LAST week, a story emerged that Asia Argento, hitherto one of the most visible figures in the #MeToo movement, had been accused, by a young man, actor Jimmy Bennett, of sexually assaulting him when he was 17 and under the age of consent in California.

The then 37-year-old had also, it was revealed, paid the actor off to the sum of around £300,000. Although she issued a denial that sex had taken place, photographs emerged which appeared to show them lying together.

A story like this was probably bound to hit #MeToo at some point. Indeed, the movement has already had its debate over what our reaction should be if a #MeToo victim looks to also be an abuser, when Junot Diaz, after writing of his childhood abuse, was accused of sexual misconduct himself.

But the impact of the Argento allegations is different – for she has been such a key icon of the movement. An early accuser of Harvey Weinstein, she once threatened other abusers: “We know who you are, and we are not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.”

Personally, I don’t think this is a bad moment for #MeToo. This is where the movement has to come of age, to acknowledge complexity, take in male survivors, and shift its image away from being a movement for a female celebrity elite. Where it goes from here is dependent on how it frames the problem of Argento, and its ability to remind the world that it is a movement not of flawed and complex leaders, but about principles. That hasn’t happened yet.

What do we do with a problem like Argento? The accusations against her do need to be taken seriously. They’re also a reminder that we need to look at the way women too may abuse their power. She was, notably, his director and co-star when he was seven.

Does that mean I believe Jimmy Bennett and not Asia Argento? I certainly don’t disbelieve him. The #MeToo credo has always been to believe the accuser. That has never, it has seemed to me, been what’s most important. What, above all, we owe victims is not to discredit them.

Yet Argento – unsurprisingly given she is the accused, yet hypocritically given she is #MeToo – has discredited Bennett, impugning him as a grifter, out for the money. It is this that has been hardest to square.

Not only that but, on social media, we see Bennett discredited by the public mob, just as we have seen so many female accusers discredited, including Argento. The tone is not quite the same, but there are similarities. He is cast as a gold-digger, someone who really wanted the sex – for after all what 17-year-old boy, so the story goes, wouldn’t? Stereotypes about young male sexual appetites abound.

What the Asia Argento story is a reminder of is that the question of who is a victim, who is a perpetrator, who is a survivor, who is an abuser of power, isn’t a matter of identity, but of relations. A person can be at one point in their lives a victim, and another an abuser. That’s the case, regardless of whether you are male or female – we all start out as powerless children.

The problem is the #MeToo movement failed, up till now, to embrace male survivors sufficiently. It was always a little “not you too”. There was always, and I was probably guilty of it myself, a tendency to use the word “her” too much, to frame the cause as a female issue.

But it’s possible for a movement like #MeToo to be about both Asia Argento as victim, and also Jimmy Bennett too. It can contain both. Dealing with that, and many other difficult questions, is key to its evolution.

Leave no stone turned ...

ENOUGH. I’m done with my long, adventurous career as an international beach pebble thief. No longer will I collect small cairns for my bathroom shelves. Nor am I going to continue to lead my children into this life of squalid crime. This, by the way, is not merely triggered by last week’s news story of how a man, threatened with prosecution for stealing stones from a Cornish beach had driven back to return them. Nor is it because I’ve only just realised that under the Coast Protection Act1949, this is a crime. I actually quit long ago.

I suspect we’ve all stone-thieved at some point. I think of it as one of our early instincts – the finding of a really good stone that fits perfectly into the palm of the hand. But, in these acquisitive times, it’s not just one nice stone, it’s a whole pocketful, or a bag, and then it gets out of control and your yard is like a shingle beach.

Now, there’s nothing really wrong with your small home cairn, but we do have a knack for turning beautiful things into stuff. Plus there are hordes of us – tourists, they call us – at it.

The stone that was a thing of beauty on the beach too often becomes a bit of clutter around the house. I know the temptation. I have it every time I visit the beach. Stone gathering is irresistible.

But then I look at my treasured pile and think to myself “better just leave it, they look loveliest here”.