Self-styled good men are very good at feeling sad about women that bad men have killed. They are not so good at thinking these bad men might have anything to do with them, let alone that the “epidemic” of male violence against women and girls might be the responsibility of male people as a sex class. They’re worse still at listening to women who might have an analysis — one built up over decades of feminist scholarship in addition to personal experience — into why male people, and not female ones, feel entitled to do what they do. These men are good at seeing women as victims, and crying about woman victims, providing these victims know their place and aren’t actually able to speak. The moment a victim speaks, she turns bad.

“Grown men” — this was Dworkin writing in 1974 — “are terrified of the wicked witch, internalised in the deepest parts of memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively evil.” Nearly 50 years on, we must still be passive, waiting to be saved. Even to name our victimhood is to weaponise it, making ourselves the aggressor. Men can describe us as fearful — poor, little fearful princesses, waiting for our princes — but the moment we name what we fear, this fear becomes an irrational phobia. Men can pity us fretfully walking the streets — a pity forever tinged with that manly sense of superiority — but the moment we ask for spaces of our own, we are selfish hoarders of privileges we don’t deserve.

By the time a woman has aged into wicked witch/dinosaur status, she may have numerous experiences of male violence to recount. She may be more adept than ever at joining the dots. This does not make her a good victim. One, she’s not dead. Two, she’s “damaged”. Three, she’s making unreasonable demands of the good guys who think their tears ought to be enough. She might want them to stand up to their friends, family members, party colleagues. She might want them to name the sex of perpetrators and not just victims. She might want them to take seriously the proposal that she has an inner life and when she tells you what she needs, she is not just doing it to withhold resources from other, more “real”, valid victims. None of these things are permissible.

Even knowing the rules — having had them identified decades ago — you still have to ask what kind of man sits there, declaring he wants to do more for victims, after months of saying fuck all about the rape and death threats a female colleague has been receiving from members of his own party? What kind of man is that incapable of making the connections? A man who likes the idea of himself saving passive victims, but wouldn’t dream of putting his neck on the line for the sake of a woman who hasn’t yet been hurt, or at least not hurt enough to meet his passive victimhood standards. A man who treats female victims of male violence as the mirror reflecting himself back at several times his actual level of goodness and integrity.

Women aren’t just afraid because of the truly bad men. It’s because there are so few truly good ones. Our lives are littered with the stories we couldn’t tell, the accusations we couldn’t make, because we know the good men will close ranks and we don’t want to see it. Hence the vast majority of victimhood isn’t even seen at all, even if it is only through seeing it all that we stand a chance of ending the fatal violence that — sometimes — can be named. Believe it or not, most of us don’t want to have to wait until we’re “good”.

To be fair, it is not our fault. We are not authoritative; we are not you. We are taught from an early age to doubt ourselves, to see our own versions of reality as suspect, requiring external confirmation from the experts, the men. When you are not considered a reliable witness to your own experiences, things become very confusing. This, I guess, is where you step in.

Not all of us are afraid of the same things at the same time. Or there are some things we convince ourselves are safe which we later understand were anything but. We are inconsistent. That’s the thing about fear. The impact impedes the articulation. What do we fear most of all? Hard to say. That is, the answer is obvious, but it’s very hard to say it without having one’s sanity or one’s morality — one’s capacity for kindness — questioned. It’s easier to defer to you. We can do this for years. We can even start to believe it.

Years ago, I was attacked by a stranger. A car pulled up in front of me and I couldn’t decide whether or not to be scared. I dithered, berating myself for my paranoia, reminding myself that stranger danger is more cliché than reality, that “you’re more likely to be attacked in the home than outside it”, even thinking — possibly, I was having a lot of thoughts — “it’s not as if any man would want to assault someone like you”. If only you’d been there to assess the situation. It wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome, but at least I’d have known whether my — in this case, well-founded — fears meant I was mentally ill, a bigot or a bitch.

Then there’s attacks inside the home. These are an actual thing, not just a line you trot out to downplay attacks outside the home. Do you know how many abusive men are considered lovely men, gentle men, kind men, by those who don’t witness what happens behind closed doors? To be fair, you probably have heard this; that’s another cliché. But also, how many abused women defend these men, doubt their own perceptions, have been beaten down so many times they’re not sure if it isn’t their fault? Do you know it’s possible to be ashamed of your own fears? To think, well, maybe this does mean I’m a bad person? You reinforce that shame each time you lecture women on fears you deem to be misplaced. Still, you’re the expert.

