The men in your life have never known how forensically you watch them. How you observe, scrutinise, marvel.

Coldly. They are always prey. You have been doing this since you were fourteen or fifteen, when you began to know them in a different way; when they started to circle.

They didn’t realise how keenly they were watched. All the males who had so much power over your future.

You could not tell them that what they were imposing upon you felt inauthentic. Cruel. All the rules they were expecting you to adhere to, all they wanted you to be.

To a teenage girl trying to navigate her way through a brave new existence it felt like fraud, of a monstrous, unfathomable kind. Because it seemed that they wanted you to be someone else. Your father, brothers, male teachers, early boyfriends, uncles: they all seemed to be expecting something different, and were trying, subtly, to change you. Shape you…

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