If you’re a woman and somebody calls you ‘attention seeking’, that’s a sure way to tell you’ve made an impact.

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn’t pay enough, shopping for things we don’t need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.

Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I’ll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people’s right to investigate those options without being punished.

Fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry the inbred great-great-grandchild of some bloodless aristocrat whose distant relations were better at murdering huge numbers of peasants than some other bloodless aristocrat.

Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.

It was always somebody else’s apocalypse. Until it wasn’t.

Feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down, and while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is filling up with water, and millions of women and girls and their children are crammed in there, looking up as the flood creeps around their ankles, closes around their knees, inches up to their necks.

I’m sure that Trump wants to sit in a shiny chair in the Oval Office and have people tell him all day that he’s the most powerful and impressive man in the world, and I’m just as sure that he doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual business of government.

That’s how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it’s not your fault. Of course it isn’t your fault. I’m sure you’re lovely. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it.

Sometimes you have to decide between doing what you love and being loveable, and the decision is always painful.