On Wednesday of this week, a man – we’ll call him Shmobert, to protect his anonymity – was returning walking through downtown Sydney on his way back from his lunch break.

On the corner of a street, he came across a gaggle of young women handing out promotional fliers to passing pedestrians. Across the road was a construction site, where scaffolding had been put up around the outside of a building. About a storey off the ground, the scaffolding formed a walkway, and along the walkway stood about six construction workers, lined up and facing the street making obscene gestures at the women across the street. The women had noticed, and to Shmobert, it seemed that most of them were studiously ...