Friends fear she's thinking about patriarchy again

Everyone is writing about sexual assault once more.

Everyone is writing about sexual assault because two men who have been known to be sexual predators for years are finally facing some consequences for being sexual predators.

This has become one of the rhythms of modern life. Once every year or two a famous man is revealed or acknowledged to have sexually harassed or assaulted women and girls repeatedly over the course of his career.

We all know, when these stories come out, that there are more victims of the man in question who are not included in the reporting. There are people who are not prepared to risk the almost inevitable tide of abuse they will face in coming forward. There are incidences for which the evidence is too light to satisfy a paper's legal department – not because the story is not credible, but because it might be difficult to prove if the famous man sues.

Many people see their own trauma, suffered at the hands of men who are not famous, reflected back at them. And so we all talk about it, for a while. We talk about our experiences, our near misses, our fear, our anger. Eventually the news cycle moves on and we do to, for a while. Until another famous man is revealed or acknowledge to be a predator.

There is some cold comfort to be had in this being one of the rhythms of modern life. Before Harvey Weinstein, after all, these stories simply did not come out.

We tell ourselves that the more of the stories that come out, the more we're able to point to bad men and say that they're bad, the more men will learn to be good. But are they? Are the men learning to be good? Are enough of the men learning?

I realise I'm talking about this in very gender normative ways here. Obviously not all perpetrators of sexual abuses are men and not all victims are women, but they trend in that direction for a reason and we need to talk about the reason.

When we look back at the way the role of women in society has changed we tend to marvel at how far we've come. We're allowed to vote! And work! And study whatever we want at university! We get to choose whether or not to get married, and who to, we get to wear trousers, we don't have to wear bonnets! Even when it comes to agency over our own bodies things have improved. Our husbands can no longer force us to have sex now, legally that counts as rape. A kind of rape that almost never gets prosecuted but still, they wrote it down, they put it on paper that it counts as rape.

It's easy to look at how bad women used to have it and feel like most of the work has been done now. The hard parts over and now that the fact that we have rights is firmly established, we just need to do a little fine tuning. Like getting an invasive weed out of an overgrown garden – we've hacked down all the thorny bushes that were choking out the flowers, now the ground is clear and we can walk freely in it and all there is left to do is pull out the remnants.

But the remnants are the roots and they're everywhere and we can't see how deep they go or how far they've spread.

The anthropologist Dr Alice Evans talks about patriarchy as a means to protect male property. Once a society has permitted property to be individualised, once they've allowed it to be used to accrue wealth and power, then ownership rights and issues of succession become important. In a matrilineal system things trundle along quite nicely, gender-wise. Monogamy is not particularly important, and no one needs to control anyone else. But in a patrilineal system you run into problems. Verifying paternity becomes incredibly important and, for most of human history, there's been no real way to do that. And so female sexuality becomes an existential threat.

The only way to protect yourself from a good old cuckolding, the only way to defend your property, is to control women. Restrict their movements, restrict their access to money, to education, keep them from living their own lives on their own terms.

When you look at an established system like this, like the one we've been trying to dismantle for the past couple of hundred years, it all seems so deliberate. Intentional. Planned. But for the most part it develops organically over time. There is rarely a council of Gilead gathering together to draft up the rules, at least not historically. Those modern regime's who have put in place severe restrictions on women have made those sweeping changes as are reaction to the freedoms gained in the twentieth century.

But mostly it's slow. Husbands become anxious about the fidelity of their wives. They invent the concept of feminine purity and begin protecting it. A narrative grows like a folk tale, shifting and changing to adapt to the times, both fed by and feeding the laws and social mores that serve it.

The received wisdom about the innate differences of the sexes used to be that men were motivated by reason and logic, while women were motivated by emotion and sensation. Women were naturally horny devils, in other words, who could not be trusted ten feet from their own front door without a companion, in case they compromised their virtue with any passing stableboy. So it was right and natural that their lives should be entirely controlled by their fathers and then their husbands.

