NOT another column about sexual harassment. Not another professional woman spilling the beans on a sordid situation dating back to the Dark Ages when The Sweeney portrayed hard fact not pumped-up fiction.

I get it.

Everyone and their aunty is suddenly writing and speaking about male abuse of power. Turn on the radio or TV and everything from rape to knee-touching is being analysed – some incidents date back decades, others happened yesterday. Equality-conscious, modern Scots know it’s important stuff. But I’m guessing many folk – and not just men – are (secretly) starting to wonder if there’s anything left to say or (whisper it) starting to feel uncomfortable about the deluge of allegations sweeping the media. Even as a fully paid-up feminist I sense those “enough already” vibes. Not because I think the post-Weinstein revelations are a fuss about nothing or “man-up” Anne Robinson is right. On the contrary.

What’s being uncovered is much larger than a series of disturbing or tawdry individual cases; the mass of women speaking out are uncovering nothing less than institutional sexism – the normalisation of power relations based on gender and the abuse of that power in the workplace.

The Stephen Lawrence case famously led to acknowledgement of institutional racism in the Metropolitan police force twenty years ago – now the Harvey Weinstein case and its aftermath is demonstrating that sexist behaviour and unwanted sexual advances at work are just as hard-wired into our world. They are just as normal.

The big difference, of course, is that in 1993 a hate crime ended Stephen Lawrence’s young life. Perhaps the absence of serious physical injury explains why no senior politician is acknowledging the institutional nature of sexual harassment in the workplace – put bluntly it happens (largely) to women because they are women and for no other reason. It is usually overlooked, condoned and covered up. Perhaps this unwillingness to speak plainly is also because the way men and women relate to one another is one of the most sensitive subjects on the planet, since half of us meet our life partners at work.

But perhaps professionals are also uncomfortable about the open nature of the current debate because it breaks one of the biggest unwritten rules – that women and their issues should not hog so much public space. Despite centuries of jokes, myths and proverbs suggesting women talk more than men, we are all actually attuned to a public domain where women speak far less. So the near parity achieved over recent days feels far more “wimminy” than usual. Too wimminy. This dynamic was first described by Dale Spender in her seminal 80’s book Man Made Language when the Australian feminist observed that men and women both get nervous if women’s subjects dominate conversation or if any woman in a group speaks for an equal amount of time to men.

Spender maintained that women speak more assuredly in private, but behave like cats on a hot tin roof when attempting to “hold forth” on serious subjects in public.

She explained it as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women are not judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.”

In other words, if women talk at all, this may still be seen as “too much” by men (and women) who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background.

According to New Zealand socio-linguist Janet Holmes, teachers are also unaware of the gender distribution of talk in classrooms, believing they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys. It’s only when they tape record exchanges that it becomes clear boys are dominating.

In the influential world of film, it’s astonishing how rarely female characters talk directly to one another. The Bechdel test is used in Sweden and elsewhere to measure the active presence of women in films. For a movie to pass it must contain one single scene in which two or more named female characters have a conversation (that is, back-and-forth dialogue) about anything at all besides men. It could be shopping, shoes or Scottish independence. It doesn’t matter.

With such a low bar it’s surprising to learn that half of 2500 movies assessed in 2013 failed the test. Some of the surprising film failures are Avatar, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, the original Star Wars trilogy, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and even Run Lola Run. One film that passed was Alien, simply because Ripley and Lambert had a brief conversation about the monster. This is how much men dominate the public realm and how rarely women are expected to be equal and active partners within it. If you think silenced women are a purely Hollywood phenomenon, think again. Elaine C Smith told me that when she worked on Naked Video many moons ago, Helen Lederer noticed the two female comics had spoken directly to each other in a sketch for the first time in years of filming – another Bechdel moment. Too often female characters in sitcoms are still isolated figures on the receiving end of gags – the airhead girlfriend or the huffy wife. It all contributes to the impression that women think, talk and care only about their relationships with powerful men – in the workplace and in their private lives. That’s simply untrue.

So what has silenced women on film got to do with sexual harassment?

Well the unnaturally small proportion of airtime given to female voices may explain the awkwardness some people are currently feeling as women speak directly to one other on TV and radio in unprecedented numbers.

The Bechdel test is also a way to illustrate how normal and unremarkable this gender imbalance has become.

Here is another. As I write a photo is doing the rounds showing Nicola Sturgeon sitting at a table with six men to discuss sexism in Holyrood. It’s ironic of course, but also suggests that neither our equality-conscious FM, nor her savvy press team, anticipated how the picture might come across. They see a set of people taking the issue seriously – the average viewer, currently sensitised to issues of gender representation, sees a bunch of white guys in suits discussing a problem they’ll probably never directly experience.

Of course, the obvious riposte is that the blokes are not there as men but because of the positions they haud. Well quite. Men occupy top jobs – with obvious, honourable exceptions. But that is precisely the problem.

Scottish society is nowhere near as knuckle-dragging as it once was, but it’s still a place where six men and one woman in a meeting looks as “normal” as three Unionists and one independence supporter on a TV panel discussing Brexit.

Men dominate the upper echelons of most – though not all – power structures. Harassment is normal. Unwanted sexual attention is normal. So normal that the folk who complain begin to look like the problem – with graphic stories of indecency that rock an apparently serviceable society to its core.

This is not to say every allegation of sexual harassment is automatically true, every man is automatically sexist or women are never guilty of sexually harassing men. It is to say the structures and mechanisms of everyday working life have produced a society in which the powerful can do what they like, without fear of reprisal. And the powerful are nearly always men – or women who’ve managed to succeed in a man’s world.

Of course, it would hardly matter which gender controls the workplace if they showed empathy for the juniors they huckle, cajole, touch up, force sex upon and sometimes even rape. But in our dog-eat-dog world there is an acute crisis of empathy.

If might is right in the upper echelons of business and politics, who can be surprised if the same uncaring outlook prevails in the workplace?

Of course, it’s not every workplace and doesn’t happen all of the time. But sexual harassment is normal enough to give women the false message that talent is not what wins respect, employment, a livelihood or promotion – what matters is who you know and what you’ll let them do.

I hope everyone reading this paper can agree on one thing – that’s not the new Scotland we are building.