EARLIER this month, the Everyday Sexism website announced it had reached the ­milestone of 50,000 entries - a barrage of testimonies cataloguing the hate, nastiness and general belittling often experienced by women.

Not much cause to celebrate, one would think, given that recent entries include rape tales, an account of a woman being told that "only lesbians and sluts" want to join the army, and countless stories of gropings and harassments. But everyday sexism, in a more general sense, has been one of the stories of this year, as a glut of tales across our media have shown just how badly men can behave, whether drunk and on the bus, anonymously spitting bile over social media, heckling in university debates, or generally having a good old chuckle over a rape joke.

Among those we saw behaving ­particularly badly this year were students - for instance, those at Glasgow University Union (GUU), who earlier this year were accused by two women debaters of sexist heckling in the institution's Ancients competition. After the Glasgow debate, Marlena Valles of Edinburgh ­University and Rebecca Meredith of Cambridge University claimed students had yelled "Get that woman out of my union" and made loud comments about their physical appearances. A deluge of online complaints by women about harassment in the union followed. Though two ­individual students were cleared of sexist behaviour, a wider independent inquiry found a sexist culture was prevalent and "normalised" at the GUU.

"The sexism of the GUU isn't quaint and it is not a tradition to be jokingly ­celebrated," said Valles after the debate. "I appreciate the efforts of members within the GUU to make it better, and maybe that incident needed to happen because we were told by many senior GUU female members that they couldn't do anything about it without being laughed down."

More shocking, though, principally because we could see footage of them posted online, were the antics of the ­Stirling University hockey team, some of whom crowed out the song I Used To Work In Chicago on a crowded bus. The song, an old drinking number, was always bawdy and sexist, but this was a particularly nasty version. Describing the fate of various women going into a "Chicago department store", it included one verse that went: "A lady came into the store one day asking for a lady train. A lady train she wanted ... a miscarriage she got."

This kind of thing wasn't just happening in Scotland. It was happening everywhere: in Durham, where student rugby players allegedly indulged in the drinking game, "It's not rape if ..."; in Cardiff, where students held a "pimps and hoes party"; in Aberystwyth, where a cricket team member was photographed wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Casual Rape".

It has often been hard to tell whether, as a society, we've slid into some cesspool of woman-hate or if actually the internet and mobile-phone recording devices have just allowed us to lift the lid on what had been bubbling away for decades. Writing of the Stirling hockey team scandal, author Brooke Magnanti asked whether this latest outburst was evidence that sexism was on the rise in university campuses. "I'm going to chance my arm here and say no," she wrote. "Rather, it's evidence that more people are saying something about it when it does happen, and that more people are walking around armed with cameras to capture the moment for all eternity."

The phrase "rape culture", meanwhile, has become common currency, used to describe everything from rape jokes to the horrifying sexual exploits boasted of by a group of boys known as the "Roast Busters" in New Zealand. If 2012 had been the year in which we were shocked and saddened by some high-profile rape cases, this was the year that saw horror at the everyday way in which the word "rape" was part of common banter or internet aggression. A club in Leeds seemed to think it was funny, for instance, to call one of its nights "Fresher Violation".

How seriously we take the issue of rape threats on social media was at the core of one of the most surprising misogyny stories of the year, that of Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned for the seemingly innocuous addition of a woman's head - Jane Austen's - on a Bank of England note. When she succeeded she was assailed by a torrent of Twitter abuse, including rape and murder threats that went on for days. She reported them to the police after receiving "about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours".

"Social media doesn't cause misogyny; the police can't cure it," said Criado-Perez at the time. "What we really need to do is sit down as a society and take a long hard look at ourselves, in order to answer the question: 'Why are we producing so many people who just seem to hate women?'"

In December, two people were charged with making the threatening tweets. Rather shockingly, one was a woman.

But just as there has been plenty of bad ­behaviour, so has there been retaliation, and this year has been equally notable for the campaigns against sexism. In Glasgow, a 200-strong protest against misogyny turned out following the University Ancients scandal. Those Stirling University hockey players were excluded from playing for their team. Universities seemed to be fomenting feminism as much as sexism.

Edinburgh University Students' Union, for instance, was the first such venue to ban the hit Robin Thicke song Blurred Lines, whose lyrics and video some controversially said were "rapey". The ban was executed under the union's policy End Rape Culture And Lad Banter On Campus.

At the Edinburgh Fringe, which the previous year had been criticised for some shockingly misogynistic comedy, the rape joke was well out of fashion.

Indeed, a very vocal wave of feminism even ­permeated entertainment culture, making it almost cool to say you were a feminist - from Lily Allen singing that it was Hard Out There in her industry to feminist comedy, which was the order of the day at the Fringe. Its most high-profile exponent, Bridget ­Christie, even won the Edinburgh Comedy Award with her polemical show, A Bic For Her.

Who won: the feminists or the sexists? It's hard to tell. Social media misogyny is still rife. Blurred Lines remained one of the most-played songs of the summer. But, when Caroline Criado Perez was interviewed towards the end of this year, she seemed positive, saying she thought it had been a good year for feminism. She said campaigns and projects like Everyday Sexism were "making sexism visible and opening people's eyes to the fact that we're not equal yet". And that in many ways is the story of the year. What was invisible is now visible. We can no longer pretend it's not there.