Part of the difference, perhaps, is that women are more emotionally dependent on men than men are on women. Making deprecatory jokes may be a way to cope with the dependence that many women still seem to feel. It's like cats and dogs; you say rude things about your dog because you love it, but I've seldom felt the urge to say rude things about a pet cat.

What bothers me the most is not emails being circulated between friends that poke fun at stereotypes, I'm bothered by the way that the media(under extreme pressure from the government and feminist lobby groups) feel the need to censor anything that portrays women as their stereotypes where as any ad that makes fun of men is considered perfectly acceptable.

I am also bothered by the way the news paper is constantly filled with articles and opinion pieces saying that mainstream advertisement has an adverse affect on young womens body image. Although I disagree with censorship in general I would not be as concerned with these articles if they also mentioned the affect that other non-media based pressures can affect both young men and women.

4 people close to me have committed suicide and only one was a female, she suffered depression relating to her parents divorce and a sexual assault where as all three males had developed severe depression as a result of "locker room" pressure(some of it coming from myself which I have never forgiven myself) perceived as fun at the time and almost encouraged by sports coaches, teachers and parents not fully understanding the ramifications of this culture.

Women often say that because men often appear emotionally distant that they don't care, and that as a result making fun is ok. If the shoe were on the other foot and men went around openly insulting women it would create major unrest. Sexism exists on both sides and it will require a serious culture change to end.

Great article. Male feminists are a big problem some of the most degrading people and the biggest apologists. I can't quite work out their mentality. It could be something about male competition, or it's simply ignorance/or a habit of placing women on a virginal pedestal...

Robert, I agree with you. After reading the article I scooted over to both my email accounts. Yep. There were the men jokes. There were also jokes about women ageing, jokes about blonde women, jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about women drivers, ...jokes about kids by the score, jokes about Father Christmas, Religion and Politics. They were outweighed, however, by religious e.mails by the score: - until I sent a message round to everyone on my mailing list that I would no longer accept either those or stereo-typical gender jokes.

It was noteworthy that it was not my friends who sent these things but usually the kind of person who just presses a button to Send to All their contacts. So for good measure I blocked a whole lot of these people from my contact list.

I also noted that with one exception the majority of the gender-jokes came from Australian contacts, while the religious ones generally came from America and South Africa.Though I was very much tempted to draw some sort of conclusion from that, I wilfully refrained.

I suggest that the author - and some posters - either weeds out their Contacts box or recruits some new and different people to it.

Just as well the article was written by a woman...

The problem, as I see it, is that jokes about the inadequacies of men as perceived by women are entirely unactionable by the sex-discrimination commissioner, yet the converse, jokes about the perceived inadequacies of women by men, are punishable quite harshly.

It's the double standard that is practised so heavily in favour of women at Governmental level that I get my back up about. I think women are great; in fact, in common with most men in our country, I was raised to the idea of "women and children first". I have no issue with women having a privileged position, but I do resent the way many have responded to their privilege like spoiled, entitled brats. It is most apparent among women who have been through the university system in the past 10 or 15 years, since their entire lives have been spent in the feminist utopia.

It may simply be a reaction to years of oppression, but the vilification of men by women who will never have to compete on other than privileged terms with men is quite egregious. I hope a decent balance is found before our society is feminised into oblivion.

"I suggest that the author - and some posters - either weeds out their Contacts box or recruits some new and different people to it."

If you had read the article with some honesty, rather than being leaping to deny the occurence of these details (the comments are enlightening to), you may have noticed these people she either works with/or are her friends-in other words, it's so commonplace now because feminist propaganda has ensured that it is "normal" to do this. Again, read the comments too. You also may have noticed that this goes beyond mere emails.