Here is a depressing reality, which I learned from the stranger in the car, and others. The strength differential between male and female people is ridiculously significant when male people want it to be. Unfit men, small men, old men, young men — they can do anything, you realise. It is not very easy to forget, nor easy to dismiss with bullshit sophistry about identities, averages and exceptions. Female fear of male strangers is not irrational from a safety perspective. It is, however, politically inconvenient, socially embarrassing, definitionally troubling etc. etc. Lots of things that bother you more than they bother us, but then those are the more important things.

That you — male people — are complicit in the creation of our fear, that you benefit from it, that it’s your dominance that enables you to breeze in, puffed up with pride at your own magnanimity, to tell us we’re allowed to feel threatened by this, but not that … I imagine you don’t really think about this. Or about the effort it takes traumatised women to qualify, reframe, deny, bargain with their fears, all the time, background music playing in their heads. The active suppression of fear of male violence is like housework; you only notice when women aren’t doing it. The rest of the time it’s invisible to you. You don’t appreciate it at all, all the half-lives, all the silences.

You think it an act of generosity to allow us to be fearful of some male people, but not others. As though fear itself is a luxury. We mustn’t be greedy; mustn’t take too much. That you should be offering safety — that a kind, empathetic response to female fear would be to look at the violence from which you benefit, question the class to which you belong — does not cross your mind. You think you float above the worst things men do.

The violent men, patriarchy’s foot soldiers, are not you. It’s hardly your fault if they’ve presented you with the spoils, one of which is the entitlement to define the reality of half the human race. And what better way to clean your hands than with the ritual shaming of the woman who fears too much?

“Women have no idea how much men hate them.”

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

What do these quotations have in common?

1. They’re all by women.

2. They’re all depressing.

3. They are all, let’s face it, a bit bloody crass.

Catchy though they are, such slogans are sorely lacking in nuance. Come on, Atwood, Greer, Angelou — don’t you want to sound a bit more mysterious? You don’t see Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva coming out with lines like this. Anyone would think you actually believed we live in a world of massive power disparities, in which dominant groups actually want to see vulnerable groups dead. Whereas, if you put your mind to being more humble and thoughtful (and ignored all the real-life slaughter), you’d see that — <strokes perimenopausal beard portentously> — things are a BIT more complicated than that.

Or — <strokes burgeoning moustache even more portentously> — ARE they?

One of the problems feminists have to deal with, time and again, is the sheer in-your-faceness of patriarchy. There’s nothing very subtle about rape, domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation, murder. At first glance, you might think this works to our advantage, at least in terms of making the case for why patriarchy is bad. Alas, it turns out, again, that it’s a bit more complicated than that. When male violence is so prevalent, yet also so everyday, so normalised, so excused in so many ways, it’s very hard to be the person who keeps on pointing out it’s happening at all.

I mean, yeah? We know, it’s obvious. Millions of baby girls missing, rape virtually decriminalised, 830 needless maternal deaths per day. Your point?

“Men keep threatening to kill — and in fact killing — women and girls” is just not very interesting or complex. On the contrary, it all sounds terribly basic. Aren’t there more fascinating debates to be had about language and symbols and whether in fact — hear me out on this, it’s counter-intuitive hence super-clever — female people are in fact complicit or even to blame for their own deaths, what with them weaponising their pain by performing being murdered within the cisheteronormative capitalist economy? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whereas a plain, boring feminism that says “no, I don’t think you threatening to kill me with a machete offers us all a unique opportunity to explore why I am in fact The Man” doesn’t make you think at all. It sounds so painfully obvious it’s hard not to suspect there’s something you must have missed.

Herein lies the road to opportunistic both sides-ism. A close relation to victim blaming, it relieves us of the moral responsibility of bearing witness to the hurt done to others. It tells us we are too clever, too humble, too conscious of nuance, to fall for anything so simplistic as a straightforward victim-perpetrator narrative. On the contrary, it makes a virtue of our bystanding. Those women who are begging you to intervene? They lack your heightened sensitivity, your intellectual discernement, your ability to see shades of grey in a fist to the face.

We do not want to think very hard about the things men do to women and children. At some point, it all acquires the status of myth. Does anyone really believe in the prevalence of child sexual abuse? Or is it in fact some pearl-clutching, what-about-the-children moral panic concocted by radicalised Mumsnet witches? I know which story would play best on social media. I know which one would make me look like some daft hag who gets in a tizz about child protection because her brain has been turned to porridge by years of childcare, rendering her incapable of thinking the very hard thoughts in which her Brass Eye-loving student self once revelled. And I know how powerful the desire not to look stupid is, matched only by the desire not to recognise and challenge those who could really do us harm.

