THIS column is not about Gregg Wallace. Given everything that’s going on at the moment – in Scotland, the UK, the world – the question of whether a TV presenter may lose his job over inappropriate behaviour will not rank high on the list of any National reader’s priorities.

However, with his extraordinarily ham-fisted attempt to dismiss the complaints made against him, the Masterchef co-host might actually have done us a favour.

By trying to dismiss those accusing him of inappropriate behaviour as “middle-class women of a certain age”, he has made matters an awful lot worse for himself, but in the process sparked a public conversation about women who feel empowered to complain (and those who don’t).

Perhaps if he had made the comment in 2020, it would have landed differently. That was the year the use of the disparaging term “Karen” travelled across the Atlantic and was eagerly adopted by British men who wished to dismiss the complaints or opinions of women with whom they disagreed.

Its origins as a term used by black women, to refer specifically to a white woman taking it upon herself to police the legal behaviour of black people, quickly became obscured.

Any woman could be accused of Karen-like behaviour, but the name suggests “a certain age”. In 2020 there was just one Karen born in Scotland, and there have been none registered since. When I was at primary school in the 1980s, there were two of them in our class of 31 pupils. Is this the measure by which my peers can assess whether we have reached a certain age?

Perhaps the yardstick should be the age of Gregg Wallace’s current wife, who is still shy of 40. I say “current” not to be needlessly unkind (heaven forfend), but because the 60-year-old is on the record as saying “I’m not willing to swap my fun, sexy girlfriend for an exhausted mum”.

No woman sets out to make that jarring transition from fun and sexy girlfriend to exhausted mum. Young women are able to delude themselves that they will never turn into the drudge, the scold, the prude, the killjoy – that they will somehow manage to avoid becoming middle-aged, because to be so is to be old-fashioned, behind the times, whereas they are more modern, more progressive than the women who came before them. But then of course time marches on...

READ MORE: BBC 'overplaying Gregg Wallace story after underplaying it for years'

Victoria Smith’s superb book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women examines the obstacles to inter-generational solidarity among women, and the way in which life experience disabuses them of the notion that by embracing a more liberal, individualised notion of feminism they can avoid turning into their mothers.

Smith does not exclude her younger self from this type of thinking, admitting that she once believed she could “identify out”, and move on from second-wave feminism’s preoccupation with the female body. Life experience taught her otherwise. Now she’s become one of the “hags” herself, and worse still is now being called “terf” by younger women as well as men.

“The demonisation of older women ensures we do not wish to identify with or learn from them, so cannot gain any knowledge to prepare us for our own experience of ageing”, she writes. “Instead we turn away from our future selves.”

When young women join in with the denigration of the “Karen”, they are self-sabotaging. The current generation of middle-aged women won’t be replaced by a younger one, but by another the same age – with decades of experience that will have burst youthful bubbles and decreased their tolerance of bullshit – especially from men.

To return briefly to Wallace, the fact that he seems to be trapped in a mindset several decades out of date, and to be almost totally lacking in self-awareness, may mean that he accidentally bridges this generational gap in the way few others could. It is certainly to be hoped that his disastrous attempt to “other” the women who have complained about him will help to boost sales of Smith’s book (which is an absolute must-read and full of wry humour).

Crucially, in 2024 there is nothing uncool, nothing “cringe”, about calling out sexually inappropriate comments in the workplace. Many Gen Z young people wouldn’t say boo to a goose (especially if they had to do it by phone call), and the notion of making a formal complaint about a household name would be unthinkable.

So regardless of an individual young woman’s previous opinion of the older ones speaking out – Kirsty Wark (above), Kirstie Allsopp, Ulrika Jonsson and Aasmah Mir, to name a few – this is a powerful demonstration that with age comes the strength and confidence to stand up to a powerful man.

That maybe becoming middle-aged is something to look forward to, not to fear; liberating rather than stifling.

The headlines may be about a man, but the story is about women pushing back. The fact that they are middle-aged and middle-class doesn’t mean they can’t take a joke (in contrast, perhaps, to the young working-class woman of Wallace’s imagination, who loves bawdy humour), it means that they are empowered to say no when others might not be.

For that, younger women can be grateful.