THAT the past week had brought a post-Weinstein backlash here in the UK is no surprise. When women, and some men, start to complain about their abuse by men whether it be rape, wandering hands or sexist comments, there’s always a moment when the problem is turned on its head and made to be about them. They are construed as the predators – or at least as wimps, gripers or snowflakes, unable to tolerate a man being a bit "handsy" – the new term for unwanted touching.

So it was last week. Following the release of a rickety dossier of sometimes unsubstantiated allegations around Westminster "sex pests", the question of whether women were starting to make too much fuss about too little reared its head.

Perhaps the most shocking example was a Daily Mail double-page spread, including a column by Jan Moir, devoted to attacking and humiliating the journalist and activist Kate Maltby who had written a Times newspaper piece about how upsetting she'd found encounters with the Deputy PM Damian Green, including one in which she "felt a fleeting hand against my knee" (something denied by Green). The headline dominating the Daily Mail spread was: “One very pushy lady.” The 31-year-old was described as “a woman determined to make it in politics, no matter what the cost”.

Maltby's own piece, however, seemed to me fuelled not by careerism but by anger at those who suggest that a hand-on-the-knee is something to be laughed off or minimised. She was partly reacting to the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer's dismissal as no big deal the fact that Foreign Secretary Sir Michael Fallon had, in 2002, put his hand on her knee. Maltby was concerned that some women find it harder to shrug off such behaviour.

Her article, in other words, had plunged into a cauldron of discussion over how much we need to clamp down on these kind of smaller, non-consensual acts or invasions of space. And it has not been a pretty debate. Part of the problem is that these commentaries don’t just exist in a vacuum. They are part of a wider media context in which we can find ourselves prompted to look in one direction rather than another. This last week delivered a slew of articles implying that women were bringing down powerful men with trivial allegations, which read rather like a battening down of the hatches in defence of the patriarchy.

It's hard to believe that all this was the focus in a week in which Labour activist Bex Bailey alleged that after being raped at a party event, she was told not to report it because it would be disadvantageous to her career.

What I find particularly unpleasant is seeing older women dismissing the complaints of the young. Anne Robinson said she was “in despair” over “fragile women". These women behave as if a mild grope here and there were just a slightly objectionable rite-of-passage, like doing long hours as a junior doctor.

This picking away at the more minor harassment stories is bound to undermine the call for serious societal change. These women are saying it's only the worst offences, the most terrible rapes that matter – that the smaller things don't count. When they single out a woman who has made a more minor allegation, trashing her reputation, and suggesting she is just a posh, young careerist on the make, they lend their support to the status quo, to keeping things as they are.

But change is needed. The huge mass of stories that has followed the Weinstein revelations has told us this. And if we're serious about making that change, we'll have to pay attention to the small stuff too.

THE POSH SHALL INHERIT THE ARTS ... ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE

MUSIC, like all the arts, belongs increasingly to the private-school educated. We know that: we can see it in the bands that dominate our charts, the actors that frequent our television and film. It’s as if we are involved in a long slow surrender to the cultural dominance of the upper-middle classes – and nothing seems to be being done to halt it.

Another slide down that path seemed inevitable last week when it was announced that The City Of Edinburgh Music School, at Broughton High School, was to be closed, in a bid by Edinburgh council to save money. The result was an outcry, and it looks possible that the plan may be shelved, but nevertheless, it’s a reminder of the fact that when belts have to tighten it’s too often music that gets the axe.

In recent times other music provisions have quietly disappeared. Slowly and surely across the country, the trend is to reduce music services. Last year a study by the study by the Instrumental Music Teachers' Network identified nine councils which were cutting music tuition budgets by a total of £1 million. The network’s convener, Mark Traynor, warned that school music lessons were suffering "death by a thousand cuts". That’s a tragedy, not just because it suggests a future of greater inequality in the arts, but because music should be for all, not just middle-class parents who will do whatever it takes to get their budding prodigies to a Suzuki method violin lesson.