Naomi Wolf accepted my invitation to speak at Trinity’s Literary Society last week. Wolf shot to fame in 1991 when ‘The Beauty Myth’ was published, which argues that as women have broken down social barriers, they are expected to conform to increasingly strict physical ideas of beauty; hence the rise of page 3, cosmetic surgery and anorexia.

Before we begin, some answers to questions posed by my oh-so-hilarious male friends: no, she doesn’t hate men, yes, she has a boyfriend, and, er, I didn’t look too closely but it appeared she was indeed wearing one.

Naomi’s talk was great but it was the Q&A afterwards which was exceptionally revealing. Asking the room to relate stories of discrimination they’d experienced, one girl said her supervisor had told her she must ‘stop writing like such a woman’.

What? I don’t even know what that means. In my essays I personally don’t tend to declare my love for pink or talk about boys (unless, you know, they're writers, and it’s hard to think of Shakespeare as a hottie when he insists on wearing that unflattering ruff). Nor do I write my essays in lipstick. All of which I imagine might count as ‘writing like a girl,’ if you meant it in a negative way.

I had a quick brush-up on ‘The Beauty Myth’ last week, and you know what? It’s absolutely brilliant, beautifully written in a way that manages to be scholarly and popular and interesting all at once. Maybe her style was what this supervisor had in mind, yet somehow I think not.

Women are constantly being disparaged by careless comments. One website counts the number of homophobic comments on Twitter, like ‘no homo’ or ‘so gay’ – you can sit and watch the counters increase before your eyes – but remarks like ‘stop being such a girl/woman’ are just as damaging. As Obama was elected this week, Americans may not have chosen a man with ‘binders full of women’, but 22 states have now passed laws confirming the need for all women requiring an abortion to undergo a vaginal probe test first. Wolf spoke recently to a fifteen-year-old who had been raped and forced to have the (medically unnecessary) procedure. At the same time, Nadine Dorries goes into the celebrity jungle to ‘draw attention’ to the abortion limit.

The state of womanhood is endemic amongst half the population, and, you know, we apologise for having both boobs and brains. We can see why that would be difficult to grasp – you’ve only had several thousand years of civilisation to grow accustomed to the idea. But really, y’all are going to have to make up your minds whether you want us, or you merely want our bodies; live with us, or control us; sleep with us or call us whores. Of course, rather than treating women as some menacing Other you could see us as just like you. But let’s not get too crazy, eh?