Misogyny Made Me Sick

Patriarchal societies make women sick and men sad, but this disease is curable.

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All that winter, I picked up the kids with bare arms.

The trees were naked. Grass crunched underfoot, and the car radio sang of black ice as day after day I parked up and ran to the school gates (always late) in a sleeveless T-shirt.

The regular chime of some mother or other, saying,

“Aren’t you cold?”

In their puffer jackets and duffle coats, in their polyester fur, with their hats and scarves and mufflers, to me with my bare arms.

Me saying,

“No. No, I’m hot. I’ve been running around.”

That was always my reason. Running around. Overheated from too much to do.

The truth was much deeper and linked to danger. But I was my only protector, and I was off-duty. Too much to do.

The Gym Instructor didn’t spot it. Not even at the “Whole Fitness Check” for new joiners. Two years later, I could see it myself on the Membership Card: the bulge-eyed stare of a woman who has to get out of there: out of her life, as soon as she can, or she’ll die.

You’d think they might have spotted it when, a good hour after I’d stepped off the treadmill, my heart rate was still at 120, still in the red. Fitness Instructors aren’t doctors. But they could’ve suggested I see one.

Maybe they did; I wouldn’t remember. My brain was fizzing and fractured. I would have dismissed it. I’m fine. I’m busy. Just too much to do.

What too much to do? The kind that happens when you, first husband, snag yourself a trophy wife and lock her in the cabinet, bury her in the countryside, chained to the Aga, with three quarters of an acre only she must look after. And three small boys, born too close together for reasons that can’t be discussed, not ever, but involve, in the third case, her saying no, and you being stronger.

Three wild boys, and no help, though there’s money, though she begs. Important to keep her busy with kids and dogs, with nettles and brambles, with chickens and bees and a vegetable garden, researching hair-brained schemes that she’s supposed to manage — raising farm trout in the garage, and a soft play centre in a barn. And if she won’t do that (and she does draw the line) she’ll do the books, do the VAT, to avoid getting fined — while you, first husband, work away all week and then at the weekend, sit in your chair, demanding to be fed, a huge cuckoo child, but this one, cutting her down to size: the hurtful remarks, the contemptuous eyes.

I’d take a coat, sure, but leave it in the car. Too hot for anything but bare arms.

And only later, when I’d left him, did I go to the doctor. Finally, with time to care for myself, wondering why my periods stopped. Why, on the day I collected new keys at the top of the High Street, my heart went bananas, racing, palpitations they called them later: later, when they put me on beta-blockers. And another drug that it was dangerous to take for more than eighteen months or so.

Grave’s Disease. A cheery name. An autoimmune disorder of the thyroid, so everything’s haywire. Too long in fight or flight mode with the hatch closed. Too long with the body powered up for escape, and nowhere to run to. My metabolism a nuclear reactor, heading for critical.

I stayed on the drug too dangerous to stay on. One year, two years, three, four. They pressed me to kill my thyroid completely: a dose of radiation. A dose so large I’d be in isolation for weeks: no kids, no hugs, no crockery; paper clothes to wear, paper plates to eat off, everything disposed of.

So radioactive I’d be dangerous to humans? I used to be a scientist; that didn’t sound wise. I, after all, was a human, and not just a wife.

Yes, despite all you’d been through with a man who didn’t think so, you were human. So thank God for Google Scholar. For Japanese studies he hadn’t kept up with, your endocrinologist. Sure, the radiation would get you off his list, but like as not, onto the oncologist’s. You wouldn’t take the risk.

That Consultant Endo, you’ve never forgotten his scorn. Another man who thought himself clever and you, just a woman. Worse, a mum. Like pushchairs drop your IQ fifty points when you get behind them. You printed out evidence, peer-reviewed studies, but the bastard wouldn’t read them. In his office, having had you weighed, and made you wait, he shouted you to tears:

“If you were my wife, I’d MAKE you do it.”

Just as well you weren’t his wife; was nobody’s wife anymore, and for the first time in years, could care for yourself. Give up smoking. Change your diet. And pray.

A daughter changed everything. Pregnancy flipped my body into neutral. And on the other side of birth, into reverse. Hypothyroid now; Hashimoto’s disease. I’ve lived with it for twenty years and counting.

Forever cold, despite the daily thyroxine. Locked in a body that thinks I’m about to starve it, because once, I did, so it magics calories out lettuce, sucks body fat out of a celery stick. It perplexes personal trainers: they think I must be cheating, secretly eating outside of the plan, and don’t understand why my heart rate never hits “fat-burning range”; drops to 40 when I’m sleeping.

Misogyny made me sick. It makes a lot of women sick, and very often with diseases classed ‘autoimmune’.¹ Which sounds like your body’s attacking itself, and that’s how they bill it, and it’s easy to believe when you’re full of self-blame, full of Why did I do it? But that isn’t the cause. You can clean that up, and still be ill.

