With violence against women having taken a bit of a sharp upturn over the last 10,000 years or so, it seems to me that it’s about time men started doing something about it. By this I mean a bit more than the helpful advice we’ve given them so far, such as not dressing provocatively, not going out alone, not going out at night, not drinking too much, not talking to strangers, not ignoring strangers, not laughing at us, not flirting if they’re not going to follow through, and, for god’s sake, to smile once in while. I’m not quite sure what the problem is, but for some reason none of that seems to have stopped men hurting them. Maybe they’re doing it wrong.

No, we need something that more actively involves men. I had a good old session thinking about it, and somewhere about the half-way mark on the fifth pint an idea came to me. What if we had some men who were known to be Good™. Men who could be trusted. Men who wouldn’t be abusive. Men who women could trust and turn to if they were in need. I’ve been hearing for ages that it’s not all men, so there must be load of these Good™ ones around.

Obviously, for these men to be placed in a special place of trust there’d have to be a lot of safeguarding in place. There’d have to be background checks, sworn testimonies from people who knew them, a lengthy and demonstrable record of doing the right thing, something to identify them, such as cards or maybe a uniform.

Then I though that all sounded a bit fash, so I scrapped the lot of it and decided just to let each individual man decide whether he was Good™ or not. Honestly, it cuts out loads of paperwork and it seems unlikely that more than a handful of men would ever lie about being Good™. Why would they need to? It’s not like men have needed to claim to be Good™ in the past in order to do bad things.

I did briefly wonder if we needed some way to take away this saintly, trusted, Good™ status from men who misbehaved in some way. I mean, supposing a man murdered a woman – which women are really opposed to – should he still be able to declare himself Good™? Initially this seemed like a no-brainer, but then I thought of lots of other things. That those men may still see themselves as Good™, or genuinely want to be Good™, or that maybe it was discriminatory to use past behaviour to predict future Goodness™, and that it might involve more paperwork for me somewhere. Then I decided it was probably best just to let them change their name or something and carry on being Good­™.

All in all, then, I think I’ve come up with a pretty watertight scheme. Women worried about accepting a drink from a stranger, or a lift, or about the man walking behind them at night, or wandering into their changing rooms, to check everyone is OK, can now just simply ask if he’s Good™ and know that they can absolutely trust his answer and relax, because it’s only Bad® men who’d ever hurt them.

And if you think you’ve spotted any loopholes in my scheme then just remember, the majority of Guardian and Observer journalists agree with me!