This sort of thing is extremely bad for women.

Days before Meghan Markle announced her engagement to the world, Hugh Heckman saw a picture of the now-Duchess and in a “low voice” dubbed her “Not bad.”

His female co-workers reportedly chastised the writer for his words, asking “Haven’t you learned?” and reminding him of a recent company-wide sexual harassment seminar.

Meanwhile, women are allowed to describe Justin Trudeau as “hot” with no consequences.

Heckman alleges he wasn’t the first PBS employee guilty of newsroom thirstiness, citing the fact that female employees had previously referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “hot.”

It will absolutely not be a winning strategy for women to portray themselves as creatures of supreme fragility and sensitivity so tenuously-constructed they shatter at a mere word. Who would want to hire someone like that on purpose? No one. No one at all.

Lionel Shriver describes the stakes better than I could.

That awful expression ‘rape culture’ puts penetration at knifepoint and unwanted knee-touching under the same indiscriminate umbrella. Such zero-tolerance levelling is not in women’s long-term interest. It portrays us as hypersensitive if not hysterical, dangerous to consort with and lacking in common sense. Democrats’ pumping up of Ford’s moderately unpleasant story into a tear-inducing tragedy reinforces the worst of stereotypes: that we women are little birds so terrifyingly delicate that a mere brush against adversity leaves us broken-winged for life.

I ain’t no little bird.

I don’t really have any objection to the term “rape culture” in an academic setting, but women are unspeakably harming themselves by being unable to make distinctions — and arguing no distinctions should be made — between one innocuous comment and coercive rape.