That changed when women won the right to be let out of the house sometimes. To do things like go to university and ride bicycles. The narrative in the modern era is that women are motivated by emotion, yes, but strong, sustaining emotions, while men are motivated by their base, physical needs. Boys will be boys so it's up to girls to make sure everyone's behaving as they should. Girls have to protect themselves from boys, and boys from their own worst impulses.

Rape used to be a property crime.

We should talk about this more often.

Rape used to be a property crime committed, not against the woman who was raped, but against her husband or father.

It was prosecuted a lot more often when it was a property crime.

Women have won the right to have our bodily autonomy recognised as important, we have won the right to have it acknowledged that when we are raped it is we who are harmed, and our prize is the assumption that when we are raped we are somehow at fault.

Many of the laws and social mores that subjugate women in the west have been changed, and those that hold on are being rigorously challenged, but the narrative remains. The assumptions remain.

We have done the easy part. The rest is so much harder.

Every one of us has grown up in a world with an unrelenting tide of messages telling boys that they are supposed to be in charge. They're supposed to be dominant. That they are supposed to have a degree of control over others. That if they don't feel like they're in control, then they have failed as men.

They're supposed to have money, they're supposed to have sex, they're supposed to have respect, and how do real men get those things? They go out and take them.

At the same time, from a very young age, boys are prevented from learning how to foster platonic intimacy. Girls are stupid so you can't be friends with them, talking about your feelings makes you gay. This serves as a barrier to men in deconstructing those patriarchal ideas of dominance.

The patriarchy fucks men up and deprives them of the interpersonal skills they need to grow beyond that. And in this dynamic, women and girls matter only in relation to men. They aren't people in their own right.

The most benign example of this is men who are so focussed on finding a girlfriend that they interpret any connection with a woman at all as romantic. These are men who will absolutely respect a woman's no but will also definitely hit on all your single friends. There is a spectrum from there that gets significantly less benign.

I sometimes worry about the way we talk about bad actions. Crime, for example. I was listening to a podcast about a couple who are currently facing charges for conspiracy to commit child abuse. The legal phrasing makes it sound like they'd gathered people around a vast, gleaming board table in an underground lair and outlined a plot, but what it really means is that they knew their nanny had hit their child and they did not report her.

The same is true of sexual abuses. When you hear about someone grooming a teenager, it's easy to see that as an intentional thing. Someone planning out a series of steps in a possible game of chess where checkmate is coercing a drunk seventeen-year-old into giving them a blow job. And I'm not saying there are no groomers who have looked at it like that.

People are driven by instinct a lot of the time. An adult man finds it comforting to talk to a high school student online and doesn't trouble himself to ask why. Maybe he becomes addicted to how impressive they find him, just because he has opinions on whisky and Scorsese and he's read Infinite Jest. Maybe he likes how little they question him. How few demands they make. How easy it is to make them behave as he wants them to behave. Maybe, if he was honest with himself (he won't be) what he likes is that that sick, strange feeling of having someone in your control, much more in your control than they, themselves realise. Because they are, after all, so young. There is so much they don't realise yet.

And none of this really matters. Because they aren't important. Their wants and needs don't exist. Their only role is to be here in front of him, for a time, and then to disappear.

An adult man who has not deconstructed the patriarchal messages of dominance has very little object permanence.

It's important that we keep making public the crimes of men like David Walliams and Russell Brand. It's important that we do more to ensure victims of sexual assault see justice. But ultimately, if we want a world where shit like this just doesn't happen, we have to undo the whole premise of the patriarchy.

We need equality, not merely under the law, but by assumption. We need men, all of the men, to consider the autonomy of women a given. Which means we need all of the men to let go of the idea of control and dominance. We need all of the men to reconsider and retrain their impulses about women and girls. We need all of the men to understand platonic intimacy. It's not optional. It is vital and it's urgent.

In the mean time, we'll all be waiting for the next round.

This is one of the rhythms of modern life and it is unbearable.