It was disheartening to hear a lawyer, at the Manatt Enquiry two weeks ago, in apparent response to KD Knight’s dogged cross-examination of Senator Dorothy Lightbourne, shout, “International Women’s Day!” This, I assume, was meant to entreat Knight to be gentler in his grilling. As if International Women’s Day is about being “nice” to women for a day.

Frankly, were I in the senator’s shoes, I’d have no problem being shouted at by a man – that is to say, being treated like a man. If women want to roll with the big boys, they have to be willing to take it on the chin. Women can’t demand equality, then turn around and use their gender as a shield to protect them from the slings and arrows that come when they’re being treated the very same way they’ve been lobbying since the 1960s to be treated. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t want to be in the boardroom with men and then when a few harsh words are spoken, run sobbing through the exit, blubbering, “Oh those big unfair men hurt my dainty, little girlie-girl feelings.”

That’s why the call for Knight to remember International Women’s Day was so hysterically funny. Men (and, sadly, some women too) still don’t get it. The implied assumption that Peter Phillips and Senator Dwight Nelson were equipped to handle Knight’s fierce cross-examination but not Lightbourne, the faint-hearted woman, reflects the very same deep-seated sexist attitude in this wretchedly patriarchal society that International Women’s Day originally set out to challenge.

A man once inferred from my position (“you feminist types,” he said accusingly – whatever that means), that I’m one of those women who don’t want men to open doors for me. Literally, not figuratively. This is how I explained it to him: If a man is going through a door and I’m behind him, I don’t want him letting go of the door and allowing to bang in my face. By the same token, if I’m going through a door ahead of a man, I, too, would hold it and not let it crack him in the face. I’d also hold the door if it was a woman who was behind me, and I’d want a woman who was before me to do the same for me, as well. Sometimes we make the feminist argument more cynical than it really is. Sometimes the issue is simply a human one: treating people fairly, regardless of gender, because it’s the right thing to do. We hold the door for each other because we acknowledge that we’re human beings and deserving of, if not quite the milk of human kindness, then simply the smallest consideration.

And, while we’re deconstructing the feminine mystique here, let’s put this out there. Men, women don’t love porn. I know, I know. It’s shocking. Horrifying, really. Ignore Charlie Sheen and those friends of his who still walk with their knuckles dragging on the ground; we simply don’t. Neither do we all fantasise about being porn stars. I mean, there’ll be the odd woman who does, but that’s just a money thing. (Anyone who can ooh and aah on command, as soon as the clothes come off, is thinking of getting paid.) It’s an unnatural state of being to walk around with our backs arched and our lips all pouty and glossy. And, believe me, cellulite can only be photoshopped out of pictures. If a woman indulges you in some torrid scene straight from the Playboy Channel for your birthday, let’s say, please don’t think it should be a daily occurrence. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the nearly three dozen employees and contractors of the US Securities who were recently accused of “accessing sexually implicit images on government computers” were men. Random porn watching, especially while we’re on the job, simply isn’t sexy to women. Women can’t have spreadsheets in one window on the computer and in another, a well-hung stud sweating up the sheets. Besides, women understand that there’s nothing as unsexy as the sex act itself. That’s why we like doing it in the semi-dark. The second unsexiest thing is actually watching it – yech, all that unpalatable body fluid, the ugly grimaces of pleasure, the embarrassing “dialogue”…

Want to turn a woman on? Instead of expecting her to channel Jenna Jameson, give her a nice piece of jewellery, a piece of art, stock options. Hold the door open for her and she’ll hold it right back for you, if you understand what I’m saying. Everybody wins. And not winning like that species of male spider that makes a gift out of an insect, which it wraps in silk and presents to the female spider so that he can quickly have sex with her while she is unwrapping the gift, thus distracting her from what she really wants: which is to eat him.

Modern sexual mores cannot simply be about one party having their fantasies met. I mean, sure, every woman has found herself at some stage of her sexual development blindfolded, handcuffed and with chicken feathers in her mouth – or, wait, was that just me? I joke, but the truth is, as we grow older, there comes a time when we let men know that the nonsense must end. For the record, for example, unless we’re lesbians, we get no erotic charge by live girl-on-girl action. You might as well be trying to interest us in the sex life of the hermaphrodite Roman garden snail. As a matter of fact, we’d be more interested in the sex life of an octopus. Did you know that an octopus can fall into such deep depression over the loss of its mate that it will kill itself by ripping off its own tentacles? Now that’s absorbing stuff. But, please. Forget that banal lipstick lesbian fantasy. No straight woman above the age of 18 really wants to appear in your bed with our BFF for some protracted three-way, wet-dream sequence. Regardless of whether the BFF looks like Halle Berry or not. Especially if the BFF looks like Halle Berry.

And, speaking of Halle Berry. Here’s a final bit of free advice. I’m telling you right now, if we have to listen to you men wax eloquently one more time about what you would do if you could have Halle Berry – or Beyoncé, for that matter… Listen, unless you look in the mirror and see the reflection of a man who looks like one of Halle’s exes, or you have the strength of pocket like Jay-Z, it’ll never happen. Get over it. Get comfortable with a regular woman, instead. And do what we regular women do when we’re with your regular asses and not the guy in the Old Spice commercial: close your eyes and think of England, or somewhere else you’d rather be.