A good 30 years ago, Germaine Greer spent a day at Melbourne’s Sandown races. There was a dress code, she later wrote, in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, one not diligently enforced given “the presence of two very young women wearing cotton sunsuits so brief as to show chubby half-moons of buttock behind, and so wide in arm and leg holes as to allow pubic fuzz and most of their small breasts to be seen”.

The indecency suggested, to Greer, that they might be prostitutes “but in Australia it would not necessarily follow”.

Possibly because of the Lady Bracknell hauteur, more likely because this early slut-shaming seemed so sensationally ungenerous from a feminist – who had, when younger, appeared naked in Suck magazine, with legs, as she might now put it, “spread” – the passage lodged in my mind. Though, rereading, I find that she describes a friend, hardly more graciously, as wearing a T-shirt “which at our age and our weight looked rather like a sackful of puppies”. Greer wonders (aloud) if her friend might be pregnant. Subsequent remarks, notably on the size of Barbara Amiel’s feet, then on my colleague Suzanne Moore’s shoes and “hair bird’s-nested all over the place”, have only ensured that if, as we read in The Female Eunuch, “women have very little idea of how much men hate them”, they can depend on its author always to share her revulsion.

Consulted recently, for instance, about her thoughts on #MeToo, Greer obliged, among other gems, with: “If you spread your legs because he said, ‘Be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’, then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.”

Given the vast numbers of men who now find themselves in wholehearted agreement with the author of The Female Eunuch, there was probably never a chance the remarks would be categorised – as with the previous bird’s nest hair, big feet etc – as of limited, principally biographical value: late Greer simply being late Greer. The avid public appetite for any Mean Girls action, from the imagined rivalry between Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, to potential intra-Spice Girl conflict, also guaranteed a rapt audience for Germaine Greer v the whole of #MeToo.

And if there is anything sweeter for men who think it’s all gone too far, than to find a bona fide feminist on their side – it must be to discover how many of Greer’s critics appear to share their distaste, or pity, for old (see also bitter, menopausal, difficult, wrinkled) women/bitches/hags who don’t know when to shut up. Win win.

What a comfort to read, in a Cambridge student magazine, that Greer really is “just an old, white woman”. Better still, for its existing male practitioners, this line in ageist – but unimpeachably feminist – rebuke appears to be catching on.

Margaret Atwood, following her controversial objection to flawed process in a college dismissal, has lately been characterised as not merely disappointing, and a bitch, but culpably, like Greer, “second wave”. Since second wave covers an era of diverse feminist activity that ranges from, say, Greer’s contributions to Suck to Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, what this descriptor actually states is “old”. Though redemption is not impossible. A dead feminist, as we learn from the current suffrage commemorations, can be forgiven some faulty or unco-operative behaviour. A talkative old one, however, risks generating, regardless of her other achievements, intergenerational distaste.

The young US writer of the much-read Aziz Ansari exposé addresses an older woman who criticised her story as: a “burgundy-lipstick bad-highlights second-wave feminist has-been”. Much more of this and Rod Liddle may find his occupation’s gone.

The alacrity with which random interventions by a handful of older women – an imputed sub-sisterhood featuring, as well as Greer and Atwood, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve – have been assembled into a case for pensioning off older women is naturally disappointing for anyone from the afflicted generation. Not merely because, like the BBC’s disappeared middle-aged women presenters, some of us are unprepared for obsolescence, but because intergenerational collaboration has been such an outstanding aspect of recent feminist organising.

The pink-hatted Trump marches needed, to make an impact, to attract everyone from schoolgirls to second-generation relics, notwithstanding disparate priorities and experience.

Harvey Weinstein’s comprehensive shaming required older women, as well as younger ones, to testify to what they, too, had endured – or overlooked – in Hollywood. Unequally paid millennial women may yet benefit from the protests that only became unignorable when the BBC was confronted by enough older women, such as Carrie Gracie and her supporters, with the seniority to threaten its reputation.

#MeToo did not just stir, among all ages, unwelcome memories of groping, it illuminated, instructively for a lot of boomer-aged women, how years of swatted-away harassment had simply normalised assault. Whether you called it cheerful pragmatism or internalised misogyny, that approach has left us, half a century since (second-wave feminist) Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy bunny, with the FT infiltrating today’s Presidents Club.

It should be emphasised, in fairness to the Playboy Club of 1963, that Steinem’s co-workers were not, like Presidents Club recruits, plied with alcohol, in readiness for mass molestation. “Sir,” Steinem learned to recite, “you are not allowed to touch the bunnies.”

That Margaret Atwood should now be more publicly targeted, for her opinions, than most of the Presidents Club hostess-chasers, and Greer more viciously denounced than Tony Hall, guardian of the BBC’s institutionalised sexism, must surely offer hope to any men cowering in the wake of #MeToo. Where sex discrimination can no longer assist, ageism may yet protect the status quo.