Jenny Diski

If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s, and are a woman, it's really hard to be shocked or surprised by the tolerated sexism back then that's currently crawling out of the woodwork. It wasn't in the woodwork at the time. It was just there, in the air you breathed, in the world you walked about in. It wasn't just DJs and comedians. It wasn't even only the touching up, the comments, the boss who called you in to deal with a pile of filing that needed putting away in the bottom drawer of the cabinet right opposite his desk (think 1960s miniskirts). The men who felt you up on the Tube at least knew they were doing something wrong, even though they didn't think it was very wrong, or only wrong because it was in public. You could say, in a loud voice, 'Take your hand off my body,' and they would look ashamed. You could strategise to avoid those you knew were trouble, you grew a tough skin walking about the street being shouted at, having your body commented on, being sneered at when you didn't respond. Learning to deal with loathesome men in public and at work was part of being a young woman. But it was more pervasive than that.

In July, Santander wrote to tell me that there were going to be changes to the online account for small businesses I have had with them for around eight years. They began: Our aim is to build the bank we know our customers want. A bank that takes the time to listen... Then it went on to tell me what it was that I wanted.

When I was a child I used to tap around the flat with a stick trying to find out what it was like to be blind. I folded scarves into triangles and knotted them around my neck and arm to make the sling for the broken arm I never had. I always wanted but never needed spectacles. I tried on other people's braces in the playground and limped around the corridors of my block of flats in imitation of children at school who had had polio and wore calipers on their legs. I thought it so glamorous to have 'a condition', and I was also curious to find out what it was like being without something I took for granted. But I have no memory at all of pretending to be deaf. I played games putting my fingers in my ears, of course, making things louder and quieter, but I never thought of it as seeing what it was like to be deaf. There were children in the playground who wore hearing aids, pinky beige flesh coloured implements you couldn't miss, but I never wanted to try them, or wondered what life would be like without hearing as I wondered what life would be like without sight.

It's a big week for rape. And it's only Monday. In a mid-August special, the Republican candidate for the Senate Todd Akin and balcony diva Julian Assange's best friend George Galloway have come together to bring you the truth about rape. What it is and what it isn't. Akin, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has explained that there is no need to consider abortion for rape victims since 'from what I understand from doctors’, women rarely get pregnant from 'legitimate' rape as 'the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.' If, by some chance, this mechanism fails, 'I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist, and not attacking the child.' In that last sentence you will notice that there is no reference to the raped woman, only the 'child' – that is, foetus – and rapist. Did I mention that Akin is on the House committee on Science, Space and Technology?

'I forgot how rare and intoxicating collective joy is. It revives the heart, a bit, doesn't it?' said Megan Cat-Noises on Twitter. I may be the only person in the country to have woken up depressed on Saturday morning. Perhaps it's just what collective joy does to me and I am therefore to be pitied. It's certainly the case that I deeply dislike spectacle of all kinds and the heavy symbolism it demands. Still, let me try and clarify a little my response to the Olympic opening ceremony.