When I was eighteen I met a charming man, who was so incredibly worldly and international and twenty six and wise and interesting and nonchalant and, really, looking back on it an absolute asshole. We had a long ecstasy and vodka-tonic fuelled conversation, and we thought we both understood each other but in fact, we were speaking totally different languages. I was speaking plain English and him, innuendo. He was a film maker, and at the time I wanted to be an actress. Not only was I naive to even talk to this man at such length, but I was also naive enough to give him my phone number and email address.

What followed this loaded late night/early morning conversation was some irregular but polite, semi-flirtatious and non-assuming correspondence, soon escalating into a barrage of emails and text messages and then demands that I meet him and a friend one evening on Brick Lane to talk business. He was sending me a series of scripts and email attachments, that I’d open but only read the first few lines of to then say I'd read them but that I was ‘too busy’ to meet up. It was only when I was explaining to a good friend in another late night/early morning conversation that this friend (cider fuelled this time), using his (--)male intuition, told me instinctively that it was porn. I was totally aghast, 'me, porn?! no! It can’t be', that kind of thing. I felt horrible, sordid, used, exploited and all those other adjectives that I should have been feeling since I’d met him a few weeks ago.

I woke up at this friend’s house in Stockwell to a rather nasty message from my new film maker friend, who told me that he didn’t have time for slackers like me in his industry. I was quite relieved to be off the files.

After getting home and switching on my laptop to properly read the attachments and have reality open my prudish eyes, I knew I’d landed on a goldmine in terms of anecdote. Not only was it porn, it was zombie, girl-on-girl porn! This man penned scripts involving girls turning into pig eating zombies, then fucking each other, all in the grounds of beautiful country manors.

No money was ever mentioned, but the professional nature of his business was obvious. Retrospectively, his intentions were crystal clear; he was never flirtatious, just succinct, driven, focused. For me, with a greater sense of lucidity, it became obvious how such a character’s manipulation disguised in flattery could be enough to convince any young or vulnerable female to become a cog in the wheel of a sexist and manipulative industry.