If there is a sense of shock for the woman, it is only a small sour note in a symphony of good feelings. Men Going Their Own Way like to hang out with other men going the same way on forums or YouTube, where they happily converse for hours and pages about exactly the thing they are supposedly pledged to avoid.

Be careful: when he realizes his methods are not working with you, it’s possible the abuse will escalate before it disappears. When we are children our families take care of our basic survival needs; they are also our first and most important sources of information about the world. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

Once she accepts an attack on her self-worth and permits herself to be demeaned, she has opened the door for future assaults. But, in the time I have spent immersed in these conversations and message boards, it has become apparent that the socio-economic background of members is too diverse wholly to confirm any one of those theories. So, over the period of a year, I immersed myself in these communities to find out how all of this is happening, and to expose a powerful, hate-fuelled force that is currently underestimated by the few who know about it, while remaining invisible to everybody else altogether. I wanted to lay bare the reality of a hate movement, the very existence of which we have completely failed to acknowledge, and ask: what is attracting boys and men to this ideology?

Interviews with former members of these groups and the people fighting against them gives unique insights on how this movement operates. She is also contributor at Women Under Siege, a New-York based organisation working to combat the use of sexual violence as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide. To question why some men behave in certain ways is viewed as an assault on all men, and thus unacceptable. Borrowed from cult film The Matrix, this refers to the scene in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice between taking a blue pill, which will enable him to continue seeing the world around him the way he always has, or a red pill, which will suddenly shift his perspective, enabling him to see the ‘Matrix’ and, in so doing, realise that nothing in his world is as he had thought. When a mother tells her daughter not to allow a man to control her or abuse her and then models the opposite in her own relationship with her husband, the girl will respond only to the behavioral message, not the verbal one.

Looking for the “magic key”: the on and off and alternation between love and abuse can lead women to believe that there must be some secret formula to make things always good, and that she can find it. This is a vital and urgent book, detailing not just the growing threat of extreme misogyny and the mainstreaming of its message but also how through allowing this to happen we are exposing girls and women to increasing levels of danger and abandoning countless boys and men to the coruscating damage of its influence. Or you might have heard that one of our vital freedoms is being undermined by pearl-clutching, humourless women taking offence at a few risqué jokes.