Sometimes you don’t realise how conditioned you are until you meet someone who isn’t. Sure, I may be blunt in my work, but I still say sorry when someone barges into me in the street. I smile when others are being difficult. After all, I am of a certain age, and was brought up, consciously or not, to be a people-pleaser.

In the 80s, I stood hesitantly outside an assertiveness training class – feminists used to do lots of stuff like that – unsure whether to knock or not, as I was five minutes late. As I have got older, I please myself far more and everyone else far less. And I often look to younger women for guidance.

The extraordinary reactions of certain men to Greta Thunberg, which have nothing to do with her urgent and necessary message on the climate emergency, tells you exactly what happens when a young woman simply refuses to be sexualised. It makes them deeply uncomfortable.

Thunberg’s manner may be associated with her Asperger’s, but her defiance unsettles them. Old, male intellectuals in France have been farting on because she is not “sexy” enough. Yes, really. The 84-year-old philosopher Bernard Pivot, the president of the Académie Goncourt, a French literary society, talked of the sexy Swedish girls of his youth. Greta does not match up, apparently. Michel Onfray, 60, another philosopher, said she has the age and body of a cyborg. Pascal Bruckner, 70, said her face was “scary” and that she flaunts her autism. Trump, as we know, has mocked her.

She is a 16-year-old, and these are grown men. And they are terrified. Wonderful. Who knew you could shake the patriarchy simply by refusing to smile for it, dress for it or demur to it? A refusal to acquiesce to the male gaze has these dinosaurs squirming.

Greta, you teach us about more than one kind of climate. Thank you.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist