Hello, this is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Grizalda and today is International Women's Day.

I'll be talking to two of the leading writers and feminists and two of my personal heroes,

Laura Bates and Rennie Edo Lodge, about sexism and the Me Too moment. Where are we now and what next?

Later I'll be talking to the best-selling French writer Leila Slamani, who won the pre-goncourt for her novel Lullaby.

So as you will know, if you've been living on the planet for the past six months,

there has been a radical shift in the way that we talk about sexism and specifically sexual harassment.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein, of course, unleashed many more across Hollywood, the media,

politics, tech. It seemed that nowhere was exempt. But this is really more than a news story.

This is daily life for women and for men too. And this is something that I really care about.

It wasn't until quite recently, in fact, probably around 2012, 2013, that I really started thinking about feminism.

It was then that it started entering the mainstream

press much more people were writing think pieces about fourth wave feminism. Before then it seemed

like it wasn't part of the conversation quite so much. Of course I knew about sexism. I'd

experienced it firsthand as most women living in the world have. I had even experienced sexual harassment. I was sent

hardcore pornography by email when I was 13. I was at school and the boys who did it, or I think

one boy who did it was expelled, but nobody talked to me about it. Nobody sat me down and said

that this was wrong, that this is not

what sex looks like, this is not how women should be treated. And so I thought a lot about sexism.

I think any woman that you talk to will have a story like this, will have been groped on the

tube, will have been cat-called, and much, much worse. But it wasn't until recently, as I said,

that I really joined the dots and I put all of these life experiences, my own life experiences

...