: Comment by Dorinda McCann.

Byline: Dorinda McCann

WELL, ladies, it's that time again. There will be few places you can go to get away from it and it will be dominating most male conversations for the next month. I'm speaking about the World Cup of course and I'm sure that, like me, there are women out there who hate it.

It's not so bad with my beloved because, in fairness, it's rare he cares enough about any match to sit and watch it but my ex would watch anything that had a ball in it and, indeed, most sports that didn't. As far as I can recall it was only ice-skating that he turned his nose up at.

It's my belief that men invented the ball, not the wheel, and women got fed up watching them kick it about for a couple of millennia so they decided to invent the wheel for themselves - how else could they carry the shopping home? It's a man's world, ever has been and ever will be and there's not a lot we can do about it. As you get older these things tend to matter less and you lack the energy to be bothered arguing the toss, even Germaine Greer must concede that though women have come a long way we are still very far from equal.

I read in a paper recently about a woman who successfully won a claim for unfair dismissal because she was the only woman in a workforce of 400 males who, she said, gave her a hard time. They told her, apparently, that they didn't want a woman working there and they also watched porn films during breaks.

The only thing that surprises me is that she was surprised. This, I'm afraid, is a down side to equal rights, if you put yourself into places that were once exclusively a man's domain, really all you can hope for is that the men respect you enough to behave the way you would like them to, but you have no right to expect it.

I'm all for equality but it comes with a price. Take a public bar. I drink in one and occasionally - not often, in fairness - a man will swear, and most men, especially older ones will apologise. But, if I was going to be offended by the language, then I really shouldn't drink in a public bar. I'm not saying it's right that men swear in front of women, and I suppose you could argue that women have the right not to listen to bad language, but if you can't stand the heat why the hell go into the kitchen when there's another room available.

Some women still expect doors opened, drinks and meals bought but women have to concede that they gave up the right to expect that behaviour when they demanded equality. It's nice when it happens and it still does because there are some men who are courteous and well mannered enough to treat women that way, but we no longer have the right to expect it.

It's no good going all girlie about things if you want equality. Feminism has done women a lot of good in some respects; at least now if we do the same job as a man we are paid the same wage. It used to drive me crazy to be paid less than the man next to me for doing exactly the same job just because our lumps and bumps were arranged differently, but women still have to work twice as hard in a man's job just to be taken seriously.

The halcyon days of the fifties are long gone when all a woman had to do was tickle the pelmets with a feather duster, run the Ewbank over the hall runner and fix up a nice dinner for hubby. Now it's often the man who cooks the meals and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm all for self-sufficient males. Women have nurse-maided men for far too long and there's no biological reason why they can't iron and clean as well as their wives.

Why, then, when I see my beloved plugging in the vacuum cleaner do I shoot out of my chair and say ``I'll do it'' as if he has to be protected from such chores.

I'm of that generation I guess, deep inside my psyche, I feel guilty if he has to do anything that isn't ``man's stuff''. Until women get rid of that last vestige of guilt at the sight of a man doing housework we are sunk.

I'll believe women have achieved equality when I walk into any pub and the television programmes are neatly divided into men's interests and women's interests. Imagine if there were cookery competitions on for a month in every pub in the land, the country would be up in arms.

Sorry ladies/women/girls we can burn all the bras we possess and argue that it should have been men fighting for equality because women were superior to begin with, but it's still a man's world, that's just the way it is.