As Tom Elliott demonstrated last week with his epic on-air dummy spit, the 'Not All Men' caveat is still expected by a large proportion of people who refuse to engage with the topic of gendered violence unless they are given permission at the outset to disassociate themselves from the problem. The end result is that discussions of this nature invariably end up being diverted away from the very real issue of gendered violence and onto the matter of men's hurt feelings.

I have a theory about why this might be, and I'm afraid it's going to be one of those controversial ideas that only compounds people's absurd belief that I hate men. But c'est la vie, right? Anyway, as humans we naturally seek recognition of ourselves in the stories we hear. Depending on the privilege of our demographics, we experience different levels of representation. Women, for example, are used to being marginalised in art and history. The same is true for people of colour, people with disabilities, trans and gender diverse people, etc etc etc. On the hierarchy of social power, white men sit comfortably at the top. This is a reality heavily backed by statistics and research, a tiny fraction of which can be found on the See Jane website.

. Credit:Stocksy

Which leads to my theory - if you are used to being uniformly prioritised in storytelling and representation, it's very difficult for you to accept that you might not be the subject of a particular story or depiction. On a very base level, we can see that in some of the childish responses to all-women vehicles like the Ghostbusters reboot. Despite what some may argue, this isn't about anyone's 'childhood being ruined' or the story just not looking that good. (Seriously, people go to Michael Bay movies. Let's not start pretending that taste is a driving factor at the cinema.) Rather, it's that white men are being suddenly 'marginalised' in an area they've been conditioned to believe belongs to them and being suddenly sidelined from it feels like oppression.

So if you expect that every story being told is automatically about YOU, it stands to reason you would struggle to de-identify yourself from those stories as well - particularly if you sense even the slightest prick of recognition. I've been thinking about this in relation to the Stanford rape case. Numerous factors conspired to mobilise public support for the survivor of Brock Turner's sexual assault, but it seemed out of place with the usual level of apologia we'd encounter in similar situations. Then it occurred to me that the presence of two male 'heroes' as witnesses was not an addendum to the story - for some people, it might have been THE story.