As Judith Herman wrote in Trauma and Recovery, “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator”:

“All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

The victim is rarely an appealing person. Anger, fear and hurt do not a winning disposition make, a situation which lends itself easily to the “both sides” narrative. The practical, rational desire not to intervene, because it is risky and upsetting, because it aligns one with the messy, disruptive victim, creates a need to see complexity where there is none. If you can position yourself as morally and intellectually superior to those basic types who still “take sides” (how childish!), then you have not only saved yourself the work of serious political engagement, but you can kid yourself that your conscience is clear. And — added bonus — it’s because you’re cleverer and kinder than everyone else!

Asking others for help, or even just validation, in the face of abuse becomes impossible when people perceive it to be an attack on their precious neutrality. The more proof you provide, the more you are seen to be demonstrating your aggression and lack of subtlety. Actual bruises are viewed as a kind of trump card that you shouldn’t be wielding. You are cheating by suggesting you have it worse, by bringing out all that unsubtle, uncomplicated evidence. You are making the people you turn to uncomfortable, bullying them with your infantile requests that they take sides while they — poor, innocent neutrals! — are caught in the middle. Even writing this feels immature. The mature view, the rational view, the nuanced view, is that no one can ever really say what really went on. Deny a person their nuance, and you are launching at attack on a person’s sense of themselves as a good person, as someone who most definitely would intervene if it were needed (but it wasn’t, otherwise they would have done so). How could you be so cruel?

I don’t want to be thought of as a simple, unthinking person who can’t approach topics in a nuanced way. I, too, want to be the clever person who indulges in impressive intellectual acrobatics, especially if it grants me the added bonus of never having to fall on the wrong side of the people I fear the most. I don’t want to be seen as a bully by people who consider themselves too fragile and intellectually refined to take cries for help at face value, instead translating them into personal attacks. I, too, would like us all to get along, but not at the expense of hearing and validating women’s testimonies. I am simply tired of not taking a particular position on an issue — especially, somehow, an issue relating to women’s rights — being treated as synonymous with being more intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful.

It is not hard to over-complicate that which is straightforward, not that intellectually taxing to make an abusive relationship look like some muddy, confusing, overwhelming mess that only a complete idiot would be arrogant enough to claim to understand. Often it is far more difficult and requires far more compassion not to be a bystander at all.

To be clear: I knew that looking like a model was unachievable. I was short, overweight and precocious puberty had given me terrible acne from age nine onwards. I lacked “the raw materials”. Nonetheless, I felt I ought to show willing.

This didn’t just apply to having photos taken. If members of my family were playing card games, I’d play the role of a “dealing dolly” from Play Your Cards Right. On my own, in front of the mirror, I tried to see if being the first girl at school to get breasts — an experience nothing akin to that suggested by Pulp’s Disco 2000 — could make me like Samantha Fox, who’d become a Page Three girl at sixteen. I knew I wasn’t supposed to read the red tops but I’d sneak a look when adults weren’t around. I was fascinated by their obsession with “wild children” — Emma Ridley, Amanda de Cadenet, Mandy Smith — underage girls who hung out in nightclubs, danced on tables, stripped off while men applauded. Papers such as the Sun and the News of the World loved them. Smith was particularly well known, having dated The Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman, 34 years her senior, since the age of 13. She “started sleeping with him” — or, in plain English, he started raping her — after she’d turned 14.

It is normal for girls to be curious about their bodies, normal for them to be over-eager to situate themselves in the sexual marketplace. What’s normal, too, is for girls to be fed utter crap about what they should offer and where they belong. The internet has made it harder, meaner and more dangerous, but I’m not sure there was any particular historical moment when we were left the hell alone. What I find strange and unsettling is not that things aren’t better, but that many of those who’d condemn the present sanitise the past, while those who condemn the past sanitise the present.

One of the kids’ magazines I used to read was Number One (basically a crapper version of Smash Hits). One article that’s always stuck in my mind was from January 1987 (for a while I worried I’d imagined it, so I looked it up — it’s in issue 187). It’s an interview with a 16-year-old Smith following the release of her debut single I Can’t Wait. The title of the piece is Young Girl Goes For It. The entire framing — Mandy, not waiting, going for it! — makes it sound as though waiting to reach the age of consent could only be for losers.

