How have attacks on women become so completely normal?

Iwas staying with a male friend in Whitechapel. I was 30. This man insinuated his way into our group at the pub – he knew some of our friends – and said he had missed his train home. I knew he was lying – it wasn’t even late – but my friend said he would put him up. Back at the flat, I closed the living room door in his face. I woke to find his hand between my knees, his trousers missing and – I found this out the next day – an unwrapped condom on the floor.

He made two mistakes: there were no curtains on the windows, so I could see him, and I was sitting up so I could move my legs. I pulled them back and kicked him across the room. I thought of my grandfather, who taught me to put pennies between my fingers if I needed to punch someone. I didn’t need the pennies, Grandad! I kicked him!

That’s the aspiring rapist; and he was clearly mad. He had no idea that intimacy should not involve standing over sleeping women with a condom in his hand, and I did tell him this as I threw him out of the flat. I considered reporting him to the police, but I didn’t. There is always a sprint to minimisation in such cases. The friend who was a journalist said I shouldn’t complain; the friend who was a barrister said I shouldn’t complain; and I had kicked him. Now I wish I had, because I am sure I was not the last woman he tried to attack. If there were any unsolved rapes around Oxford in the early 2000s, I think I have your man.

Then there is the opportunistic rapist: the rapist who isn’t really a rapist. He’s just the man who follows you home from the bar after you have very clearly said goodbye in the hope that you are so drunk, he can have sex with you. That I was, and he did. It was very much my fault, for being so very drunk, and so very followed home. He’s an important man in government now. Sometimes I see him at Conservative Party conferences. We kept in touch for a while. We even had lunch once, in a pitiful attempt at denial.

I find it easy to access the anger inside me. I scream. I hit. I am lucky I have never met a powerful or really determined opponent. When a man tried to stick his hand up my bottom – there is no other way to describe it, and he doesn’t really deserve a metaphor – at the barriers at Tottenham Court Road Underground Station, I turned round and smacked him. I had the element of surprise, again: he thought I would just let him stick his hand up my bottom which was very guilty indeed of being a bottom near his hand.

I also don’t mind screaming in public, ever. I’m not afraid of seeming mad. When a man pushed me on to the London Underground with two hands in my back – he thought I was waiting too long to board – I screamed, “Don’t touch!” at him until I could sense the carriage willing me into silence. It was only a shove. We know we mustn’t complain unless they really hurt us. That the man who only slightly hurts you might really hurt someone else is not something that is explained to you at school.

The more I think about it, the more they come to me. When I was 11, the man who ran the corner shop touched my breast, such as it was. When I was 11, a boy at primary school punched me in the kidneys because he hated me. When I was 12, a man suggested he perform a sex act on me so lewd that I can’t repeat it. At the time I did not know what it was. When I was 13, I was shown violent pornography by a man who lived down the road. In retrospect, that is the one that angers me most; attempts to ruin innocence are rarely so conscious and deliberate.

When I was 14, I was with a friend on the London Underground. I was singing. Children like to sing. A man came up, put his hands around my throat and tried to strangle me. He was pulled off. That is not the shocking part, which is this: as I moved to get off, another man came up. “That will teach you,” he said. To do what? I still don’t know.

When I was 16, a man asked me to “come to bed”. I was wearing school uniform; and that is why he asked me. When I was 21, a boyfriend jumped out from behind a curtain and punched me three times in the face. He is now a lawyer. When I was 25, four men tried to persuade me to get into a car with them. They told me there was no local taxi company nearby and they would drive me home. I said no, and walked round the corner, where I found a taxi company.

It’s all completely normal, and I am very lucky. I know those two phrases contradict each other utterly.

It’s not explained that the man who only slightly hurts us might really hurt someone else