I want to know what this world could be like if women got to be really f***ing big deals.

These were the words shared with journalist Caitlin Johnstone in an anonymous interview from 2016 with a former swimmer, whose clear path to the Olympics was derailed by what Johnstone referred to as her “collision with rape culture”. The swimmer was only a teenager when she began experiencing sexual harassment and later assault from a fellow swim team member. She reported his actions to their coach, only to be told she needed to “not make waves” and keep the team together. Eventually, she became so demoralised and broken down by the casual acceptance of what was being done to her that she quit. No more swimming. No more Olympic dreams.

These words have been playing in my mind in recent weeks, with the confluence of political events exposing to the Australian public what feminist writers like myself have been saying for years: that rape culture is real, and it is carefully cultivated in even (and perhaps especially) the most privileged of institutions. It is Brittany Higgins bravely speaking out about the rape she alleges a colleague perpetrated against her in Parliament House, only to be dismissed as a “lying cow” by her ministerial employer and turned into an humanising thought experiment by the staggeringly out of touch Prime Minister. It’s revelations of widespread sexual assault and harassment being perpetrated by private school boys against their female peers, documented in painstaking detail by one of those young women, only to have her bombarded with abuse from within. And yes, it is in the carefully contrived performance of Attorney-General Christian Porter, accused of an historical rape against a woman whose death by suicide has only somewhat hampered the willingness people normally have to dismiss complainants as fraudulent liars angling for that big pay day that apparently awaits all women who speak out.

Mr. Porter has strenuously denied the allegations. But what struck me most about his lengthy press conference was his focus on having only been 17 at the time, as this detail alone mitigates the possibility of anything criminal having occurred. There was his acknowledgement that the complainant had helped him to iron his shirt, because he had not known how to do it - a child, you see, a hapless boy barely able to dress himself, let alone assault someone! A man who only a few short years later would be referring to lawyers as “well dressed prostitutes” and dismissing an opposition’s case as having “more holes than Snow White’s hymen”, and who, according to the recollections of barrister Kathleen Foley, treated women as “objects of ridicule”, the only point to them being “for him to hit on them, or for women to be made fun of, particularly for the way they looked.”

But there he was at 17, unable to iron a shirt and conveying within that a grave message to a roomful of people thirty years later: What if that were your son?

I am reminded again of the ease with which misogyny positions men as both the natural inheritors of power and rule, and yet eagerly reverts them to a state of boyish incapacity when addressing their potential to cause great harm. Indelible in the hippocampus was the laughter Christine Blasey Ford remembers hearing as a teenage girl when allegedly trapped in a room with future Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh - but we have to remember that boys will be boys, and it’s up to girls to protect ourselves from their urges.

Boys - particularly those from privileged backgrounds - always get to be positioned at the starting blocks of life whenever they are accused of sexual harassment or assault. Their futures stretch out before them on their way to greatness, with so many dazzling pit stops along the way. Would it really be fair to punish them for mistakes, these young boys who don’t know any better, who don’t know how to control their urges, who are a raging mess of hormones and desire, who don’t even know how to iron shirts let alone hold down a woman, but who if they did do those things surely shouldn’t have to have their entire life ruined over it???

Because boys will be boys.

Much was made of the athletic prowess of the two young men found guilty of rape in Steubenville, Ohio. When the verdict was handed down, CNN correspondent Poppy Harlow lamented how difficult it was to see as these “two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.” In Stanford, the father of Brock Turner - another “promising” athlete found guilty of sexual assault - requested leniency in sentencing for his son, whose life he said “will never be the one that dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve”. The senior Turner called this a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.” My own lesser experience as a public feminist of dealing with abuse meted out by boys (which ranges from rape threats to commands that I kill myself) is typically characterised by anger towards me exposing it. Young boys are apparently robust enough to describe rape and murder to women, but too delicate to experience the consequences of this. Those protected by institutional privilege and Old Boys mentality will never be called on to account for their behaviour, because the bodies of girls and women are still fundamentally seen as the spoils of a war we did not ask for and have no chance of ever winning.

And what of the promising young women whose own shredded futures are left in the wake of these boys and their first flexings of power? The countless anonymous swimmers, artists, musicians, lawyers and yes, future prime ministers, who form the practice grounds for boys and men on their way to becoming captains of industry? Who will stand up for them? Who will lament what it is we have undoubtedly lost as a society by maintaining a culture in which these promising young women are churned up and spat out, treated as the inconsequential, collateral damage of a system still learning to iron out its own wrinkles and creases?

Mr. Porter implores the public and the press gallery to “imagine for a second that it’s not true”. He need not ask that, because rape culture and its constituents have never struggled to imagine men are innocent of all things in which women have the temerity to call them to account for.

There is a better question, and it’s one that we must start challenging ourselves to ask and answer if we want to preserve the potential of our girls: imagine for a second that society cared.