Gaby Hinsliff on yet another way to keep women down:

Yet reports of so-called “spiking by needle” – young women on a night out allegedly being injected by unseen strangers with something that knocks them out – are being taken seriously by police in cities including Nottingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Heartbreakingly, there have been reports of nervous women going out in thick, needle-proof jeans and leather jackets. However rare these incidents may turn out to be, they fit a pattern of behaviour that for many feels horribly familiar.

Emphasis on the horrible. The pattern is that women aren’t real people, women don’t matter, women have no rights, women are walking cunts who exist to receive men’s penises. Women are something to trick or force into allowing a man to poke them between the legs because he enjoys it. Men are the people in this story, and women are the inconvenient bitches placed in charge of those nice holes the men want to poke. Those holes are for men! Not women! Women have no right to gatekeep the holes, so whether they get punched or drugged, they deserve it.

A stranger’s hand unceremoniously shoved up your skirt on a night out has become almost routine for young women. Street harassment – not just catcalling but crude propositioning and being followed by men who may get aggressive if rejected – is normalised. Young women are sick of being told to stick together, or to watch their drinks, when the problem is male violence, not female vigilance. Why should they tie themselves in ever more anxious knots trying to stay safe, while the perpetrators carry on regardless? What depresses many older women, meanwhile, is that, if anything, this kind of everyday harassment seems to have got worse – creepier and more aggressive – over the years, even as the world opens up for younger women in so many ways.

And closes down in so many others, for instance via being bullied and silenced for not agreeing that men are women if they say they are.