There are also a few that think Brand is being judged by 2023 standards when a lot of the alleged crimes happened in the 2000s where although the law was the same , in my opinion, the culture wasn't and Brand was maybe an extreme of behaviour shown by many men.
Perhaps it is because I am oldish now (60), but I always feel a bit wrongfooted when people speak of alleged variations in standards over just a few decades. I don't really see the line of progress that these alleged variations seem to imply.
In the 2000s (and in the 90s, and in the 80s) people tended to have the exactly same optimistic illusion that they have now. Namely, the belief that "these days, unlike the past, we know that it is wrong to be sexually exploitative. We are less likely to tolerate the terrible wrongdoing of men in positions of power."
Once you have seen people tell themselves this once a decade or so, it is easier to percieve a more depressing reality: While in some respects things get better for women, overall it continues to be just as easy as it ever was for men in power to abuse women (and/or children) and to frame themselves (by means of whatever zeitgeisty language is current at the time) as behaving properly or even progressively.
Occasional spasms of holding individual men to account will occur - when certain specific truths become too obvious to ignore, and when the passage of time makes it easy for people who should be ashamed of their inaction to exploit a framing of the past ('oh but we all know so much better now') that gives them a get out of jail free card ). But those spasms do not, as we optimistically imagine, amount to a steady line of progress to enlightement. We just circle and circle in the same fundamental exploitation.
I bought into the idea of progress when I was younger. I imagined my parents - my mother even - understood less than I did about what sexual equality was and how it could be achieved. I thought we, the young people of the 80s, were all more enlightened. But we weren't. We were just in the next iteration of the same cycle
As far as I understand it, some of the tenets of today's feminism among younger women has the same character of 'knowing better'.
'Sex positivity' for example, seems to portray an earlier generation of feminists as failing to understand that women's equality included the right to enjoy liberated sex on their own terms, without shaming, etc. (I may have misunderstood this, but this is what it looks like). Of course we understood that. But feminism of the seventies and eighties was reacting against the appalling pressure under which women were placed by the earlier incarnation of 'sex positivity', namely the concept of the 'permissive society' in the wake of the introduction of the contraceptive pill.
Women were expected (were told) to view effective contraception as the starting gun for leaping into a sexuality that was 'just like mens', performed on men's terms, for men's gratification. So feminism of the 70s/80s was partly about protecting women from this pressure, demanding the space for women to shape their own version of liberated sexuality, unpressured by a culture of in-your-face suck-my-dick-till-you-choke male desire.
Eventually our voices were heard to the extent that there was some small movement towards respecting women's space to say No. But the circle turned again and we arrived at the sheer decadence of male comedians (and their 'new lads' acolytes). Their schtick was the 'ironic' performance of exactly the same male entitlement, placing exactly the same requirement on women to want sex all the time on men's terms, simultaneously requiring women to pretend to themselves that this was part of their own sexual liberation.
Just now (this month, this year, maybe a few years if we are lucky) there is a little disgusted shudder that is temporarily turning society back to admonishing these men. But I'm pretty sure there is a new generation of men who are doing exactly the same thing, just with a different cultural cloak now that irony is so tired (such as the cloak provided by so-called progressive language around sex). And so it goes on.