For centuries, this was just a basic expectation held by men in patriarchal societies. In 1869, the English philosopher and feminist John Stuart Mill described the despotic mindset. ‘Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments,’ he wrote in The Subjection of Women. ‘All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.’ Orwell gave this same animating desire to Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us … We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.’