Absolutely, 1999 was a significant year in Hollywood film history (so often interchangeable with ‘film history’ more generally), but let’s get a grip before we start hurling around the term ‘the greatest’. In the light of the carnival of rose-tinted glasses that covers much of positive discourse supporting this claim, it’s perhaps no small coincidence that The Blair Witch Project (one of my personal all-time favourite horror films, as an aside) is effectively the story of a woman filmmaker being punished by supernatural forces for daring to make a movie.

Being sexually propositioned on Tinder is akin to being asked for sex at a singles party. The same situation on LinkedIn reads like a colleague approaching you in the mail room and asking to fuck you on the copier. By turning LinkedIn into a tool for sex, men have invaded yet another online space, one where women were just going about their business.

That is the last time I will ever shave to make up for somebody’s bad acting abilities.

Perhaps we need to start thinking about the external influences that might be present at a live gig. We most definitely need to do this before we start talking about the attire or behaviour of women. The biggest influence on crowds at festivals and intimate gigs is obviously the artists themselves.

Regrettably, there are those in the music industry who don’t see gender inequity as an issue at all. As in all areas of society, they instead turn complaints of sexism in the industry around to blame the harassed. Or, in response to a lack of female representation, they’ll argue that female musicians barely exist; or that they do, but simply aren’t as talented or skilled or generally up to the task as men. This last notion makes your stomach turn, and it emphasises the need for an industry-wide attitudinal shift.

I’m friends with this hot young writer. He’s widely published, prodigious, pretty, too. I was at a massive international convention with him earlier this year, sneaking into parties we hadn’t been invited to, the crush of the hotel suites full of conversation with the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy. Standing in the corner with him, sinking free ciders plucked from a bathtub full of ice, when some publisher or big-name writer or other would come and interrupt our conversation to talk to him.

I am sixteen and I sneak into a bar to watch my brother’s band play. I slink in the corner and try to blend in with the booze-stained walls. It is a school night but I am exhilarated and full of inspiration. I am eighteen and study music at university. I attend esoteric and experimental music performances and record nonsense that no-one will ever listen to on vintage cassette tapes. I am twenty-one and have joined my first band, and then I join another. I play shows almost every weekend with my friends. We get drunk and think that, soon, we are going to ‘make it’.

I recently discovered that being topless outdoors is a wonderful sensation; one that many women deprive themselves of out of societally enforced shame, or fear of the leers our bodies so often evoke. Back pressed to the warm granite, I soak in the rays, totally at peace. Half an hour later, there is a rustle in the bushes behind me. I turn to see Andy, concealed among the trees, touching himself. He slinks away, but I feel disappointed, objectified, and more than a bit pissed off.

But there is no Stella Count for film criticism; instead, the women film critics I know employ a less formal and statistically rigorous response involving pinot noir, vented spleens and a high volume of f-words.

The hospitality industry is founded on a collective willingness to let things slide. Most people know that $17.70 per hour is the national minimum wage, and anything below that is illegal. However, underpaid employees are typically placated until the balance tips that bit too far in favour of the owner, accepting a few dollars less per hour to feel justified in not cleaning under the rim of the toilet.

Every morning I wake sometime between 3 and 4am to spend an hour worrying about how I’m going to have enough time to do the work I’m being paid to do and also make the work I want to make. I often follow this up by berating myself for not just getting up to write. Eventually I go back to sleep for at least half an hour so that I can wake again refreshed. I find that chronic insomnia and dwelling on daily anxieties like this helps to prematurely age me, giving my hair the ‘silver fox’ look I am increasingly going for as I hit middle age.

While it would be absurd to claim that women haven’t ever traditionally existed on cyber landscapes, their experiences are often filtered through a masculine lens, or deemed to serve a masculine function. In turn, a woman sharing a photograph of herself in a lavender bikini isn’t just a photo of a woman in a lavender bikini. Her intentions are redundant, her authorship stale and meaningless.

When rabbits are afraid, they freeze. This works about as well for them as inaction works for women in the face of injustice and degradation. For many, just surviving is an act of daily resistance.

Even before Goldman’s radical political-feminist critique of sex work, Marx postulated that ‘prostitution’ might be most basically understood as a signifier or a metaphor for the relations between labourer and capitalist in a capitalist system. The simplicity of this argument, as well as the very complex and sociocultural plurality of the relationship between men and women, makes it a less favourable way of understanding producer-consumer relations in contemporary society.

If you’ve made even a vaguely, politically left-of-centre remark in a public forum online in the last couple of years, chances are that you’ve been hit with the more or less official insult of the alt-right nerd Nazis, and been called a ‘cuck’.

A chance encounter with a review on Goodreads has led me to discover a whole new world – men who love Jane Austen. The review was for Pride and Prejudice, and it was very concise. I was forced to read this by my future wife. I was not, however, forced to give it 5 stars.