How can we as feminists make that gap the beating heart of women's fight against oppression, against the stultifying ideology of what women are meant to be, and not allow the same internal breathing space to men? Surely our chance of a better world relies on the ability of all of us to stop, think and reject the most deadly "requisite" behaviours? No man comfortably possesses masculinity (any more than, other than by killing, one person is in total possession of anyone else). Indeed, such mastery is the very delusion that underpins the deranged and most highly prized version of masculinity on offer. Prowess is a lie, as every inch of mortal flesh bears witness. But like all lies, in order to be believed, it has to be endlessly repeated.

One of the most striking aspects of the saga of Hollywood producer and sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, as told by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who broke the story in the New York Times, is that he seems to have been at least as keen on the slow burn of coercion and resistance, which would sometimes go on for hours, as on any act of so-called consummation.

Rowena Chiu, for example, describes how, shortly after being hired as his assistant, she endured four hours of threats, cajoling and bribes. At the end, "He parted her legs, and told her that with one single thrust it would all be over". She managed to get out of the room. (What exactly, we might ask, was in it for him?) Clearly, for Weinstein, the revulsion he provoked was a core component of his pleasure, which is not to say that he did not also wish to get his way with these women. "If he heard the word 'no'," commented one of the key witnesses in the February 2020 New York rape trial, who chose not to be named, "it was like a trigger." For Zelda Perkins, another assistant who was subjected to his assaults, he was "pathologically" addicted: "It was what got him out of bed in the morning."

If sexual violence always tends to spiral out of control, it is because the agent of that violence must know deep down he is on a losing wicket. Weinstein's physical collapse after his arrest can therefore be read not just as a staged plea for sympathy – a day after photos were released showing him using a walking frame on his way into court in December 2019, he was seen walking around a supermarket unaided – but also as an inadvertent display of the fragility and eventual bitter truth of the human body, a truth his predatory behaviour was designed to conceal from the women he abused, from the world, and from himself.