Once the element of sexual intimacy has been added, the speed and intensity of the emotions becomes even greater. You don’t go through the normal progression of discovery with your new lover because there has not been enough time. Your new partner has many qualities that are going to affect your life — qualities that cannot be seen immediately. It takes time for both partners to develop the openness, trust, and honesty that are needed for a solid relationship. A whirlwind courtship, thrilling as it may be, tends to provide only pseudo-intimacy, which is then mistaken for genuine closeness. She was beautiful and had a figure that wouldn’t quit. She had her own business and was making a go of it by herself. She’d raised her son and seemed to have done a good job of that. I’d never met anyone like her. She was outgoing and bubbly and enthusiastic about everything I was doing with my life, even about my kids. She was perfect. I started calling all my friends to tell them about her. I even called my mother. I tell you, I never felt like that before. I never thought about anyone so much or dreamed about them all the time like I dreamed about her. I mean, this was really different. The first indication Laura had that there might be trouble came soon after she and Bob had begun living together. It’s the Rodgers and Hammerstein way to fall in love. You see him across a crowded room, your eyes meet, and that certain thrill surges through you. Your palms grow damp when he stands near you; your heart beats faster; everything in your body seems to be more alive. This is the dream of happiness, sexual fulfillment, and completion. This man will appreciate and be responsive to you. Just being near him is exciting and wonderful. When it happens it’s overpowering. We’ve come to call it romantic love.

If the questions here reveal a familiar pattern, you may be in love with a misogynist -- a man who loves you, yet causes you tremendous pain because he acts as if he hates you. My client Laura’s whirlwind courtship started out literally “across a crowded room.” At the time, she was a successful account executive for a major cosmetics firm, a very pretty woman with light brown hair, dark almond-shaped eyes, and a slender figure. She was 34 when she and Bob first met. She was out one evening with a woman friend at a restaurant:

Success!

The band’s defenders will often point to the bawdy humour in their songs. The big-breasted, thunder-thighed women and hopelessly horny boys that inhabit them bring to mind saucy seaside postcards and Carry On films. In 2004, in an interview with Sylvie Simmons for Mojo magazine, guitarist and band founder Angus Young remarked, “We’re pranksters more than anything else,” while his brother Malcolm noted: “We’re not like some macho band. We take the music far more seriously than we take the lyrics, which are just throwaway lines.” But if the band members are merely pranksters, then women are their punchlines. He told me that all the other women he’d been involved with only wanted to know, “What can you give me?” But what he found so special about me was that I was interested in what I could give to him. He said it was as if I had been born, shaped, and existed only to take care of him. All the other women had been taking and taking, all gimme gimme gimme, there for the good times but running from the bad ones. I was different. Bob’s deceptiveness should have been a warning to Laura that she needed to take a closer look at him, but she didn’t want to see. She wanted to believe that Bob was the man of her dreams. The pitiful irony here, as Bates shows, is that “men’s rights” groups splintered from the original, pro-feminist “men’s liberation” movement, which sought to free men themselves from harmful social expectations of masculinity. As one activist put it: “Our enemy isn’t women – it’s the role we are forced to play.” Nearly 50 years later, this still sounds like it might be worth a try, especially in a modern culture formed around such ossified, regressive stereotypes that it can seem society has become much more sexist even since the 1990s.

Plenty, but not all. There’s an unpleasant sneering quality to Bon Scott’s assertion on Carry Me Home: “You ain’t no lady but you sure got taste in men/That head of yours has got you by time and time again.” In Let Me Put My Love Into You, Johnson sings: “Don’t you struggle, don’t you fight/Don’t worry cause it’s your turn tonight”, a grim rape fantasy with the payoff: “Let me cut your cake with my knife.” Bates agrees that the phrase is problematic, but, as she wryly asks towards the end of her book, why should she and her sisters have to do all the work of detoxifying language, and men themselves? Perhaps we men who don’t hate women can make a small start by replacing talk of “toxic masculinity” with something more appropriate to Johnson, Trump, and their acolytes – perhaps, say, “pathetic man-babyism”?

Rosalind was 45 when she met Jim. She is a striking woman, tall, with auburn hair and a trim figure, which she works hard to keep in shape. She has a distinctive style of dressing that shows off her height and her artistic flair. She owns an antique shop and is a successful dealer, collector, and appraiser of advertising art, which is her specialty. Rosalind was married twice before and has a grown son. She was excited about meeting Jim because she’d heard so much about him from her friends. They took her to hear him play with a local jazz group. Afterward, when the four of them went out for a drink, Rosalind felt very drawn to Jim, who was tall, dark, and extremely good-looking. AC/DC are the worst. This much I know. They are preposterously smutty, hopelessly unsophisticated, and pretty much every one of their songs sounds the same. As well as big riffs, they are defined by casual sexism and oafish double entendres. When not extolling the delights of fighting, gambling, drinking and fast cars, their songs are about getting laid or hoping to get laid. Their songs are populated by strippers, prostitutes and young men with apparently unvanquishable erections. They really are appalling. Man, I love AC/DC. I am a proud feminist, and a sizeable proportion of my work as a journalist is about combating sexism. I try, where possible, to encourage my daughter to think about how women are represented in art, music, film and everyday life. Together we have looked quizzically at the acres of pink in children’s clothes shops and at the miniature cookers and plastic cupcakes aimed at little girls in Toys R Us. We have talked about why so many of the female characters in classic kids’ books are dismissed as bossy, or cry a lot, or play second fiddle to the boys. We have had tentative conversations about sex, physical autonomy and body image. I try to be frank with her at all times, but even I’m not quite ready to give her a full breakdown of the body shaming, objectification and dehumanising of women in the AC/DC oeuvre.

The next morning, when he called me, I told him that I wouldn’t hold him to anything he’d said the night before. His response was, “I’ll repeat every word of it right now.” It’s this context that, in the case of AC/DC, renders their lyrics daft as opposed to damaging. In seeing the band for what they really are – a bunch of archly sex-obsessed idiots with sharp tunes and some seriously killer riffs – she might just grow up to love them critically, but love them all the same.

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She shows how to break the pattern, heal the hurt, regain your self-respect, and either rebuild your relationship or find the courage to love a truly loving man. In this superb self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward draws on case histories and the voices of men ad women trapped in these relationships to help you understand you man's destructive pattern, the part you play in it, how to break the pattern, heal the hurt, regain your self-respect, and either rebuild your relationship or find the courage to love a truly loving man.