. “Shut up!” one yells. “Shut up,” Bachman replies. “Really? This kills at group therapy for rape survivors.” At intermission, according to witnesses, a weeping woman in the audience complained about Weinstein’s presence. She was thrown out.

Weinstein’s presence at the Downtime Bar is the latest in a string of increasingly brazen returns to public life by men who were credibly and multiply accused of sexual assault during the #MeToo era. Louis CK is performing again, sometimes showing up, like Weinstein, unannounced, surprising women club goers who then have to decide between enduring the discomfort of being in his presence and sacrificing the price of their ticket. Aziz Ansari just put out a comedy special in which he decries “wokeness” and “cancel culture” and implies that he considers himself a victim. Al Franken, fresh on the heels of the revelation that a ninth woman has accused him of groping her, has been booked for an appearance at this weekend’s Politicon conference in Nashville.

Meanwhile, Matt Lauer, the former news host who is alleged to have kept a button under his desk to lock unwilling women inside his office, recently gave an off the record interview to Jeff Zeigler of Mediate, his first since being fired over assault and harassment allegations from NBC. The resulting podcast, which came on the heels of a new rape allegation against Lauer in Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill, was defensive and even laudatory of Lauer, with Zeigler joining Glenn Beck to declare that Lauer is innocent of the allegations against and has not had a chance to tell his side of the story. In fact Lauer has already told his story to quite a large audience, having published his response to Farrow’s reporting in a lengthy letter that was printed by Variety, a national media outlet.

Critics of the #MeToo movement have described being accused of sexual assault as akin to summary execution for a man, and have loudly bemoaned men’s ruined careers and social deaths. But these men are not dead. They are very much still alive, and in many cases they are still working. They will not go away, and they seem unwilling, even, to stop demanding our attention, stop showing up uninvited in our newsfeeds, on our television screens, and in the comedy bars where we go to have a laugh and relax. We’re told they’re dead, but they keep appearing everywhere, still here and still very much capable of inflicting further harm. In the set that got her booed at the Downtime Bar, Bachman compared Weinstein to the horror villain Freddy Krueger, and in his zombielike ability to reemerge and torment women where they expect to be at ease, this comparison seems particularly apt.

Really, that these men would attempt to make a comeback after their abuses were exposed is not very surprising. We already know that they are vain, entitled, lacking in self awareness and largely impervious to shame – after all, these are the qualities that allowed them to abuse women in the first place. What is surprising, instead, is how readily they’ve been welcomed.

In her set addressing Weinstein’s presence, Bachman spoke of being a rape survivor, and in the video, female voices can be heard cheering her. But the men in the room had already booed, expressing not only support for Weinstein but hostility toward the woman who said his behavior should be enough to exclude him from polite society. Even Weinstein, the man who it seemed even the #MeToo movement’s most committed antagonists were willing to concede was a monster, had allies in that room, allies who were not afraid to side with a monster against a woman who wanted to stand up for herself. Maybe feminists like me and my friends were wrong to think that even Weinstein’s behavior could be condemned as too hurtful to be tolerated. For this culture’s hatred of women, there is no bottom.