I even used to love it when builders used to wolf whistle at me

A woman who teetered into an open women's meeting on impractical FMQ heels said this too. She too was dripping with glitter eye shadow, sloshed on - it would seem - to "impress" the blokes she worked with (i.e. typed their illiterate outpourings and made their tea) and announced that being whistled at "made her feel better".

[btw "blokes" is an alternative word for men, not derogatory (indeed they positively like it) with (natch) blokish - i.e. unreconstructed sexist - connotations. It also, in the Montréal joual dialect, means simply an English speaking person].

Of course, she needed to feel better and I'm glad to say was persuaded to retrain and embark on a more personally fulfilling career. Not that this guarantees freedom from discrimination at work on the grounds of gender. Oh no. At around the same time, the height of the women's movement in the 70s, I was the first female journalist to report from the Wales TUC and the NUM in the run-up to the first miners' strike. Reaction ranged from bemusement to hostility from certain "brothers". When applying for a press officer post at the UK's largest union, I received a preprinted postcard which read "Dear Mr . . . " in acknowledgment. And as a freelancing subeditor at Wapping pre-Murdoch lockout I was denied shifts on the grounds that "men needed the money more".

There are, of course, certain benighted female persons who go along with this, even today. They have no conception of the bravery of pioneering women who won crucial political and labour rights nor of the importance of equality and diversity at work and indeed in life itself. As much as I have contempt for sexist men, those apologies for women who connive in this are far, far more distasteful.

I know that there are some women who seem to only derive their self-esteem from courting the approval of men, and who will even do down their own sex in the pursuit of it.

Yes, I know them too.