If you’re young and a freelancer — or even if you’re in a steady media job — every day is a concerted effort to let people know who you are. You want them to respect you for the things you do, despite the fact you might sometimes be flippant or outgoing or even a little silly.

Part of this effort is learning when and how to pick your battles. I can’t go to war every time someone implicitly or explicitly denigrates the book I’ve written because it’s expressly aimed at young people and must, therefore, be frivolous. It would be a waste of my time; I’d rather show them they’re wrong by selling fuckloads of copies. And similarly, I can’t call HR every time someone makes a sexist comment, I can’t publicly shame every famous man who inappropriately hits on me, I can’t tell every important commissioning editor that no, it’s not okay to talk to me like that. We work in an industry that is based not only on talent and luck and hard work but also on reputation and word of mouth. If you cause trouble for one man — just one man, one time — there’s always the chance that that’s it for you. You’re ‘unreliable’. You’re a ‘troublemaker’. You are To Be Avoided.

Of course I think women should communicate their experiences, whether directly or obliquely. I think if women are happy to speak out about particular men they should do that, and I’ll happily support them and amplify their voices. I think women should protect each other, warn each other, look out for each other. My problem is not ever with women, or how women deal with these issues — because there is no ‘wrong decision’ if something feels like it’s right for you — but with the way in which men don’t only suggest but insist that making large amounts of noise is the only way to proceed.

Most of these men, incessantly telling women to speak up against harassers and creeps and predatory older journalists, are probably doing it because they want to enact change in an industry that is a largely unrefined version of itself fifty years ago. On the whole, they are probably trying to be good guys. But what they also think is that because they understand and have adopted the radical vocabulary of online politics — a politics that has been partly responsible for giving women the language to discuss their harassment, by the way — that the world we live in has morphed and changed accordingly.

It hasn’t. Just because you understand what privilege is doesn’t mean that you don’t have it. Just because you can deftly use words like ‘discourse’ and you talk about quotas all the time and you don’t think anyone has ever asked for it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world, or even the rest of the media, agrees with you or understands you, or that the industry in which you work isn’t still systemically unequal. Knowing these things does not mitigate the beneficial impact they have on you or your career, just as the fact I know I have white privilege doesn’t mean I don’t actively benefit from it every single day of my life.

It’s all very well telling women that they need to ‘take a stand’ against harassment, that we all need to be ‘proactive’ and ‘work together’ to stop these things from happening. But it’s easy for you. Because like Charlie, who doesn’t understand why I can’t just tweet about my harassment, like the lecherous broadcaster who tries to buy my silence with unasked-for favours, like the office creep whose age and reputation protect him from me, an infant; you have far less to lose than me.