Most women watching the video footage of Bishop Charles Ellis blatantly groping Ariana Grande at Aretha Franklin’s funeral will be able to relate to the experience of suffering through unwanted, sexualised touching.

Following Grande's performance, the preacher presiding over Franklin’s funeral pulled her in for a hug and then, perhaps unaware of how clearly the cameras were capturing his actions, proceeded to slide his hand up to Grande’s breast and knead it with his fingertips.

Bishop Charles Ellis, right, with Ariana Grande after her performance. AP

Although no one but Grande can speak to what was actually going through her mind, her response seems sickeningly familiar: she tries to pull away from Ellis while maintaining a frozen smile, ducking her head away.

It isn’t difficult to imagine what she must have been feeling as she felt that hand on her breast in front of millions of people: disbelief, disgust, humiliation and fear. For those of us who live in the world as women, these are the emotions that work so well to keep us silent.

To really break this down, let’s look at each one of these emotions in turn.

We’ll start with disbelief. One of the sad realities of living under a patriarchal structure is that women are not only taught to blame themselves when "something bad" happens to them, but are also conditioned to doubt their own assessment of events as they happen.

You’re moving through the world and all of a sudden there’s a hand on your breast, on your butt or, as once happened to me in a nightclub, up the front of your dress and on your crotch. Is this really happening? Surely you must be imagining it! It’s too intense, too ridiculous to imagine that a man would think it was okay to just grab your body like that in front of an entire roomful of people! Afterwards, when you reflect on it, you’ll come up with any number of implausible scenarios that you tell yourself must have been what really happened. You overreacted. He was probably reaching for something else. He didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Did you make him think it was okay? That you wanted this?

It will surprise no one to learn that Grande – the woman whose breast was fondled on stage in front of millions of people, by a man hiding behind religiosity – has already been criticised for wearing a short dress.

Which leads us to that second emotion: disgust. Because, even though we are conditioned to doubt our interpretation or recollection of events as they happen, we still feel the churning, panicked sickness that comes from being violated and sexualised without our permission.

The disgust is physical, but it’s also mental and emotional. We wonder if we should have tried harder to stop it. If we should have said no, loudly and forcefully: all the things we are repeatedly instructed to do, yet that are also then used against us as evidence of our ‘irrationality’ and ‘oversenstivity’. He was just having a joke. He didn’t mean it. You’re acting crazy.

And then there's the humiliation. Because why would someone feel like they could do such a thing to us unless they thought we deserved it? That we were asking for it? That we are only good for such things, and that all the work and effort we have put into our careers and our lives and our ethical frameworks is meaningless, because at the end of the day we’re still just seen as a pair of tits and a couple of holes. I can well imagine how humiliated Grande felt as Bishop Ellis told her with words how well she performed while telling her through actions how little that really mattered.

But nothing works better to maintain women’s silence against sexual harassment and misconduct than fear. Not fear of physical escalation, although that plays a part. I’m talking about the fear women are conditioned to feel over the prospect of "making a scene". No one wants to be the woman who halted the funeral of an icon to accuse a respected religious man of having inappropriately touched her. She can’t have known for sure that it was being caught on camera, and women, of course, have to provide forensic CCTV evidence whenever we make claims of harassment because our testimonies and motives are considered pathologically unreliable.

In that moment, every single lesson Grande has learnt regarding "polite femininity" would have been informing her response, chief of which is this: don’t embarrass men.

Women learn to absorb a broad range of humiliations in order to prevent men from feeling exposed or foolish, and this example is no different. We go through that mix of emotions – disbelief, disgust, humiliation and fear – and choke it down, because causing embarrassment to a man by reacting against it is something we’re taught to feel is the worst of all things.

These are all true things. But still people have asked: "Why didn’t Ariana Grande say anything?"

Because, in this world, that continues to be a more pressing and relevant question than: "Why do some men feel entitled to grope women’s bodies?"