The journalist, Andrew Panos, is at great pains to emphasise Smith’s “maturity”:

“When Mandy Smith says ‘little girls’, it’s easy to forget that just a few years ago she was a little girl herself. Today, sitting in a plush photographic studio in South London she looks (apart from absolutely stunning) more mature and she acts much older than her 16 years. But that’s probably because at 16 she’s seen and done a lot more than most girls her age. At 13 she met up with Bill ‘Je suis un very old rock star’ Wyman of The Rolling Stones. She gave up school and concentrated instead on going to swanky showbiz parties and nightclubs with Bill.”

Even at eleven, a small part of me wondered whether this — which seems unspeakably creepy now — could be quite right. Then again, I worried my misgivings were merely proof that wasn’t as grown-up as Smith. Clearly, acting “older than most girls” your age was meant to be a good thing. And “swanky showbiz parties”! Jokes about Wyman’s age! Obviously this wasn’t something I should be taking too seriously.

The article continues in this vein, making Smith’s life sound amazing while dismissing her detractors:

“She became friendly with the likes of Elton John, David Bowie and John Taylor who she describes as being ‘very sweet’. But eventually news of her affair reached the newspapers. Everyone was ‘outraged’ although quite happy to read about it at the same time.”

See? When other people got cross and suggested Wyman might be a paedophile, those people were just pretending. It wasn’t outrage but ‘outrage’. They loved it, really. Did I, an eleven-year-old Number One reader, want to be one of those hypocrites, or did I want to cheer Mandy on as she hobnobbed with Bowie? Well, did I?

It’s weird, given how many magazines I used to plough through, that I’ve never forgotten this one piece. Even my recollection of Smith’s particular pose for the photograph was correct. I guess that no matter how hard I tried to persuade myself otherwise, there was still something about it that creeped me out. Embedded in it is what I might now think of as groomer logic. It takes things that you might find exploitative or harmful and presents them as normal or even positive; it takes advantage of the fact that you haven’t yet got the vocabulary or conceptual framework to articulate your discomfort; it alienates you from those who might validate this discomfort (the faux ‘outraged’); it confuses you by insisting rules that might apply elsewhere — don’t rape teenagers — don’t apply in this particular case. Above all it makes you feel like a massive idiot for still having that feeling, deep in your stomach, that things aren’t okay.

There’s something of this I see in the backlash to the backlash to the film Cuties (Mignonnes). Having criticised the marketing and one of the scenes on twitter, I felt I had to watch it “to be fair” (which is annoying, since had I not been offended, I might have overlooked it completely). And, to be even more fair, I thought the vast majority of the film was brilliant. The actresses are superb and it somehow manages to depict the viciousness of female friendships without resorting to crass “girls are just bitches” tropes. I’d have liked to see even more of the friendships. More friendships and fewer close-ups of gyrating bodies.

To be clear, the “bad” clips from the film circulating on social media show most — but not all — of the unpleasant scenes. There’s a point (I was about to say how many minutes from the end, but then thought, no, don’t make looking it up that easy) where you suddenly think “hang on, why are they filming it this way? It was fine up to now!” Yes, there is a point to be made: little girls simulate pornified performances from popular culture without fully understanding what they are doing. But it is surely possible to film this in a way that does not replicate the production values and principles of pornography. The close-ups are excessive and it is frankly jarring in a film that spends so much time conveying the perspective of the main character, Amy, to suddenly find yourself watching from the viewpoint of a dodgy porn consumer. And yes, that may be the intent — see how this girl, who you know is so human, is now just an object! See how you, the viewer, are made complicit in her objectification! But intentional or not, this is harmful.

I am conscious of how much of a twat you sound when you start declaring certain artistic productions “harmful”. Ooh, hark at Mary Whitehouse over there! Get you and your moral panic! This has been the tone of much of the response to the original criticism of Cuties. The Telegraph’s review declares it a “provocative powder-keg for an age terrified of child sexuality”, insisting that “Netflix’s controversial French import is disturbing and risqué because that’s exactly what it aims to be”. Meaning, if you find it problematic, you’re the problem (because obviously, sexually objectifying children is exactly the same as recognising that children will wish to explore their own sexuality. As opposed to, I don’t know, being the exact opposite).

