It’s a long time since I’ve thought about those men every day.

I haven’t been an intern on newspapers for more than 10 years. It’s been slightly less time than that since I decided that a career in the kind of “serious” journalism that I loved was beyond my reach.

My foot was in the door. But once inside, I had to drink glasses of wine with men old enough to be my father. Outings that were billed as “meetings” turned into dates where they admitted they hadn’t read the work I’d handed in to them, or suggested that I do nude photoshoots to advance my career (yes, it did happen). It felt like grooming, and it wasn’t happening to my male peers, who were getting great assignments and bylines. I didn’t want whatever those drinks were leading to, so I did not follow up on these men’s offers of “further conversation”.

Now those men have returned, or the ghosts of them: with every new revelation of a prominent journalist’s abuse of women and power, I’m reminded of how they pretended to care about my work and then made me feel like an object.

Like a failure.

Like a pathetic little girl who was too fragile and unsophisticated to pass through the gauntlet of gropes and leers that lined my path to career advancement.

A ceiling made not of glass, but of grabbing hands.

We’re all angry, women who work in the media, or who have worked in the media. Many of us fall into the latter category: these men who have been exposed over the last few weeks are the men, or exactly like the men, who made us give up and drop out.

Others are the endurance champions: the ones who looked forward as they passed through the gauntlet. Who shook it off, or ignored it, or – in rare cases – accepted settlements and moved on to other jobs in the industry, in new organizations where they had to dodge new aggressors.

We’re all angry, and we’ve been swallowing this anger for so long – for our whole careers.

I feel the most for women who still have to go to those offices every day, to work in the spaces where they’ve been abused, or witnessed abuse that they’ve been unable to prevent. Some of them are the women I used to look to when I was crumbling under the pressure of the gauntlet. I’d look at them and wonder what it was that they’d done to be able to survive: had they slept with these men? Were these women able to maintain the frisson enough to get what they wanted at work, without giving too much up?

I’d wonder why I wasn’t as tough as they were. I wonderer if they had regrets, or simply accepted sex acts as the price of career advancement. I envied their success because I presumed it didn’t bother them as much as it bothered me, especially since no one stood up for me when I was sexually harassed at work. This, of course, is an essential part of our toxic culture – that it causes women to suspect and blame and isolate each other rather than offering each other support.

With each revelation, women know that the problem is still not solved, and won’t be solved for a very long time. The systems that allowed these men to thrive at work for so long still exist.

It’s the system that permits “woke” male media figures to feel comfortable expressing shock that harassment was going on, despite the fact that it was going on in front of them.

It’s the system that meant that women witnessed it, too, and did not intervene, for fear of repercussions for their own careers.

It’s the system that prompts conversations about “levels of offense”, compares one act with another, suggests that women should let some things go.

It’s the system that allows space for men to say how nervous they feel that they’ll be wrongly accused, while many women remain incapable of speaking about what actually happened to them. Because they know it did advance their careers. Because they are still low in the hierarchy to speak truth to power.

It’s the system that means that the power of all of this anger of women in the media and elsewhere – and there is so much anger – is still not enough to undo the structural effects of years of abuse.

Sometimes I wonder what my career would be like if I hadn’t come across those men. Or if I had not been living in a female body.

Thousands of women must be thinking the same thing: who could I have been if I did not meet him?