The truth about what Saoirse said

Men, please enter the chat.

[All photos: BBC]

Ah, men: can’t live with them, can’t live without dreaming of living without them. Or something like that, I forget the exact quote. Increasingly often, I will say to my partner than men freak me out, that I’m not sure I like men. I am attracted to their physical form, obviously, and I’m acutely aware that I am one, but men are difficult to be around. I am becoming wary of them.

The longer I last on this ever-spinning crouton in the soup of existence, the more downhearted I feel about how (a lot of) men control everything, ruin everything, and generally make the world feel like an unsafe place. Shouting from podiums, manspreading on trains, elbowing the rest of the world out of the way at the bar. I imagine some men reading this will be tempted to hit unsubscribe, and please don’t take it personally, but perhaps our collective ego would benefit from a bruising . I am generalising, obviously, but it’s a generalisation based on my life experience of being pushed around, cut down to size, or threatened by other men, usually straight ones.

But if you want to know how scary men really are, ask a woman. They can tell you stories about the average and everyday men you queue behind in Starbucks or work alongside or grew up with. These stories would be rejected in TV writers’ rooms as too brutal, too gory, and so disheartening that the people making the decisions – men, usually – would worry about civilisation coming to a standstill should such unflinching portrayals of half the population ever reach the masses. Okay, so it’s not you. Fine. But, oh, your sons, and your brothers, and your fathers and other men upward and outward to every branch of every family tree: at least one woman out there bears a scar, visible or otherwise, from a skirmish, emotional or physical, with one of these men. Like the spacemen in 1969, driving a flag into the peppery dust of the lifeless moon, no surface goes unspoiled for long.

If you are a man, please think about your most violent predator. What do they look like? Unless you’re a gnu darting between the shadows of the Serengeti to avoid hyaenas and lions, your most likely assailant looks kind of like you.