Welcome to my world.

Welcome to the world of hate mail and targeted nastiness that comes almost entirely from men, a world female columnists keep to ourselves. To speak of it would be a sign of weakness in a working world that's still male-driven, and unlikely to care very much.

The silence was broken last week by women columnists in Britain, who revealed the nastiness they've had to deal with in their blogs. Which is why I've always resisted having a blog. At least a newspaper or magazine can mediate between the deranged and plain nasty and me, deleting their comment before I get it; at least I can choose not to read what arrives in the mail; but on blogs, women who express opinions outside the zones of traditional safety are easy prey.

Understand, too, why women columnists – and female journalists in general – so often gravitate towards food, fashion, decorating, health and education matters, or writing – with wry humour, or otherwise – about cosy family lives, common female insecurities about their appearance, and their weight. These are zones men like to see us in – traditional, domestic, insecure and unthreatening. There we are safe.

I was not safe when I began writing columns long ago in TheListener, when columnists were fewer on the ground in this country's newspapers and magazines. I poked fun at middle-class values and fashionable beliefs and wrote candidly about what it was like to experience pregnancy and have young children. Some women still keep those columns, they tell me, because no other women wrote like that then – we thought we were alone in the everyday hassles of domestic life.

The price I paid for my youthful candour was increasing social isolation. It was not pleasant to be regularly slagged off by drunk men at parties, one of whom told me, when I was heavily pregnant with my first child, that he hoped I'd have a painful labour and delivery. Such breathtaking spite, simply for expressing ideas in print, still astonishes me.

I persisted – I hate to let bullies win. Over time I lost the luxury of having a column without my picture on it. Like many other female columnists I dislike having it there – it reminds me that my physical attractiveness is important as a platform, just as it is for female novelists, who increasingly resort to glamour photography on their book jackets. Age is a disadvantage, though what we do for a living has nothing to do with either our age or our looks. The opinions of plain women and older women are simply not worth bothering about.

Women newspaper columnists in England generally seem to conform to the ideal type, under 40, attractive – and targeted, like Laurie Penny, who writes for The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Independent. It's she who made the first disclosure last week, citing personal attacks on her appearance, her past, and her family.

"The implication is that a woman must be sexually appealing to be taken seriously as a thinker did not start with the internet," she writes. "It's a charge that has been used to shame and dismiss women's ideas since long before Mary Wollstonecraft was called `a hyena in petticoats'."

Other well-known names in British journalism have backed her stand against routine online abuse which often includes threats of rape, and in which nasty name-calling is habitual. Some say they've hesitated before publishing their opinions because of this; one writer says she gave up her column. I, too, have hesitated to write about some subjects, knowing the onslaught of abuse that will follow. You do get tired of it.

There is a bigger picture that troubles those writers, who suspect a widespread, pervasive misogyny still lingers out there in the vast world of dysfunctional men. As if to fuel that suspicion, Facebook last month refused to take down pro-rape web pages, despite a petition from 176,000 American women who fail, as I do, to see them as legitimate freedom of expression.

I never spoke about the abuse I experienced as a young columnist, though it had a significant impact on my life. There were obscene phone calls and accusations from male colleagues, who should have known better, that I was sleeping with an editor who was good to me. These were depressing. There was outside interference in my relationship from people who didn't like my writing, and thought my partner should break up with me because of it. I hadn't expected people to identify so strongly with their own opinions that they couldn't tolerate others thinking differently. I lost friends. That relationship broke up. It would have anyway. And this was before the internet.

Worst, as in the English women's experience, was the sexual aggression, subtle and otherwise. An example of subtle would be the (married) architect who nagged me to have sex with him because that was what I "needed" – a recurring theme, as if sex would be the equivalent of warm cocoa before a good night's sleep. Great sex – which such men claimed to offer – would, I assume they meant, stop me being uppity.

Less subtle was the young man from out of town who, after an evening of pursuing me, admitted he'd be paid a substantial sum by his mates if he managed to go to bed with me and give them a report. That might not qualify as thoughts of rape, but on a level it was pretty close.

More recently, a man in a prominent position of trust wrote to tell me he knew personally of a problem within my family that – in his view – disqualified me from writing about a subject, and my children all endured snide comments in class from teachers who disliked what I wrote. There is little privacy in a small country, but bothering my kids or using private information to get at me is unforgivable.

Caroline Farrow, a vicar's wife in England, blogs for Catholic Voices under her own name, with a picture of herself. The downside of this choice, she admitted last week, is that "for some men this makes you a legitimate sexual target". I am less surprised than she was.

"Butter wouldn't f------ melt", one letter to her read, "you'll cry rape when you get what you've asked for. Bitch."

I feel I know this guy. He's been at it for years.

I don't open mail written in red ink or capital letters or anything addressed in obviously crazed writing. I recognise the persistent sexual fantasist's writing and bin his very long letters automatically, ditto the religious nutters who threaten me with hell.

Last week one rogue letter slipped through. I saw – the curse of speed reading – that in part it commented nastily on my column picture being "20 years old". It isn't, but for all I know, and all I care, it could be. Yet more evidence that unless a woman columnist with wide-ranging opinions is seen as young and nubile, she should shut up.

In my experience, normal, day-to-day journalism doesn't attract the same levels of misogyny. It's when you express opinions of your own that the nastiness – an update on schoolboy bullying – really kicks in. No wonder so few female columnists last the distance.