Okay, okay, I get the message — maybe it’s time to stop making jokes about women. A couple of months back I wrote a long article about Harriet Harman for The Spectator that began with a paragraph of crass, gutter-bred, laddish sexism. I had meant it to be a parody, to make a point; it seemed to me so grotesque and surreal that nobody, I thought, could mistake it for high seriousness. But, oh, they did.

The remaining 1,700 words were very serious indeed but they have been entirely forgotten — which is the first indication that I must have got it badly wrong. The second is that it clearly offended a lot of women in a way I had not remotely intended; even the ones — few and far between — who got the joke thought it a bad joke and one that they believed revealed in me an inherent and rather foul sexism. I haven’t found many women who appreciated the article, if I’m honest, and most got no further than the first paragraph.

The piece opened with the lines — “So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober” — and continued with an imagined scenario in which one had pulled Harman, perhaps in a pub or lap-dancing club in south London, and repaired to her pad — but was put off from becoming any more intimate because of her fair-trade coffee and Joan Armatrading CDs. Yes, I know it seems bad now, written down like that — but it was a confection, a joke, designed to ape precisely the kind of dunderheaded chauvinism against which Harman rails. The rest of the piece then took that reductive, bone-headed, conservative feminism of hers to pieces (I hoped).

Um — while we’re on with it, I think I also said that I thought Caroline Flint, former minister for Europe, was “as fit as a butcher’s dog”, but I’m less convinced that this deserves an apology. Being as fit as a butcher’s dog is, where I come from, a term of great commendation and affection. Yes, it’s sexist. Yes it is commenting upon a woman for her appearance rather than her many political accomplishments. But then a few weeks before, Flint had been pouting at the cameras, modelling clothes for The Observer, although I don’t believe she did any topless stuff. Complaining that someone treats you as a sex object when you’ve just trousered a bunch of dosh for being a sex object is not merely having your cake and eating it, it’s having your cake, eating it, regurgitating it and then eating it again. With a spoon.

As it happens, the modelling assignment wasn’t what first attracted me to Flint — it was that look she used to give the press when she left Downing Street, an icy stare of hauteur and contempt with the faintest ghost of a smile. Funny thing, sexual attraction, no?

But back to the stuff about Harman, which was where the complaints were directed. The first person to complain in print was Janet Street-Porter, and I discounted this because I’ve always thought her a half-wit. Please believe me, this isn’t chauvinism on my part: if she were a man I’d think her a half-wit, too. But then the others started, writers whom I’ve always rather respected, such as Tanya Gold, and I began to worry quite a lot.

When one woman journalist, Rachel Cooke, announced that reading the piece had brought her out in a rash, I lay awake all night fretting about it, mulling over how I could have aroused such wrath; these two are no fools, nor, in Cooke’s case, prone to explosions of cosmetic fury. And so I started importuning women, indiscriminately, asking if they thought I’d, you know, overstepped the mark a little. Most thought that indeed I had. Some even thought I’d been serious in that fantasy of mine. I found that staggering, but still.

Now I’m aware, of course, that simply dismissing something offensive as a “joke” does not necessarily diminish its offensiveness. But it can do, if its purpose was to undermine a particularly offensive opinion or state of mind. I thought I’d done that, but clearly I hadn’t. No more jokes about women from me, then, not even that hackneyed old line about why did the feminist cross the road.* I believe women should be given equal opportunity to do whatever job they wish to do and that unfair gender discrimination still exists and should be stamped upon wherever it occurs. My objection to Harman’s feminism is that it does not delve beneath the surface, it makes grotesque assumptions from neutral data — and worse, on occasion has criminally manipulated statistics to support her political point of view.

Let’s take two examples. Harman believes that sex discrimination is the sole reason why women are paid 23% less, on average, than men. Perhaps she is right; in which case she should provide evidence of this. But she has not; the only evidence she has is that women are paid 23% less than men, which is not the same thing. And even this figure she has wilfully misrepresented, according to Sir Michael Scholar, the boss of the UK Statistics Authority: she failed to account for the fact that, in general, women work far fewer hours than men. So there’s one way in which the pay difference is emphatically not down solely to sexual discrimination — fewer hours worked.

Another reason could be that women tend to gravitate towards different sorts of jobs from men, which have lower rates of pay. Perhaps it is wrong that a speech therapist (80% female) is paid less than a thoracic surgeon (90% male), but it is not down to direct discrimination in the workplace. Harman cannot countenance this notion; it is an article of faith for her that men discriminate against women, full stop, and there can be no other explanation.

It does not occur to her that a smaller proportion of women than men may wish to do certain jobs and that this is a consequence not of discrimination, nor even of infant gender stereotyping, but because we are different creatures. And it is the reflexive hatred of men that results from this mindset which offends; Harman recently announced that female workers had been the main victims of the recession — at which point every statistician in the country jumped down her throat and pointed out that it was overwhelmingly men who had lost their jobs. But for Harriet, it’s an article of faith, not of science or of fact. And to my mind this faith demeans feminism and strips from it a radicalism that seeks not to emulate everything men do, but to feminise society as a whole.

Still, all that stuff got well and truly lost as a consequence of my first paragraph, for which I am doubly sorry. Hell, it seemed a good idea at the time.

*Absolutely typical! Why shouldn’t she cross the bloody road?

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