Perhaps we need an International Women’s Day once a month, to remind us where we have got to with our attitudes to women. I am still reeling from the shock that the Oscars goody bag, stuffed with gifts to console nominees who didn’t win, included an “orgasm shot” – a surgical procedure that “rejuvenates and enhances the genital tissue”. Of a woman. It would be, wouldn’t it? What a strange and horrible present – having growth factors (your own platelets) injected into your genital tract. I bet nobody found it and waved it about, saying: “Oh lovely, look what I’ve got!”

In the quest for sexual rejuvenation, men take a little blue pill, while women have their vaginal tissue and clitoris stabbed with needles. Under local anaesthetic, luckily, but that still doesn’t sound too much fun. I don’t like to think about it too hard, because it makes my legs go cold.

And that’s just a lightweight physical horror. For seriously terrifying depravity and brutality towards women, watch the documentary India’s Daughter, an example of what goes on all over the world: rapes, battery and physical attacks on women.

You could easily think that these strangely aggressive men were scared shitless of women’s bodies. Why? What is so scary about us, that we have to be so viciously smashed, poked and cut about, and generally ground down? We’re not that much of a threat. We’re not sinister or unclean, vaginas don’t bite, we don’t want to envelop and weaken men and take over the world. We just want a fairer deal.

Now we have more evidence and are getting a global picture – a very ugly one, telling us that millions of women are experiencing violence, more forms of it are ongoing (sometimes for decades), and women get the blame. It’s the vast scale of it that gets me down – it’s everywhere, from top to bottom, from the Oscars to the meanest street or hovel.

I heard American author Erica Jong praising the Native American tradition of a Council of Grandmothers, who decided on war or peace. If only. I don’t know whether we’re going forwards or backwards.