My dear GFPs, hello. I had been planning to write to you about the latest on sex disaggregation in heart failure clinical trials (spoiler: it’s not good), but then all these words just kind of came out and, well, in conclusion, I’ll come back to the heart failure issue, because clearly this other stuff is where my head is right now and I think it’s important too.

There have been a lot of news stories recently that have been swimming around in my brain, taking up space and emotional energy. They have all been in one way or another about male violence against women, which is an issue I don’t tend to write about that much. There are a few reasons for this, the first of which is I think there are already a lot women who write brilliantly on this topic and I don’t feel that there’s a lot of added benefit I bring. It’s not my specialist area and, while I’m often asked to comment on these issues, I don’t really see what having another feminist voice saying “this is bad” about something self-evidently bad adds to the mix.

But today I feel compelled to, because these stories have, for whatever reason, coalesced this morning into a single loud thought, which is simply this: it is deeply traumatising to be a woman in a society — this society — where you cannot escape from constant reminders of just how many men don’t think we’re fully human.

There are the constant drip of stories about British police officers raping and brutalising women — we only just sentenced the last guy and there’s already another one been charged. Even when you are fully aware, as I am, of the levels of institutional misogyny in policing (for a brief overview I wrote about it previously here and here and here), the specific details about what specific police men have done to specific women hit hard.

There are also the regular updates on how schoolboys are parroting lines from the alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate about how women exist to be dominated by, and to serve, men. The stories about how Tate himself treated the women in his life, literally branding them as his property. This man, who parades his hatred of women as a point of pride, is someone our boys look up to.

Last week, in Helen Lewis’s always excellent newsletter she linked to a story about a male online gamer paying for deepfake porn of two of his fellow female gamers. Another woman from the community then went looking on the website, finding that she too had had her images deepfaked into porn. Men online - who will never have to worry about something like this happening to them —reacted to this story by calling the women snowflakes for objecting.

And let’s be clear, the women this happened to were not meant to like it: it was intended as a violation. It was intended as an act of dehumanisation, of degradation, of asserting power and dominance. Porn made with real women is freely, abundantly available online (the discussion over whether it should be we can set aside for now; the fact remains that it is). So there is simply no need to deepfake the women you work with — unless the point is that they have not consented. Unless the point is that they are unwilling, and usually, unknowing.

And that is, inescapably, the point. The point is to degrade women. To remind us of our place. This is also what is behind the popularity of Andrew Tate and others like him. It is behind the actions of David Carrick, the police officer and serial rapist.

These are the actions of men who hate women. These are the actions of men who resent the tiny gains women have made and want to put us back where we “belong.” These are the actions of men who cannot conceive of women being their equals. And my god. It’s hard to be reminded of how many of them are out there.

Like a lot of women, this stew of misogyny triggers memories of my own experiences — experiences that would take a lifetime to recount, as they have filled, and shaped, a lifetime. I think, of course, of the sexual assaults. But I also think, perhaps even more acutely, of men who have deliberately terrorised me. Men, acting both alone and in groups, who made it obvious they were following me, taking clear pleasure in their ability to frighten me, and in this way reminding me that the streets are not mine in the same way they are theirs. And the reason I think of these experiences in particular, where technically, nothing terrible happened, as opposed to the ones where something did happen, is that this feels the closest parallel to what I feel now.

I have not (as far as I’m aware and I don’t intend to search) been made into deepfake porn. I have not been sex trafficked and had my abuser’s name branded onto my body. I have not been locked in a broom cupboard and held captive for days by my rapist. But not every woman needs to go through these specific experiences for these actions to work as intended: to keep all women living in fear. We all have our own experiences to remind us that this specific one hasn’t happened to us simply because we were not that woman in that place. It could have been any one of us. Next time, it might be.

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote Germaine Greer, over fifty years ago. I’m not sure I agree — or at least, maybe it was true then. I don’t think the same could be said now. I don’t think the issue is that we don’t know. I think the issue is that living in that knowledge, day in day out, is unbearable. So mostly we choose to look away, to pretend it isn’t happening. Like when you laugh along at the demeaning joke in the office, or act like you haven’t heard the catcall. Because turning around and facing it is often just too hard. It’s easier to pretend none of this is happening.

So, what is the point of all this? Where’s my fix? The honest truth is, I haven’t got one. We are living in a period of intense backlash and it is horrifying to experience. I can only hope that, like other periods of backlash, we will get through it without losing too many of our rights. But there is no escaping the fact that women today are being traumatised by living through this time.

And so, while I can’t fix this, while I can’t stop this happening, I am going to do the one thing I can do, and that is to speak now to the men who read this newsletter. I know that you cannot possibly imagine what it is like to be a woman in a world like this. How could you possibly know what it’s like to have your daily actions and words shaped by game planning how men might react to them? Shall I say what I’m thinking and get shouted down, demeaned, patronised, or should I just keep quiet. Should I take that seat on the bus next to that man or should I stay standing? Should I walk down that street or should I take the long way around. It affects what we wear, how we walk, where we go, what we say, how we sit, where we run, what we do, how we work, how we think. It affects pretty much every so called free choice in our lives. Whenever we are in a mixed-sex environment, the office, the street, even, sadly, often the home, we are constantly game-planning and risk assessing how people with bodies like yours will react.

I know it’s not possible for you to fully, bodily experience that, as it’s completely alien to how your minds have been shaped by your own lives. But I’m asking you, as men who read this newsletter and therefore care about women, to try to think about this reality, this world that women inhabit, every time you read one of these stories. I’m asking you to know that this is how the women in your life are reacting. For you, it’s a news story about an isolated bastard. For us, it’s a reminder of how many of them are out there. It’s a reminder of how much damage has already been done to us. And how much worse it could still get.