The first time I recall realizing this was when I was about 13. Whilst babysitting one night, I came across the 1960 Sophia Loren film "Two Women" on PBS, and to my regret I watched it. It's an excellent movie (Loren won a best actress Oscar), but the subject matter - based on a true story of a woman and her young daughter who were gang-raped by soldiers in Italy during WW2 - was harrowing and left me shaken and quaking. I still distinctly recall the room where I watched "Two Women" in vivid detail, even though I think that was one of the few times I was ever inside that family's house.

A few years later in 1970, I read Kate Millet's "Sexual Politics" shortly after it first came out - and boy did that open my eyes about how widespread woman-hating was. Fortunately, I had a father, brother, uncles, teachers, neighbors, bosses, work colleagues* and many other males in my life who were nothing like that at all - and I had many decent male friends and loving, doting male BFs too.

In 1971, I ruined dates by stomping out of movie theaters during showings of the then-newly released movies "A Clockwork Orange" and "Straw Dogs." The guys I went to those movies with were quite nice, but the male attitudes and behaviors I saw on screen were, I felt, monstrous and misogynistic. No way I was gonna spend a Friday or Saturday evening watching that shit.

*Re bosses and work colleagues: I had jobs on the books the moment I turned 16 and was legal to work. But I worked under the table for years before that. I had an uncle who owned a resort hotel, and I'd been been doing various jobs there since I was a little kid. At four I was filling the sugar bowls and folding the linen napkins in the dining room; at six I was cutting up fruit and doing the set up for the bar; at eight I could "man" the front desk, checking in guests - and making change for the Coke machine and pay phone, and selling packs of cigarettes and candy like Hershey bars and M&Ms. However, the managers who trained me often jokingly wagged their fingers at me whilst they instructed me always to push cigs on the kids, and candy to grown-ups.