Men. We need to talk.

Have you noticed the women in your life acting a little differently this week? Not just your mother, wife or daughters, but the women you work with, the women you interact with as you go about your day. The women in your industry? The women on LinkedIn?

Because if my experience is anything to go by, you probably haven’t noticed anything at all. A grand total of 6% of my contacts here are men* and most new connections from the opposite sex are rapidly followed with a pitch slap, usually for a product or service that bears no relevance to my business at all. In a recent post, 1% of the reactions were from men. You fared better in the comments at 6% (4% positive, 1% mansplainer and 1% joker) and 4% of male allies reposted.

Men, are you following us? Listening to us? Caring about us? Women go check your contacts, are they there?

When you don’t listen to our stories you know very little about us. Especially our bodies. Medical experiments were only performed on men and male animals until 1993 - our hormones were seen as too erratic for consistent scientific results. In 2000 a team at UCLA studied the fight or flight reflex with women and female mice and discovered a new response to fear: Tend and befriend. 

That’s why we choose the bear. A primal instinct from prehistoric times when men went off to hunt for days or weeks at the time to bring back a few days' meat and a couple of pelts. That left us women to work out how to grow our own food, weave our clothes and blankets, organise society and fend off predators. 

Now look where we are. It’s war. Steve Bannon called it back in 2016, “It's not Me Too. It's not just sexual harassment. It's an anti-patriarchy movement. Time's up on 10,000 years of recorded history. This is coming. This is real.”

Currently, the big men think they’ve won, in reality they’ve just inched ahead in one tiny battle. The war on women has been going on since the bronze age when men started spinning their yarns placing themselves at the centre of the universe. In this round, as usual, they will be expecting women to fight or hoping we’ll take flight. They won’t know what hit them if we offer them sustenance, listen to their stories and try to understand them.

Yep, you heard that right - their nemesis will make them a sandwich. Is that the fairer sex giving in? You do know fairer has two meanings - as does nemesis. In the time of the Goddesses, Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of justice, who distributed fortune, both good and bad, in proportion to what was deserved. 

What do you deserve? Because from our perspective you haven’t fought hard enough with us. We now face a world where the leader of the ‘free world’ is a convicted rapist who is surrounding himself with dangerous men, and don’t give us the ‘he hired the first female chief of staff’ bullshit - look at her - she’s a carbon copy of his mommy to keep him safe from all those nasty people who won’t be nice to him. We're already experiencing what we feared - within days of the result we’re seeing open misogyny, racism and homophobia and that’s just from children. And don’t get us started on the little ones we’ve seen shredded to pieces on our social feed everyday for over a year.

Yes, American white women voted for this. The patriarchy has a very strong hold on a lot of women too - because this war isn’t between men and women - it’s a war against a system designed by men for men and a lot of women either know no better or profit from it. 

For the rest of us who fear what’s coming it’s back to the kitchen (or M&S) to rustle up some delicious treats to entice all fans of the patriarchy into challenging conversations. We’re quite adept at bear taming and will happily take you on one-to-one in civilised verbal combat, but don’t get complacent - a hell of a lot of us are strapping on our armour and amassing armies.

But the ones you really need to worry about are those of us who flee, because as Sam Cook said, a man’s world is nothing without a woman or girl.

•Calculated on random selections of 100 members from my 6,000+ contact list and a post with a reach of 420,000 with 289,000 views 9000 reactions 650 comments and 900 reposts