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Good morning. A bleak picture of attitudes towards girls and women teachers amongst school boys and young men at university emerges in a newly published report from the House of Commons' Women and Equalities Committee. Misogyny and sexual harassment are so prevalent that, according to one witness, many girls felt such a 'sense of defeat' that it seemed easier to 'normalise and accept' than challenge such behaviours. For me, as a man and as a parent to 9 and 7 year old girls, this makes for troubling reading. That 'sense of defeat' is easily understandable. The ready availability of pornography has made things worse, so the Committee was told. But of course, misogyny and sexual harassment weren't invented with the smart phone. The stories of female saints from the middle ages are perhaps an unlikely source of reflection on this issue, but in fact any number of these folk heroines faced something akin to current problems. The misogynistic fathers and suitors of these tales think that all a woman could be good for is marriage and child bearing. And when the woman declines the unwanted proposals of marriage, and typically expresses the wish to remain a virgin, the matchmakers will just not take 'no' for an answer, and resort to often extreme harassment. The legendary St Barbara was shut in a tower to bring her to her senses - and the tower became her attribute in the many later depictions of her. The tower didn't do the trick, however, and she was finally handed over to the Roman authorities to be tortured and condemned to death. Many other female saints - Agatha, Lucy, Agnes - trod the same path, spurning their insistent suitors and facing death. Wilgefortis - widely venerated but never officially canonised - sprouted a vigorous beard to end her engagement, which it did, but was killed all the same. These stories tell us that medieval Christians recognised the issue we face - but they do not provide any sort of solution to the problem. In the first place - and somewhat ironically - pictorial representations of these virgin martyrs were themselves often highly erotic, as early protestants would complain. But more importantly the stories embody their own form of defeatism. The women they idealise don't overcome or tame toxic masculinity, but simply escape it - either by committing themselves to a convent had they been allowed their way in the first place, or by martyrdom. The Report from the House of Commons Committee is highly discomforting, and parents like me, will especially wish to see its recommendations taken up with all due seriousness. But from those medieval stories I take one lesson - that we need to a find way as they did of celebrating women who bravely challenge their brutish oppressors.