THE day after Piers Morgan was tweeting his disdain for those who participated in the Women’s March Against Donald Trump, the BBC launched another dark and edgy drama series. Mr Morgan, basking still in the arc of Mr Trump’s dubious favour, had this to say about the march. “I’m planning a ‘Men’s March’ to protest at the creeping global emasculation of my gender by rabid feminists. Who’s with me?” The following day I settled down to watch the brilliant Emily Watson star in Apple Tree Yard.

Ms Watson delivered a towering performance as a successful, middle-aged career executive who embarks on an uncharacteristically impulsive affair with a man whose name she still doesn’t know days after she has had sex with him. “That was the most reckless thing I have ever done,” she tells him in an email hours after their furtive concupiscence.

We are invited to suspect that this may end badly as the episode begins with a scene nine months in the future in which the character played by Ms Watson is observed entering the dock in a courtroom. Long before the end of a taut and mesmeric first episode, I was gripped but the scriptwriter delivered a coup de grace before the credits.

In this scene Ms Watson is the victim of a violent rape by her previously diffident male professional colleague. The deployment of the word “violent” in describing rape is probably superfluous but the prolonged depiction of this one saw Ms Watson suffer two hard blows to the face while intermittently blacking out amidst a volley of foul-mouthed abuse by her attacker. It seems that it is no longer considered sufficient in modern television drama to convey the fact that a rape has occurred; we must also be made to witness the detailed horror of it at close quarters. Often it will be filmed at an unusual angle or in broken sequence as a means of saying to the viewer that what they are watching is something deep and meaningful.

As a male who has never aspired to feminism I felt queasy and a little sickened. I also, somehow, felt reduced. According to Rape Crisis Scotland in 2014/15, 1,797 rapes and 104 attempted rapes were reported to the police in this country. One in five women aged 16 - 59 has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 16, according to the first joint statistical overview of sexual offending in England and Wales by the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and Office of National Statistics. In 2015 a survey conducted by The Daily Telegraph revealed that one-third of female students in Britain had endured a sexual assault or unwanted advances at university while a study by NSPCC showed that one-third of teenage girls in a relationship suffered an unwanted sexual act.

Taken together, these numbers suggest that very few of us will not personally know at least one woman who has been either raped or sexually assaulted. In the La La Land where television drama executives reside a decision has been made, it seems, to fetishise this. When they have wrung every last ounce of our capacity to absorb these scenes to the point of desensitisation perhaps they will move on to explore themes around violence to immigrants or homosexuals or disabled people. They will probably do so secure in the knowledge that there will always be some among a self-appointed cultural Sanhedrin who will deem it to be “artistically appropriate in the context of the overall narrative”.

Perhaps I’m being unfair on Piers Morgan in highlighting his injudicious tweet in the context of this. I feel, though, that it serves as a useful reminder of why ordinary women all over the world took to the streets to march against the new American President. I suspect that many among them might hesitate to define themselves as “feminist” but you don’t have to be a feminist to be more than slightly alarmed that America has just propelled into the White House a man who said this to his television la-la-land chum : “I’ve gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This is how the most powerful and influential man in the world expresses his sense of entitlement towards a woman’s body. By his elevation to the presidency how many men felt that their shared sense of physical entitlement to women was being endorsed and vindicated?

Yet, while society seems to be increasingly aware of and less tolerant towards violence against women, perversely we seem to embrace it in popular culture. No crime production from Scandinavia is ever complete without the rape, torture and killing of women. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson’s edgy and brutal shocker, established the mould. Several months on I still have flashbacks to scenes in the BBC’s television drama, The Fall. Over the course of three series we were invited to share the rape fantasies of a sexual serial killer of women and, at times, to sympathise with him. I watched most of the episodes but on none of those occasions did I watch it in the company of a woman; I simply could not have. This troubles me.

A recent study by Amnesty International found that 46 per cent of respondents thought a woman who had been raped was partially or totally to blame if she had been acting flirtatiously. Nearly half felt the same way if the woman was drunk and 30 per cent felt that, if she was wearing revealing clothing, she would be complicit in anything that might happen to her. We’ve seen similar statistics among men and, more disturbingly, among women from similar surveys conducted in Scotland and throughout the UK.

Like many other fathers of daughters I occasionally had cause to express consternation at their choice of apparel before they embarked on a night out all pink and giggly and shimmering in high heels and short dresses. They acknowledged sullenly that my concern was born of love and a desire to protect. But what else was I subliminally embedding in their early consciousness: that in enlightened, modern, 21st century Scotland a woman can’t express herself and take pride in her body and try blamelessly to feel for a little while like a Hollywood princess? And if by conveying such a fear I wonder, too, if the thought took root within them that, in certain situations, men become animals and that it’s best not to provoke us as you’ll only have yourself to blame.

How many women going out this weekend will pull their coats more closely about themselves and mind how they go because an aggressive old sexist has grabbed control of the world and popular culture is risking normalising sexual violence against women? I think that’s why many ordinary, non-political women took to the streets last week.