Oh come off it, what did they think was going to happen? A men-only dinner full of suits in an expensively discreet location, with rivers of booze supplied, could only mean one thing. They must have known what they were getting into, surely. And even if they genuinely didn’t have a clue at the beginning of the evening, the outfits provided should have given the game away: skimpy black dresses with heels to match, like backing dancers in a 90s soft rock video? It’s all very well feigning shock now, but they made their choice on the night.

I mean the men, of course. It’s the men now frantically dissociating themselves from the Presidents Club’s “charity gala “ at the Dorchester — not the young women paid to put up with the pawing — who should have known where it would lead. Those hostesses may or may not have realised, as they signed non-disclosure agreements, that they were about to be groped and propositioned, and asked hopefully if they were prostitutes, at the self-styled “most un-PC event of the year”. They were certainly free, depending on how much they needed the money, to choose not to take the gig.

But men have choices too, and in these post-Weinstein times they can expect to be judged on those choices. A man is very much free to make a charitable donation. And he is also free, before accepting an invitation, to pause and ask himself who goes to a men-only dinner in 2018, and why. For these days “men only” sounds dated and grubby, not alpha and aspirational. It screams stag nights and strippers and 70s porn mags, rather than: “This sounds like an opportunity to raise money for Great Ormond Street, while mingling with like-minded tax accountants.”

And deep down they must have known it, which is why the whole pack of cards collapsed so astonishingly fast. Within hours of the Financial Times publishing its undercover reporter’s account of the night, charities were returning their donations . Frosty conversations no doubt ensued over marital breakfast tables. The chief whip carpeted Nadhim Zahawi, the minister for children and families , for attending (even though Zahawi says he left early because he felt “uncomfortable”). David Meller, the club’s co-chair , had to resign as a non-executive director of the Department for Education. Journalists began questioning exactly how much money had been raised. And the club rolled down its shutters for good, presumably realising that no chief executive would dare be seen at next year’s bash. Time, gentlemen, please.

And in doing so the club has left its high-profile members looking almost as exposed and vulnerable as those hostesses. One wonders how many are struggling to look their female colleagues in the eye, as they sign off on the latest boardroom diversity initiative; and whether some are secretly dreading the arrival of reporters on the doorstep. These aren’t historic allegations, to be excused as relics of another era. To be caught out like this in 2018 just makes a man look painfully behind the curve, too dim to realise when the game is up. How could they not have seen the writing on the wall before they got caught?

That so many seemingly did not is a mark of just how fast things have changed. Before Donald Trump became US president, before sexual harassment scandals forced a string of resignations in Silicon Valley , before Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, the Presidents Club got away with it. Without all these exposes, someone might not have thought to tip off the FT reporter Madison Marriage that this event was worth a look; the City’s favourite paper might have hesitated over a story that its sniffier readers would have deemed downmarket; parliament might not have weighed in.

But in the current climate, the condemnation was so overwhelming that the club’s supposedly powerful members barely tried to defend themselves. The only visible resistance is online, where anonymous men in the FT’s comments rail furiously against the “new puritanism”. Which is ironic, because what the Presidents Club seems to offer is just a more expensive version of what is free on the internet: the chance for a grim minority of men to do and say things to women that they can no longer do and say in everyday life.

The unspoken deal with charity events, from the fabulously swanky to the school fundraiser, is that it’s not just about the good cause. It would be easier for everyone concerned just to write a cheque, but left to themselves people don’t bother — so you offer them something in return for loosening their wallets. What the Presidents Club seems to have offered is the sort of good time that City men increasingly struggle to have now that banks have begun to frown on expense claims from strip clubs, and make their executives attend endless businesswoman of the year dinners instead. It was essentially selling the chance to go back in time, to an era when rich men could still make themselves feel bigger by making poorer women feel small.

And that’s where the Presidents Club differs from the slowly dying world of working men’s clubs , Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs , and men-only golf clubs . It wasn’t really men-only at all. Had it been so, nobody would have come. The whole point was that the room was stuffed full of women, but crucially a certain kind: women the men were allowed to treat as objects, not equals; whose feelings they didn’t have to care about; who couldn’t complain to HR, and who were paid to take whatever the men threw at them. Women like women used to be, before feminism came along and ruined all that.

Nights like this feed a particular form of male fantasy, one that these days leaves many younger men as well as women cold. But for some, the fantasy will endure long after this club is forgotten. The party may be over. The clearing up, one suspects, is going to take a while.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist