I clocked it at twelve. Proper clocked it. Standing in the kitchen of our maisonette on the estate, school skirt still on, listening to my mate’s older brother tell her she was “getting a bit mouthy lately” while he leaned on the fridge like he owned the place. She laughed it off. I didn’t. Something in my stomach just dropped and I thought, that’s not banter. That’s a warning. I didn’t have the words then. Nobody on our street did. We just knew when a bloke’s voice went quiet in that particular way, or when he started counting how many times she went out, or when the jokes about her body started landing a bit too accurate. University feminists would spend three years and a student loan learning to call it coercive control. I had it mapped by the time I was nicking fags off the older girls behind the shops.
Listen, babes, growing up Basildon council estate is like a masterclass nobody signed up for. You see it in the dads who come home from the site and expect dinner on the table before they’ve even taken their boots off. You see it in the uncles who “joke” about keeping their wives in line and everyone laughs because what else are you going to do at a family do. You see it in the lads at school who call you frigid if you don’t let them cop a feel behind the bikesheds and then call you a slag if you do. It’s not subtle. It’s not hidden in some academic journal. It’s right there in the way they stand, the way they talk over you, the way they decide when you’re allowed to be funny and when you’re “too much.” I swear down I could spot it before I could spell patriarchy. And once you see it you can’t unsee it. It follows you.
First boyfriend was a classic. Fifteen, thought he was proper grown because he had a moped and a fake ID. Started off lovely. Walked me home from the bus stop, bought me chips. Then the comments started. Why was I wearing that top. Who was that lad I was talking to at the chippy. Why did I need to go out with my girls when I had him. I remember sitting on the wall outside the offie one night, him going on about how I was “changing,” and I just looked at him and thought, here we go. Same script, different prick. I dumped him the next week. My mum said I was too picky. I said I wasn’t about to train another one. She laughed and made us both a cuppa. That’s the thing about estate women. We don’t always have the theory but we’ve got the pattern recognition down to a science. We’ve watched our mums, our aunties, our neighbours swallow it and we decide early whether we’re going to do the same.
I moved to Hackney thinking I’d left it behind. Big city, progressive circles, everyone talking about intersectionality and decolonising the curriculum. And then I’d sit in some pub in Dalston listening to a bloke with a tote bag and a politics degree explain feminism to me while his hand rested on the back of my friend’s chair like he was marking territory. Same energy. Different accent. He’d use all the right words. Consent this, emotional labour that. Then he’d talk over her when she tried to finish a sentence and laugh it off as passion. I used to think the posh ones were better at hiding it. They’re not. They’re just better at dressing it up. An academic paper will give you a definition of toxic masculinity that takes four pages and a bibliography. An Essex girl will give you the look. That little side-eye that says I know exactly what you’re doing and I’m not playing.
Work made it worse. Or better, depending how you look at it. Journalism is full of them. The editor who asks you to “soften the tone” when you write about a Tory MP’s voting record on women’s services but never asks the male reporter to tone down his takedown of a Labour councillor. The source who only wants to speak to “the pretty one” and then gets arsey when you won’t flirt for the quote. The colleague who shares your thread then slides into your DMs at midnight with a “you looked fit on that reel.” I started keeping notes. Not the official ones. The other ones. The ones that live in my head and come out in The Coven chat at 1 a.m. when we’re all vaping and ripping apart the day’s news. We don’t need a seminar. We’ve all got the same stories with different names attached.
There was this one bloke I dated when I first got to London. Proper nice-guy energy. Recycled, voted Green, had a tote bag with a slogan on it. Lasted three months. The controlling started small. He’d “joke” about how I spent too much time on my phone. Then it was who I was talking to. Then it was why I needed to go home to Basildon so often, didn’t I have a life here now. I remember standing in my kitchen one Sunday morning, hoodie on, bare feet on the lino, blue nails wrapped around a flat white, listening to him on speakerphone telling me I was “too independent.” I laughed. Proper laughed. Told him independence isn’t a personality flaw, it’s how I survived the estate. He didn’t like that. They never do when you name it out loud. I ended it that afternoon and blocked him before he’d finished the paragraph about how I was damaged. Classic.
The academic papers came later. I read them. Of course I did. I’m a journalist, I do the work. Connell, hooks, the lot. And they’re useful, don’t get me wrong. They give you the language to take into an interview or a pitch meeting. But they always feel like they’re catching up. Like someone sat in a library and described a fire after the house had already burned down. We lived the fire. We smelled the smoke in the stairwell. We knew which flats to avoid after dark and which dads to smile at and which ones to cross the road for. That’s not theory. That’s muscle memory. And once it’s in you it doesn’t leave. I can be in a room full of media people now, all of us nodding along to the same talking points, and I’ll still clock the one bloke whose eyes linger a second too long or whose laugh is just a bit too loud when a woman makes a point. It’s automatic. Like breathing.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I ended up writing the stuff I write. The threads, the Substack, the Reels that get me called a man-hater before breakfast. I’m not. I just refuse to pretend I didn’t see it coming. Every time some high-profile man gets caught and the comment section fills up with “but he’s always been so charming,” I want to scream. Charming is the point. Charming is the camouflage. We clocked charming on the estate when we were still in primary school. Charming is the uncle who brings sweets and then comments on how you’re filling out. Charming is the lad who walks you home and then sulks if you don’t invite him in. The papers can analyse it for decades. We had it in our bones before we had our first period.
I still go home every other weekend. Mum’s roast, same table, same banter. The men in the family have mellowed a bit, or maybe I’ve just got better at calling it in the moment. Last time my cousin’s new boyfriend started that quiet thing, the “you’re a bit quiet tonight, everything alright?” that actually means “why aren’t you performing happiness for me.” I looked at my mum. She looked at me. We both knew. Didn’t need a conference. Just a raised eyebrow and a change of subject. That’s the inheritance. Not the theory. The radar. And I wouldn’t swap it. Even when it makes dating a nightmare and work a tightrope. Even when it means I burn bridges because I won’t let the little comments slide. My therapist used to tell me I have trust issues. I told her I have pattern recognition. She didn’t have a comeback for that.
The whole thing’s bare problematic when you think about how late the language arrived. We were living it, naming it in our own way, warning each other in kitchens and on night buses, and then suddenly the universities decided it was a field of study. Good. Fine. Use the words. Just don’t act like you invented the knowing. Don’t stand there with your reading list and tell an Essex girl she needs to “unpack her trauma” when she’s been unpacking it since she was twelve and the only toolbox she had was a sharp tongue and a good memory for faces. I use the academic terms now because they travel better in print. But the first draft of every piece I write still sounds like the estate. Short. Sharp. No patience for the long way round.
I was on a Zoom the other week with some panel about representation in media. All very worthy. Someone started talking about “lived experience” like it was a new concept they’d just discovered. I muted myself, turned the camera off, had a vape, and thought about that kitchen when I was twelve. Lived experience isn’t a bullet point. It’s the reason I can read a room in three seconds and know who’s safe and who isn’t. It’s why my threads land with women who grew up like I did and why they bounce off people who think oppression started when they read about it in a seminar. I don’t say that out loud on the panel. I just file it away for the next piece. The one that doesn’t need a bibliography to prove what we already knew.
Sometimes it still catches me off guard. I’ll be in Tesco or on the tube or sitting on my bed in this hoodie that I’ve worn three days running and some bloke will do the thing. The glance. The comment. The little power play dressed up as a joke. And for a second I’m twelve again, school skirt, kitchen, that drop in the stomach. Then I remember I have a platform now. I have the words. I have the receipts. And I use them. Not because I want to be the angry Essex girl forever. Because someone has to keep saying it in a voice that doesn’t sound like it came out of a think-tank. The papers can keep writing. We’ll keep spotting it first. We always did. We always will. That’s not theory. That’s just how it is, innit.