When I was young I was pretty generic: tall, slim(ish), blonde, blue-eyed. Probably due to the long legs and hair I got plenty of unwanted attention. To be honest, you get so used to it you can usually ignore it.

I’ve been with a girlfriend in the back of a cab in Melbourne and had the creepy experience of the driver, um, obviously pleasuring himself. I’ve been flashed at while sunbaking at the beach and walking home from school.

I’ve been followed around the Great Pyramid of Giza with my travel companion by an oddball who lifted up his jellabiya robe to, um, do what the cab driver did while walking along behind us. That one was really pretty gross.

While I was living and doing a journalism course in Paris I had my skirt lifted and bum grabbed by the guy on the step behind me on a packed escalator and had more than one man walk up, look me in the eye and grab me on the boob.

Once, when a guy groped me in the Metro I told him to f**k off, he seemed so shocked he whipped out a short, sharp little flick-knife. That one actually rattled me.

My purpose for listing some of my less enjoyable moments with the dudes is because when one of these events randomly popped to mind this week it occurred to me that none of it even slightly put me off men.

I’ve always enjoyed male company, a lot. I always had a lot of male friends — one of my besties as a kid was a guy named Ken who I’ve been very happy to reconnect with since I finally got on Facebook (he’s been living in a different state for decades). I’ve written whole columns lamenting the fact it can be hard to keep up your male friendships once you’re married and wondering what became of the men friends who drifted away.

I was rapt when my first two kids were boys, being a long-time tomboy I love the mad energy of boys, their pragmatism, their humour and their physicality. When I had a girl I joked I’d need to buy “the manual”.

I adore my brothers, my dad is one of my best friends and I’ve managed to hold down a marriage for 18 years, thick and thin. The fact is, I like men.

So it has felt very confronting, at times disturbing, to have your faith in males challenged by seeing what guys are happy to say online about women — and not in small numbers. Working in the online “space” has introduced me to facets of (some) Australian men that I never knew existed and wish I still didn’t know exist.

It’s hard to gauge the size of the hard-core online women-hating community, but even if it is small (and I hope it is) what it may lack in numbers it makes up for in volume.

These guys are aggressive, angry and dedicated to trying to bring women down, individually and as a group. They’re unlike any man I know or think I know, or have known. Their language is intentionally menacing.

The most uncomfortable thing about the very nasty stuff they write in comments online or on an increasing number of intensely anti-women blogs and websites (that they try to spread the word by linking to) is how it forces you to question if the men you know and love could ever possibly harbour or sympathise with any of these feelings.

Reading an endless flow of comments about how women cause men’s violence against them or how they’re to blame when fathers kill children or exes, or to blame if they are raped or assaulted, does leave an imprint. Like the pervs or flashers, receiving those comments is the kind of unwanted attention to which you may become desensitised — but you don’t forget it.

In four years of writing about subjects including equality, family violence, childcare and other issues impacting women (after I was asked to start a “women’s” blog by a previous editor) I’ve read enough poisonous responses from men to have had to accept it’s more than one or two outliers who harbor deeply hateful sentiments about women and, worryingly, who want to bring other men along.

Sadly, as issues such as closing the gender pay gap or reducing violence against women or harassment in the workplace have come to prominence in the last couple of years the blow-back from these committed misogynists has increased exponentially.

I’ve just shut my blog and what a relief it is no longer to be the one who presses “publish” on a stream of ugliness from a committed group of bile-spewing men. No longer seeing them feels like a weight has been lifted. No longer feeling you’re “censoring free speech” if you do consider withholding one to spare violence victims a possibly-traumatic moment’s reading is a blessing.

Those blokes can continue to howl at the moon; spreading the idea that women really do have something to fear. I won’t be listening... but despite their best efforts, like all the attention-seeking creeps before them, they have failed to shake my faith in basic decency of the vast majority of Australian men.

Originally published as The fact is, I like men. Just not these men