If you, like me, came late to feminism, then you probably remember what it was like on the ‘other side’. I once laughed along as a room of grown men spoke about the variety of ways they could fuck my friend because she was ‘so small’ and ‘easy to throw around’. I understood my boyfriend punching in a metal lift door next to my head as him ‘having a bad day’. There was a limit to my tolerance, but it was pressed often and without reprieve. The shields I had up, the ones my mother handed me along with my Ninja Turtles lunch box—ignore them, I love you—were pulled further out of my reach every day.

I remember cold conversations with women about music made by men, gigs played by men, women fucked by men, rivalries contingent on men, break-ups, hook-ups, dick-sucks, would he show up and when? I was a real-life Bechdel test failure. I hadn’t grown past the sense that men were important, that their opinions mattered, that their attention was more vital, all of it, more essential than my own.