WASHINGTON — Alan Simpson was appalled by the injustice of it all.

Back in 1991, during the incendiary Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the salty Republican senator from Wyoming was very concerned at the idea that a woman would wait many years after a disturbing encounter and then “come out of the night like a missile and destroy a man.”

It has been a rough spell for men whose primal fear is women coming out of the night like missiles.

Even though then-Senator Simpson absurdly claimed during those hearings that it was puzzling that Hill had not come forward sooner given that the nation’s capital was “fertile ground” for a woman with a sexual harassment complaint to be treated fairly, it took 26 more years of rampant sexual harassment — and a fortune in secret settlements on Capitol Hill — before women took to the ramparts.

For all the furor surrounding those hearings, male politicians did not learn anything about sexual harassment. Most of the all-male, all-white members of the Judiciary Committee privately — and mistakenly — assumed that Thomas and Hill had had some sort of work romance that soured. So they just went through the motions of looking into it and then got back to business as usual in the men’s club.

It took far too long, but something finally snapped with women. Why had we allowed ourselves to think of abusive behavior as the norm for so long? Maybe it was this pent-up anger that has given the cascading accusations such a feral edge.