Domestic Violence is everybody’s business.

Last January, in her bedroom in Walthamstow, Karen Ingala Smithstarted making a list. For over 10 years, two women have been killed through domestic violence in England and Wales every week, and she wanted to name them. She wanted the horror, their horror, their regular weekly horror, their lives, their relationships, to feel less abstract. So news story by news story, she collated their names. In the first three days of January 2012, seven women were murdered by men. Three were shot, two were strangled, one was stabbed and one was killed through 15 blunt-force trauma injuries. Some made it into the national media, but most were barely reported, stuck on local news sites between cat videos and a story about a library. “I just started counting,” Karen says, “and once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.”

Last month, 12 women were killed through suspected male violence in the UK. Mayurathy Perinpamoorihy’s age hasn’t been published, but Danielle Roberts was 21, Anu Kapoor was 27, Caroline Parry was 46, Judith Maude was 57, Gail Lucas was 51, Orina Morawiec was 21, Julie Connaughton was 57, Sabrina Moss 24, Jane Wiggett was 57, Betty Gallagher was 87, and Merissa McColm was 31. After Merissa’s body was found, her boyfriend was arrested on suspicion of murder and released on bail until the end of November. But these don’t all involve allegations of domestic violence – it’s wider than that, less exact. Men hurt women in order to exert power over them. These are the stories we don’t connect, the stories that wallpaper our lives, of women being beaten, raped and killed by men, and they’re a consequence of inequality. They’re the sharp end of something that we all encounter, the knife point. The edge of our cliff.

This has been one of the warmest summers on record. August came at the end of a 19-day heatwave, where three soldiers died during a training exercise in the Brecon Beacons from heat-related illnesses. Where the sun’s reflection off a skyscraper melted a car. Where behind bedroom doors these acts of violence towards women were happening and happening again.

It’s those doors that I think about a lot. The smoked-glass screen between their violence and our world. When we suspect that a woman we know is in an abusive relationship, is one of the 25% of women experiencing domestic violence in their lives, what can we do to open that door? How can we help?

By talking. By telling them, gently, you’re concerned. If you’re wrong, oh well. If you’re right? Well, even if she doesn’t want to talk, or doesn’t leave him, or does leave him but then returns, she knows you’ll support her. You say things that remind her that it’s not her fault, and you tell her it isn’t her responsibility to make him change. But most of all, you say something. And you ease your way through the awfulness of that conversation with props like hot drinks and tears. And then, a week later, you talk to her again, and you try to understand that it often takes several goes for a woman to escape, several bags packed and unpacked, several train tickets bought.

Since she started, Karen has counted 199 dead women. The families of some of the women killed have got in touch to say thank you. But now she wants to stop. Rather than rely on Google and a laptop, she wants the government to take over. She wants it to officially collate the names and release them annually, and she wants them to use these cases to identify patterns in the crimes – she wants it to stop seeing these murders as isolated incidents. The aim, she says, is that we understand the things that are happening behind those doors and collectively act. That we understand the power imbalance that leads to these murders, and that we reach out, in this cold September heat, and help other women stay alive.

When you’re sick, really sick, there’s always Women’s Hour on the radio to soothe you

Yeah, I’m OK now. I’m all right, cheers. I was really ill, violently, hyperventilatingly sick last week, though. The kind of sick where you feel like you’re turning inside out, like there’s a small but serious chance you are being possessed and are doomed to forever watch from inside as a demon uses your body for evil, and when you talk, the demon takes your voice, and when you move, the demon kills.

And during the vomit downtime, when I was too sad to watch TV and too tired to read, I lay in bed and tried to control my thoughts. When you’re ill, it’s as if you go analogue. The channels of your mind are limited. I’d be trying to remember something important, but it was as if my mind had been locked inside one of those safes that’s disguised  as a tin of soup, and not only did I have to prise it open but I had to find it in a pop-up soup-tin shop.

Lying there, I listened to Woman’s Hour. It’s only when I’m lucky enough to be ill that I catch the programme, as it airs mid-morning, when I’m usually hip deep in my swivel chair, two teas, three chats and 500 words down. I’d read about their controversial Power List in the paper, the Queen perched atop a selection of women chosen, it appeared, purely to anger those of us who question the glut of inheritance and private education. But it’s only when Woman’s Hour is in the news that I remember it exists, that lone spurt of programming that is solely for us.

And it was in the paper last week, too, a recap of their phone-in on feminism, which I heard through weary ears – a selection of well-spoken ladies talking about choice. It occurred to me then that it felt like a privilege to be listening, there, with my blinds drawn at 11am, when everybody else I know was at work.

Who is Woman’s Hour for today? When I hear it I love it, its slightly batty mix of politics and thick tights, but I don’t hear it. Despite its pieces about business and equality, those it aims them at have long left the house by the time it starts – surely its real audience has retired from work. Its scheduling feels misplaced today, like a shrugging gesture that says: “Well, maybe the best place for women is in the home?”

