The sexual abuse of women and girls by certain men who worked for Oxfam is clearly despicable. Let us not muddy the waters by describing this as “the use of prostitutes” or by pretending this is the first time “do-gooders” have done wrong. Prostitution implies choice and consent. It is not clear how any choice was made, in the devastating aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, when women had so little that they were bought for the price of a meal or a cheap pair of shoes.

Abuse is the result of a power imbalance and it happens in places where those caring for the powerless break the implicit trust. In care homes, in boarding schools, in religious institutions, in all these places that operate in their own unique moral universes, the most vulnerable have been abused by their so-called protectors. We know how phenomenally slow and reluctant many of these institutions have been to react to abuse scandals, preferring instead to see the ruining of lives as an internal matter. The relocation of abusive Catholic priests to other dioceses, for instance, is a form of absolute denial about the harm that has been done.

Oxfam’s safeguarding has apparently primarily involved safeguarding its own reputation. Roland van Hauwermeiren, one of the men at the centre of this abuse, was proffered “a phased and dignified exit”, according to a confidential Oxfam report. He was country director in Bangladesh for Action Against Hunger in 2012-14. Was the dignity of this man worth more than the bodies and souls of women in Haiti or Chad? Clearly so.

None of this should invalidate the good work Oxfam does, but the refusal to be transparent is a moral failure. The cover-up and the organisation’s strangely nonchalant spokespeople have made this worse.

Transparency means honesty – and more honesty is needed about how different kinds of aid and intervention work, and where they do not, for it to continue to be funded, as I believe it must be. Everything that could go wrong in Haiti did. In 2010, UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti. UN soldiers fathered babies with very young Haitian women, then abandoned them.

For the past couple of years, reports about predatory UN peacekeepers have been coming in, particulary in the Central African Republic. These tales are horrific: girls made to have sex with dogs. At the centre of this is the idea of sex as a transaction used by utterly desperate black women. This is colonialism at work. The vilest exploitation.

This happened in Liberia and in Haiti. If girls exchange sex with several men for a peanut butter sandwich, this is somehow framed as consensual, not rape.

The privileged white abusers of Oxfam are no different from the UN soldiers in this respect. The implicit racialising of sexuality here is hard to ignore.

This is not just about a handful of charity workers tarnishing the work of living saints. There are many good people in NGOs who understand the complexities of being “in the field”. The best of them work with smaller local organisations. This is not an excuse to cancel aid budgets – but can we please stop talking about sex work as a lifestyle choice. We are beginning to know what Oxfam did not want us to know, but we already knew that the “price” of certain women is considered so low as not to count at all.

Why women in black dresses make Bannon hot under the collars

The patriarch’s clairvoyant ... Steve Bannon. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Steve Bannon is right. I would have thought it as likely I would ever write that sentence as it is that Bannon will launch a skincare range, but there you have it. He saw the writing on the wall while watching the Golden Globes. The writer Joshua Green sat with him during the ceremony and describes the moment in a new foreword to his book about the ex-Trump man, Devil’s Bargain. Apparently, Bannon recognised the anti-patriarchy movement as a force that will “undo ten thousand years of recorded history”.

Calm down, dear. Still, Bannon likes to pride himself on understanding revolutionary populism, even if it is not the kind he likes. “It’s a Cromwell moment,” he is said to have shouted. “It’s even more powerful than populism. It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that – this is the Puritans! It’s anti-patriarchy.” He recognised that Trump is the ultimate patriarch and that women are going to take charge of society.

According to other remarks he made, this will, of course, result in the cutting off of every man’s balls.

While many of us thought the wearing of sexy black dresses was a minimal and possibly slightly rubbish #MeToo statement, it seems to have rattled Bannon. Who would have known it took so little to get him going – the man once described as the most powerful in the US?

Trump’s White House is a flabby patriarch’s wet dream, of course, with its dishevelled, incontinent men and ultra-groomed women, its defence of known domestic abusers and its attempts to curtail female reproductive autonomy.

Just as capitalists like to present the market as common sense, so patriarchy likes to manifest itself as the natural order, rather than an imposed one.

That the ripples of a small show of female solidarity cause Bannon to think all of history will be unravelled reveals the fragility of these guys. Patriarchy can only be toppled if it is named. And so, wow ... old two-shirts has certainly done his bit.

Facebook: too slow and boring for teenagers

Avoiding intimacy? Like. Photograph: Alamy

Facebook is for me. Snapchat is for my teenager. I did not need a survey to tell me that. Life is too short for the sucked-in bellies and sharing plates of Instagram. Of course Facebook is for older people – as is much of Twitter, actually.

Young people want to look at each other and they like disposability. People of my generation do not want to be seen. Nor should we be. Skype is bad enough. No, I do not want to talk to you in my old nightie while I pretend I am “at my desk”.

Facebook is slow, mannerly, boring, boasty and discursive. It can be used to maintain contact, but to avoid actual intimacy. Which, let us be frank, is precisely what many of us seek at a certain time in our lives.

• This article was amended on 14 February 2018 to clarify that Roland van Hauwermeiren did not go on to run Action Against Hunger, but rather was its country director in Bangladesh in 2012-14. Action Against Hunger said he had not worked for that organisation since 2014.