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WHAT a dreadful, lowering week to be a man.

Earlier this week feminist Caroline Criado-Perez won her campaign to have Jane Austen featured on the £10 note. Good news for women – who are woefully under-represented in this area.

Some disagreed. To be specific, some men on Twitter disagreed violently: she began to receive around 50 rape threats an hour.

Now here’s a fellow worth picturing. Here's a fellow who hears something on morning TV about a woman successfully campaigning to have another woman put on a banknote and his first thought isn’t "Well done", or even the much more likely "I don’t really care who’s on the £10 note, now what’s for breakfast?".

No, his reaction is, "That uppity bitch, I am going to go on Twitter and threaten to rape her".

If you think that’s abuse, I agree. If you think it’s unusual, that’s where we part company. It happens to women all the time. I have a friend who is a columnist for a national newspaper. Like me, she’s an early bird and we’re often trading text gossip before the sun is properly up.

One morning she said to me: “God, trolls are bad today.” “How come?” I asked. “I’ve already had an offer to cut my head off and one to…” Well, I can’t say what the second offer was in a family newspaper. I looked at the kitchen clock – it was 7am and she’d already had two insults that would have floored most us at 7pm with a couple of drinks inside us.

I love Twitter and my little corner of it is heavily weighted in favour of women, many of them writers: Caitlin Moran, India Knight, Lauren Laverne, Grace Dent, Deborah Orr, Marina Hyde, Suzanne Moore.

I look at that list of names and think: "Here comes the fun – fun that knows its way around a dictionary."

It seems a lot of men don’t react that way. They look at this list and they think something like, "Here come a load of gobby, opinionated, feminist cows who want shutting up."

And it occurs to you that here is part of the problem: Twitter is all about pure mind. Give me your best sentence. It’s not about who has the loudest voice. Men can’t shout women down and talk over them. You can smash the keyboard all you want – the letters come out the same size, baby.

Some men, it seems, have difficulty with the concept of this level playing field, filled with women happily skating circles around them. (Stick around – I'll be throwing some more metaphors in the grinder in a bit.)

Within a few days, the Criado-Perez case had gone from being a Twitter issue to being on the national news.

Many people are calling for Twitter to introduce a “report abuse” button. Many other people are very agitated about this – because there are grey areas. Who is to say what constitutes "robust banter" and what is abuse? Who watches the watchers?

Anyway, these people argue, there is already the block function on Twitter. (For those of you who don’t tweet, if you block someone, they can’t read your tweets and you can’t see theirs.) If someone persistently offends you, block them. Yeah, after you’ve done blocking 50 people an hour, what do you do with the hour of the day you have left?

I love robust banter. I don’t think it’s difficult to distinguish between banter and “I’m going to rape you”. Between people who engage with other users, sometimes using salty language, and pure trolls – people who only exist on Twitter to pelt distressing abuse at women.

If you want an insight into this world, have a look at Twitter account Everyday Sexism, which exposes some of the abuse women receive. I became aware of it after Marion Bartoli won the women’s final at Wimbledon. Instantly there were men saying things like ‘FAT UGLY COW’, ‘BITCH’, ‘SLAG’ etc. As well as the usual offers of rape.

Everyday Sexism retweeted some of the worst remarks along with the men’s user names and account details. I tried to engage with a few of them. Surprise, surprise – they had already deleted the offensive tweets and closed or protected their accounts.

Because this is the way it always goes with these losers. These sub-humans. These no-men. They throw vicious rape abuse at a woman. Someone retweets them and the real world comes crashing in. They delete the tweets and close their accounts down.

Then, a welcome new thing last week, they get arrested. Some may lose their jobs. They go from fearless abuse gods to cowering, grovelling apologists very quickly.

One of the fastest examples of this was Oliver Rawlings. He tweeted the academic Mary Beard after she appeared on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show last week, where she was talking about how upsetting the trolling she gets is.

Lovely Oliver sent her a message, saying: “Retweet this you filthy old slut. I bet your ****** is disgusting.” Someone else said they had Oliver’s mother’s address and suggested Vine print his tweet off and send it to her.

Seconds later, Oliver said: “I sincerely apologise for my trolling. I was wrong and very rude. I hope this can be forgiven and forgotten. Xx.”

And those kisses really cracked me up – coming so quickly after. As if this foul abuse was a hiccup or a burp, something that just popped out.

And here we come to the big point – it’s usually women. As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I’m fairly robust in my views on there. I get next to nothing in the way of trolling.

Most women I know who regularly come close to expressing an opinion get trolled constantly.

This is a men-on-women issue. Guys are pretty much doing it to the girls. Which, thankfully, is where our good friend socialism steps forward. Because this will not stand for those of us who are socialists. We are all equal.

And if something is happening to one section of society that just doesn’t happen to another then it’s discrimination and it’s time to do something about it.

Like maybe trying out a "report abuse" button on Twitter. Or, as another funny female writer Anna Hart said this week, a "print tweet and post it to their mum" button.

Yeah, as our good friend Oliver Rawlings realised, trolling would be over like THAT.