The antibodies aren’t to blame. You can think of them as paramedics, attending the site of the (ongoing) trauma.² In my case, the throat, where a lump manifested, marking the silence of swallowed emotions, protective silence designed not poke his rage. The one legacy of abuse that I still haven’t shaken.

“Incurable”, they tell you. Which only means it can’t be fixed with drugs. Most doctors are stuck in the twentieth century, trained in prescriptions but not in emotions. Most don’t yet know that trauma is a cause; that trapped distress will express through the body.

Why keep expressing?

Because the threat on your life is ongoing.³

Because once you’ve been triggered into knowing your vulnerability, you’re sensitised to the great broad river of misogyny you swim in. Not just the recent toxic sewage of the Manosphere. But the seeming-clear, invisible poison of the patriarchy. Women as subordinate, second-class citizens. Talked over, patronised, mocked, harrassed. Domestic servants, sex dispensers. Constantly criticised, no matter what they do. Especially the bright and even the beautiful, constantly assaulted by the eyes and words of strangers,

Smile, Love. It might never happen.

But it already has.

And then, there’s this physical knowing. That a man can overpower you, no matter how often you go to the gym. I remember the ex, who never went once, who fished, drank beer and smoked, locking his hands around my wrists like manacles one day when I was trying to leave the house to see a friend. Laughing as I failed to free myself. So pleased to let me know my powerlessness.

Men’s greater handspan and grip strength does more than open jars. And women’s thin necks are liabilities. A man can kill a woman with his bare hands, and say he was provoked, and be believed. A woman needs a weapon, and she will go down. Once we’ve been shown this, we never forget it.

So how do we cure this?

Here’s pure statistics. Misogyny doesn’t just make women sick, it makes men sad. Makes whole countries miserable.⁴

Because women don’t want to have sex with people who hate them. Don’t want to have babies with people who’ll quickly degrade them, remove their freedoms, shove them in the kitchen. We’re catching on. We can be flexible. Be bi or lesbian. Asexual. Get a dildo. Get a root vegetable. We don’t need a man to make us feel crap; we’ve got politics.

And removing the pill, abortion, our sources of freedom? Believe me, that’s not sexy. We don’t get turned on by the prospect of unwanted pregnancy.

The happiest countries in the world have the highest equality.

So, let’s go forward, educating young and old that women are humans. Are equally valuable. That you need our cooperation if we’re going to keep replacing the human race. We’re sick of coercion. Literally sick, and not getting any better. A drain on your taxes because we are carrying trauma.

So how about you clean up your mess.

Cook us an omelette.⁵

And knit me an effing sweater.⁶

With love,⁷

Far too effing cold for this latitude,

A once abused and now empowered

Lit Fuse.

If you’re excited to read an award-winning verse novel about the 16th-century poet and spy Christopher Marlowe, you can buy The Marlowe Papers here. If you’d prefer a story about grief, quantum physics, and the nature of consciousness, you might prefer my much-loved second novel, Devotion. Or buy me a coffee!

1. 80% of autoimmune patients are female. Scientists have found a mechanism on the X-chromosome but what matters more is the epigenetic trigger. For the link with abuse, see ‘Intimate Partner Violence Survivors More Likely To Develop Chronic Illness’. The immune status of women can be predicted from their exposure to Intimate Partner Violence. A meta-analysis of 14 studies showed a significant link between stressful events and the onset of autoimmune illnesses. I have something to say about the fact that, in this meta-analysis, the link was found to be weaker where women are the subject. We are literally swimming in misogyny. We take it on the chin. We are subjected to so much of this kind of stress that it can go unrecognised as a cause (a ‘stressor event’), both by us and by researchers. Thus, I am guessing a lot of the ‘control’ group of women deemed not to have suffered some kind of stressor are in fact swimming in exactly the kind of stress that triggers an autoimmune response. Let’s not forget the prevalence of sexual violence (and the fear this generates) exposed during #MeToo.

2. See ‘The Fatal Flaw of “Autoimmune” Disease” by Remnant MD.

3. 27% of women aged 15-49 years who have been in a relationship have suffered intimate partner violence. See WHO Violence Against Women factsheet. 25% of women in the UK experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. See National Centre for Domestic Violence. 82% of women have suffered sexual harassment or assault. See Study Finds No Change in Sexual Assault Stats in 2024. Yes men are sexually assaulted, abused and raped but the incidence is significantly lower than it is for women. Statistically, we are overwhelming the victims, not the perpetrators.

4. Celeste Davis writes that the highest ranking countries on the World Happiness Report are also at the top of the index for Gender Equality. This is not a coincidence. In largely heterosexual societies, happier women make happier men make happier countries.

5. My husband cooks a knock-out goat’s cheese omelette with raw beetroot salad. He does all the cooking, laundry and food-shopping. And when our daughter was little, most of the childcare. Household equality is the first step to happier people.

6. He doesn’t do knitting. It’s more of a metaphor. But he does make me a hot water bottle every night.

7. I mean it. Let us all work together for everyone’s greater happiness.