But much confused me in those few sweaty days. Limbs, for instance. Limbs confused me. And colour. In the middle of the night, as I’d slept too thickly all afternoon, the bright lights of Instagram felt like a mirage. Like postcards from health, both teasing and reassuring, and their colours leaked into my dreams, along with images of Lena Dunham’s dog, and a hand factory’s worth of nail art, strobing. Sickness is like scrolling through Twitter with mittens on, or your head getting stuck inside your favourite dress. I was no longer a full movie; I was a comedy gif on constant repeat. And, half-awake, I’d be feverish with ideas for work that felt important, but that, as the painkillers kicked in, revealed themselves to be mundane. Like when you’re walking down a dark road and the people in all the lit windows look so unique and romantic, but then when you get closer you see that they’re all just leaning out, smoking. That’s what people do by windows now. They’re not signalling to secret lovers or musing on the moon like in the old days – they’re leaning out with a cigarette to avoid getting smoke on the sofa.

Some things, though, get clearer with the addition of germs. The greasy marks around the light switches. The patronising tone of daytime programming. What One Direction are trying to say with their explosion of awful tattoos (“I own me”). How, when you’ve mentally moved on from winter, the return of snow has a crushing effect, as if you’re seeing a ghost.

I’m better now, thanks. But I was ill.

No more Mr Nice Guy!

There are “nice guys” and then there are “Nice Guys”. Do you know what I mean? That genre of gentleman who defines himself by how much respect he doles out. Like he’s giving ribbon-tied gifts rather than just being a grown-up. Who talks about the “beauty of childbirth”, about his admiration of “strong women”, “real women”. About the way he appreciates not tits and arses, but minds, yeah? Here’s your award,  Nice Guy! Put it in your downstairs loo, next to your medal for paying taxes and the framed certificate marking a whole decade of not having drowned a cat.

Those guys, an army of artful goatees, downturned eyes and fallen insteps. One of them recently posted a picture of himself on Tumblr, Photoshopped on to an “outer space” background, holding up a handwritten sign that read: “Dear Girls, don’t be insecure, you don’t need make-up and nice clothes, you’re all fucking beautiful.” He thought he was offering support, presumably. A chuck on the chin to all the insecure ladies fretting over their wardrobes, a hand held out to take theirs and hold it over his heart, and then maybe slowly move it down under the duvet. But it’s a classic Nice Guy thing to say – that saccharine condescension, that patronising “Papa knows best” tone, reinforcing the suspicion that women exist only in relation to men. “Hey girl,” he says, “don’t do what men want, do what Nice Guys want!”

Happily, it went viral. And some people, their irritation levels now hovering at hazardous levels, have started photographing their own responses. “Dear boy in outer space,” writes one woman, her eyes sighing, “don’t tell me what to do.” And on it rolls. “Girls, stop doing things I do not like, and being all the things I do not want you to be. This is relevant because I hand-wrote this! Thanks.”

I blame Ryan Gosling, who confused idiots everywhere with his feminism and his fight-stopping and his mournful gaze. Because of his success, Nice Guys are multiplying, like nits on a head. See, for example, One Direction‘s double-platinum single “What Makes You Beautiful“. Five Nice Guys, ones so sweet they appear carved out of white chocolate, sing about the pleasures of an “insecure” girl. “Don’t need make-up to cover up. Being the way that you are is enough,” they croon, to a chorus of female “Phews!”

What a relief! Permission not to wear make-up from a muscular circle of 18-year-old millionaires. “You don’t know you’re beautiful. That’s what makes you beautiful,” they end. The message to their panting fans? Stay weak – we think you look prettiest that way.

In their scramble to sound right on, One Direction reminds me of Britain’s top Nice Guy, David Cameron, and his comment that single mothers are “heroes”. If he says it loud enough, perhaps it’ll drown out the sound of childcare tax cuts, benefit cuts, the cost of paying the CSA to chase fathers for unpaid maintenance. All that. “Heroes”. Who “look better without make-up” probably.

The difficult thing is that Nice Guys truly believe they’re being helpful. These boys who have had to think no further than their knuckles really believe that by ordering women to dress down, they are liberating them from the shackles of patriarchy. But nice guys do not tell women what to wear. They don’t plaster over their cuts with empty compliments. They don’t high-five themselves for showing respect. The only difference between Nice Guys’ misogyny and that of their fathers’ is that Nice Guys’ misogyny is in disguise. It’s wearing a little hat. An eye patch. Nice Guys cuddle them tightly, then half an hour later they realise he’s nicked your wallet. Nice Guys lift up women on their shoulders, but only to make sure they don’t see all the stuff they’re crushing underfoot.