I don’t like a fuss, me. Someone pushes ahead of me in a queue – I say nothing. Someone is destroying my peace on a train journey in the quiet carriage I deliberately booked into? I hate them with the heat of a thousand suns and wish them a painfully slow death followed by an eternity in hell pursued by the tinny percussive leak from their own headphones – but I say nothing.

Part of this is nature – I don’t think I would ever have been a massively assertive person; passive resistance is probably my maximally bellicose setting – but a lot of it is nurture. It has been successfully pounded into me over the years – as a child, by my family, later on by society at large – that girls and women are supposed to be nice. Be quiet. Smooth over contretemps, not cause them. Take up as little space, literally and metaphorically, as possible. No heads above the parapet – play peacemaker instead.

Thus, I have always been awed by activists. They’re so… active. To become one myself always seemed like too much of a leap. But, recently, I feel like there’s a bridge forming between us, made up of the increasing number of moments in which ‘normal’ women (in the sense of those not involved with activism per se, and often not readily identified with support for women’s issues at all) are speaking out.

At the Golden Globes there was Natalie Portman reading out a list of, as she independently amended it, “all-male nominees” for the best director award she was presenting.

During the same event there were also Debra Messing and Eva Longoria calling out – live on the channel itself – E!’s gender pay gap.

In the UK there’s Carrie Gracie publicly resigning from her position as China editor for BBC News in protest at the gender discrimination in international editors’ pay packets.

Lucy Mangan: “Why we must strive to be more ‘difficult’”