Not all Men are predatory sexist bastards. Just a lot of them.

It is just not easy being a woman. It really isn't. I am talking about the social experience here, not the biological, about which my kids would say (both of them boys, by the way) that there is already Too Much Information. I am talking about the daily sexism you experience in your car, walking up the street, in a shop, at the gym...anywhere. Here is my experience of the morning. Just this morning, mind. In my car, I am hooted at rudely at a T junction by a car behind me. It is a BMW convertible and the guy behind cannot understand why I am waiting for the traffic to pass. He wants me to pull out and make them stop. I am a meek observer of the Highway Code, on account of the inherent illegaility of driving under any other rules, and besides I see he has a dent in the front right corner of his car, while mine is intact, and given his behaviour I think there is probably enough proof to demonstrate that the Highway Code was not invented for nothing. So I continue to wait until the road is clear and then I begin to pull out. But this man has had enough waiting so he drives alongside me, pulls out in front of me, blocking me in and narrowly missing a bus, which pulls on the brakes, throwing the passengers around the interior. They appear to pick themselves up calmly. London commuters are, after all, accustomed to such driving. The BMW driver then slows down in front of me, forcing me to slow down. The man puts his hand out of the window and makes the all too predictable rude gesture. I smile and wave graciously, a la Queen Elizabeth, which I know from experience will infuriate him further, so I also check that my doors are locked and windows are down. Previous experiences of this have ended in the maddened bloke jumping out of the car and hammering on my window trying to get in for a good throttling. Or perhaps worse. So. I drive on to the gym giving this man little more than a few second's thought. At the gym I am midway through a range of tortuous floor exercises which Matt Roberts, famous trainer with ridiculously toned body that suggests he may not have much of a personal life, assures me in his freebie Mail on Sunday pullout, will nuke the paunch. I don't believe this for a minute, but I do like to vary my exercise so I am giving this a whirl, and it's bloody hard, so I am huffing and puffing. I hear a small noise and I look up. A bloke who is balancing on a large exercise ball while lifting unfeasibly large weights, is whistling at me. He has been appreciating the view of my cleavage that the exercise I am doing has been affording him. I look at him neutrally, turn 90 degrees, and finish my set. On my way home I stop to buy bread. There is a small queue of 3 or 4 people - this is a popular bakery which opens at the crack of dawn and half the borough buys its breakfast there en route to the office - but this does not stop two labourers from walking past me and calling to one of the staff who they refer to as "girl". They take a minute to stare at my breasts before sauntering off with their supersize me croissants. I complete my purchase and leave. That was my morning, all before 9am, before I had even sat down to my own breakfast.  That, frankly, is a snapshot of my daily life in terms of interactions I have not sought or invited or encouraged, welcomed or responded to, from random strange men. Twitter Trolls? That is scraping the surface.