A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a situation where I felt vulnerable at the hands of a man. Nobody was touched, it didn’t take place in some dark alley, but I was still made to feel as if I was completely powerless. Usually, I’d feel the all-too-familiar feeling of shame, despite doing nothing wrong. But what marked this occasion as different was the realisation that I felt nothing. I had become used to sexual harassment – or at least as used to it as I could.

On paper, all that happened was that a man decided to waltz up to me and detail exactly how he would “wreck my p**sy”. No greeting, no ‘courting’ – this was Kingsland Road at 2am, so surely a girl in a dress and platform boots should have seen it coming. Rather than silently keep tapping away at my phone, I looked him squarely in the eye and told him that I’d love to wreck his penis… by chopping it off and putting it in a meat grinder. After a few expletives and several gobs of spit were hurled my way, he shuffled off, and I jumped into an Uber. I was shaking, but not from fear, for once.

I needed to share what had happened, and not by calling my mum. I wanted to disrupt my Instagram feed, a space where nothing bad ever happens, and pointedly broadcast my experience to the young men who follow me: a mixture of guys I’ve dated, ones I’ve never spoken to, and those I went to school with. So I posted a Story.

“The majority of guys reading this probably don’t make girls feel *this* small on the street, and therefore don’t think it applies to them,” I typed. “But… if you actively tell your peers it’s a sh**ty and disgusting thing to do, then they might just listen to you.” I woke up to more than 60 messages - and none of them were from men.

Why all men have a responsibility to help stamp out catcalling