Then again, the issue might not be that you’re a prude; it might just be that you’re stupid. Alyssa Rosenberg declares that “if conservatives [because all critics must be ‘conservatives’] who have jumped on the debate over #Cuties, want to be taken seriously as cultural arbiters, they have to be able to talk about the *text* of a movie like this in an honest, responsible way”. Ooh! The TEXT! As though having a problem with close-ups of pre-teens humping the floor isn’t enough. As though saying so out loud reveals you to be shallow, lacking in learning, too dumb to grasp the broader message. As though, like some moron who never even noticed that FHM and Loaded sexism was, like, totally ironic sexism, you’re just too thick to differentiate between the thing in itself and a critique of said thing (what with both things looking exactly the same).

I’m not saying the question of “how do you produce a criticism of X without replicating X” is an easy one to answer. I’m put in mind of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Marti Noxon’s To The Bone, both of which fall down by assuming the answer is “it’s criticism because I say so”. Yes, in its extreme misogyny and violence American Psycho “holds a hyper-real, satirical mirror up to our faces” but really, this is something the reader will have already worked out about a quarter of the way in. Only the book goes on and on, and it kind of has to, because nihilistic repetition is part of the point, innit, and oh look, you’re at one of the ‘women being raped and tortured’ bits again and yes, maybe as a cultural event (ahem) the book would otherwise fail. Part of the genius of American Psycho is that it is so unremitting, yet the misogynistic fantasies aren’t any less misogynistic because of this. The narrative rhythm depends on Patrick Bateman tearing women to pieces and fucking their corpses, then listing men’s toiletries and pondering the work of Whitney Houston or Huey Lewis and the News. It’s clever, yes, but it’s also hate-filled. It’s higher art but if you can get in a tizz about Blurred Lines, you might also want to question the impact of books like this.

Meanwhile the film To The Bone tells the story of an anorexia sufferer, played by Lily Collins, who lost a significant amount of weight for the role. I reviewed the film when it was released and felt that, had I still been suffering from anorexia, I’d have found it dangerous. What struck me was that Collins — herself a former sufferer — wasn’t performing starvation. She was literally starving, just as the girls in Cuties are literally thrusting for the cameras. To me, this is unjustifiable. There are times when the gap between being and critiquing is unclear, but this is not the case with American Psycho, To The Bone or Cuties. There is no gap at all.

Anyhow, that’s enough on <portentous voice> the complex tension between artistic intent and the uncontrollable demands of a fluid audience </portentous voice>. What really pisses me off about those defending the pornified scenes in Cuties is the intellectual snobbery, the way in which it’s suggested that those who raise concerns about child safeguarding are just incapable of grappling with the complex socio-cultural themes of the oeuvre. I totally agree that Cuties explores some fascinating themes. I’m just guessing that those who fast-forward to particular scenes in order to do particular “things” aren’t particularly arsed about those. I don’t think anyone sits down to “focus on” those scenes then thinks “hang on, there’s a broader message here about the immigrant experience and the way in which patriarchy is transmitted intergenerationally by women themselves and how social media blah blah blah”. The girls who are featured in these scenes have no control over how others respond to them and these scenes are out there, forever.

One of the aspects of Amy’s characterisation that I loved was that she’s the one who pushes things too far without realising what she’s doing, and while remaining the least dominant member of the group. It felt entirely relatable, yet I’ve never seen this dynamic portrayed so well before. This could so easily have been the story. It’s almost as though there’s a point at which Amy’s inner life, so beautifully portrayed, ceases to be considered interesting enough to hold its own. These actresses deserved better, so much so it is very tempting to stay quiet about the film’s bad parts (in much the same way that it is difficult for feminists to criticise any aspect of the sex trade without being told they are undermining sex workers. Industries which sexually objectify create their own human shields).

In recent years Mandy Smith — who divorced Bill Wyman at 20 — has become a born-again Christian and recommended raising the age of consent to 18. Speaking of her past, she has said “You are still a child, even at 16. You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could” (so much for “acts much older than her 16 years”). One could argue that she is replacing one patriarchal regime with another (in much the way defenders of Cuties have tried to use the film’s exploration of different forms of patriarchal control to defend its explicit scenes). In any case, it seems clear to me that the ‘outraged’ were onto something all along.

Newspapers today might not salivate over “wild children” as they did in the eighties; they wouldn’t get away with it. Still, I don’t find it hard to imagine a similar phenomenon being repackaged by Teen Vogue as “teen girls exploring their sexuality”. It is very easy to shame people out of expressing misgivings (you’re prudish, you’re immature, you’re stupid, you’re in league with the Christian Right). But things that are done to bodies can’t be undone. Young girl goes for it. There is so much spirit in girls. We shouldn’t be crushing it while claiming to celebrate it.