WOMAN, as John Lennon once suggested, may well have been the nigger of the world (although quite how much preaching I’m prepared to take from a man who had an entire New York apartment simply to house his fur coats, I’m not sure), but now, it seems, it’s man’s turn.

While I was away, no fewer than three items dropped into my in-tray proving that sexism is alive and well and perfectly acceptable provided it is aimed at men.

“It’s payback time,” one woman told me. Ah: so two wrongs do make a right.

Well, firstly, don’t blame me for all those years without the vote. Go and dance on Asquith’s grave if you must. Secondly, here in the middle classes in the UK in the 21st century, life is pretty equitable for the sexes (unless you work in the City, in which case, buy a gun with your pitifully inadequate bonus — no one would blame you).

To cheer you up as you carry all those old Dworkin tracts down to the charity shop (poor women still have a few issues, I believe), here are two jokes. Which is acceptable?

(a) Why do women have periods? Because they deserve them.

(b) Why is a man like a computer? Because you have to turn them both on to get their attention.

Now, obviously, joke B is acceptable. It must be, because the attitude it represents — that men’s brains are in their trousers — seems to be the starting point for much creative thinking in the contemporary marketing industry.

Which brings me back to my in-tray. Did City University in London really play host to a workshop designed to show men “how to laugh a lady into bed”? According to a press release written like a script for The Office (“Funny equals sexy. Fact.”) it did, complete with chat-up tips for “the gym, the office, the supermarket” (but not, oddly, the police station, the court or the industrial tribunal).

So. Comedy for men. Not just to make you funny. But to get you shagged.

Next was a genuinely, if accidentally, funny press release from Cats Protection, “the UK’s largest feline charity” (all that trouble for just one fat cat?). With an entirely straight face it tried to persuade us that 46 per cent of Britons would rather wake up with “their puss than their partner”, and that 52 per cent would rather “have a snuggle with Tiddles” than get tiddly.

But this was the killer cat crap: “Lone gone is the image of a cat as a girl’s pet . . . they are good news for blokes too, as research shows they are the new babe magnet . . .”

So. Cats for men. Not because men are sensitive and caring, but because they get you shagged. (I would have to take advice from City University on whether or not cats and comedy could be combined in a single, masterful chat-up line. Perhaps: “Would you care to come upstairs and stroke my pussy?”)

All of which nonsense pales alongside the final offering, from a major publishing house where executives, keen to flog more books to young men (sorry: keen to promote literacy among young men), have gone straight for the groin with an insulting campaign that boils down to this: “Carry a book and women will shag you.”

This is not a misrepresentation of the “Are you Good Booking?” campaign (visit goodbooking.com if you don’t believe me). Proclaiming laddishly that “men can increase their chances of pulling by becoming ‘Good Booking’ ”, it doesn’t even bother to pretend that blokes (and don’t even start me on this patronising, we’re-all-lads-together “blokes” crap) might actually need to read a bloody book.

Just pick one which says something about you (experts suggest, for instance, that The Catcher in the Rye says “I’m confused, sensitive, funny” — it might also suggest, of course, that you are still doing your A levels), carry it around and wait for the chicks to come flocking. You might want to avoid 101 Uses For a Dead Cat.

As a writer signed to Penguin, which plans (or planned, anyway) to publish my novel in the spring (which I am now considering titling The Bernard Manning Guide to The Care and Love of Kittens), let me say this: for the love of God, get me on that bloody list and stop plugging that bastard Hornby. Come to that, let’s carry this line on the cover: “Girls! Buy this book and shag the author.”

Never let it be said that I wasn’t prepared to do my bit for literacy among young women.

jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk