A friend told me recently that of all animals, I most resemble a Shetland pony. In other words, my physique doesn’t exactly scream “athlete”. And so, when I go swimming, it comes as something of a surprise to others that I am actually quite good at it.

The more I swim, the more I notice that a not-insignificant number of men seem to take against my swimming abilities, and respond with an array of irritating behaviours. They push in front of me, they take up the whole lane, or – my personal favourite – they expend all of their energy on overtaking me, just to prove that they can, and then spend the rest of the lap swimming desperately slowly in front of me.

The vast majority of men sharing the pool with me are no trouble whatsoever. Many are actively friendly. But it’s also true to say that there is usually at least one annoying incident every time I go swimming, and it’s always a man responsible for it. And so I started sharing stories with other women who regularly swim to see if it’s A Thing. And it gives me no pleasure to report, ladies and gentlemen, that right under our very noses, Britain’s public pools have become hotbeds of patriarchy.

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First there’s what I am amusingly dubbing “the Butterfly Effect”. Several women complained to me about men taking up an excess of space, and generally splashing a lot, by swimming butterfly, without any regard for what other swimmers might be doing. One woman told me a man did this a few metres away from a baby swimming class she had joined with her son, “resulting in some very tiny babies getting inadvertently dunked”. The Butterfly Effect is actually a genus in a family of inconsiderate behaviours women listed, such as brushing against and kicking them, and general unwanted physical contact.

Then there are the men whose behaviour is informed by the expectation that women will be less competent swimmers than them. Women complained about men aggressively overtaking them, even grabbing their ankles to slow them down. One woman told me a man pushed in front of her because, he said, “men are faster swimmers,” even though she was fast enough to catch up to him and ask why he had done it. A male friend, one of the most enlightened men I know in matters of gender, admitted he feels distinctively different when he’s overtaken by a woman. “When a man overtook me, it didn’t really register at all. But when a woman overtook me, I had a kneejerk feeling inside that it was just a bit wrong,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The open-air swimming pool at Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. Photograph: Alamy

When women confront men about their antisocial behaviour, they don’t seem to take it very well. One woman told me that asking men to change their behaviour only “results in further aggression”. Another said a man had “slapped the water” in anger when she pulled him up for aggressively overtaking.

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the most common stories are about sexual harassment. Women told me about quitting swimming lessons because they were being harassed, having their bums pinched (several times) as they were swimming, being followed into the showers, and being leered at from the public gallery. A man told me he had seen other men swimming alongside women and chatting them up. I was once getting changed when I spotted a man peering through a crack in the doorway and masturbating, which led to the absurdly Benny-Hill-esque situation of me, naked, chasing him away.

Numerous studies show that men, as a group, tend to exhibit aggressive behaviour more often than women. And the #MeToo movement has revealed the sheer extent of sexual harassment women are forced to endure. I think the swimming pool makes these behaviours feel more concentrated, because it is rare for women and men to be packed so tightly together, wearing so little, in a public space. Tensions sometimes run high in pools because, as one friend put it, they can be “generally quite crowded and a bit annoying”. Add in the fact that most men see themselves as physically stronger and faster than women, and it’s no wonder going swimming starts to feel like a giant social experiment devised by Judith Butler.

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Many pools are cognisant of gender politics, and respond by holding women-only sessions, which are really good for women who are self-conscious, or have religious beliefs that prevent them from swimming in mixed-gender pools. Nevertheless I’m not sure more women-only sessions are the way forward. Rather, staff should be more attuned to this stuff, and intervene more often. This will require extra training and support from management, because – as a friend who worked in swimming pools tells me – many pool-side staff members are quite young and may feel reticent about challenging angry men who are a couple of decades older than they are. Whenever I have reported bad behaviour to the lovely staff in my local pool, they’ve been fantastic. So I suspect it is an issue of awareness and experience, rather than will.

But men themselves also need to think more carefully about how they behave in public spaces. I go to the pool to get a workout, and I understand the frustration of being prevented from doing that because the lane is too slow and crowded. But we all have a responsibility not to behave antisocially. If you’re a man who internally seethes at female swimmers, engage with your feelings and ask why they are there. If you see other men behaving badly, think: could you intervene without exacerbating the situation? Swimming pools don’t have to be stressful places for women. We could make them nice and relaxing for everybody, if we wanted to.

• Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes about politics and culture for the Guardian