Human League

Fetching children from hockey practice, packing lunch boxes, washing dishes and cleaning up cat wee. Its a womens world!

There’s a whole lot of sexism going on. First, the new body scanning machine at the gym coldly informed me I am the Khulubuse Zuma of the exercise world. I’m convinced the machine is a man.

Then there are those lovely Saudis who decided women aren’t fit to be included in their Olympics team – even though women in that country are probably the fittest athletes in the world, considering the number of overbearing beardy types from which they have to flee.

In the German town of Triberg, the mayor has designated “easy” parking spots to women and “difficult” ones to men.

What a load of tosh. I once parked an entire Land Rover in a shoebox while eating a Fizz Pop, composing a sonata in G for piano and making a macramé pot holder for my aunt. Note: I was not talking on my phone.

However, the worst bit of sexism I have come across recently was a piece in a British newspaper which declared: “Women are brighter than men!”

Now, I can see how that would confuse you because as a bona fide, card-carrying, Benicio Del Toro-loving member of the female species, this announcement would surely please me.

Initially it did. I sent an SMS to my husband: “Neh, neh, neh- neh, neh. I’m cleverer than you.”

Then I read the rest of the story and was horrified to discover the only reason women’s IQs have overtaken men’s is because our constant multi-tasking has forced our brains to sharpen up. We’ve developed what Brett Murray would call “spear brain”. Frankly, I’d rather have blunt-penknife-used-for-cutting-up-guavas brain.

Fact: Women don’t multi-task because we like it. We don’t joyously bound into our cars after work to fetch children from hockey practice, then skip into the kitchen to prepare pork chops, wash the dishes, pack lunch boxes, clean up cat wee and iron shirts – all while humming Adele, pictured, ditties.

No, we multi-task because, as that Dettol advert says, if we don’t take care of it, who will?

Just this morning, I completed the following: collected a urine sample from the dog (which involved me crouching in my pyjamas with a used mushroom punnet under the nether regions of infected hound); delivered urine sample to the vet; vacuumed the car (which, weirdly, was full of pretzels); did five loads of washing; cleaned the house (including the toilet bowl which, weirdly, was full of dental floss); phoned my mother-in-law for her birthday; phoned my mother for her gammy leg; and went grocery shopping. I achieved all of this – and wrote this column.

This afternoon, there are a number of things I have to attend to – including going to gym, where that sexist machine will once again tell me that even though I’ve been living on basil leaves and kettle steam, I’m still Khulubuse.

It’s just too much. “But you’ve done it to yourselves!” the khaki feminists cry. “You’ve allowed this status quo, and now you’re paying for it.”

Yes, well, that might be true, but the alternative is monstrous.

If I handed over the reins to B, telling him I’m going to watch repeats of Café Racer and fiddle around with my iPad instead of attending to chores, we would end up eating chilli paste on toast for dinner, wearing rugs to work and sleeping on a brigade of bed mites.

What to do? You’d think that with our newly elevated IQ we’d be able to come up with a different way of existing.

But we’ll just have to wait. Because if women carry on multi-tasking, we’ll just get cleverer.

Then we can become mayors and beardy types, take over the world and establish a new order: robots for cleaning, disposable clothing, DNA-enhanced pets, pills for food, self-schooling children and parking for macramé-makers only. Now, that would be an IQ for which I’d happily queue.