Come on girls, it's our shout.

ROSEANNE Barr was a housewife who insisted on being called a domestic goddess. She refused to turn off the TV when her husband wanted sex.

And when he asked for more space, she locked him outside, explaining: "You marry the man of your dreams and after ten years you end up with a couch that burps."

How many women feel like that but never say it? We're brought up to please and not to stand our own corner. Our lives centre around the wishes of men and making them feel good. Look at the lies we tell in bed.

But what are we so frightened of? This week, a tribunal backed Joanna Traynor and Deborah John, who risked ridicule by complaining about the boss who poured forth a stream of insults a schoolboy would find juvenile.

They took the case to tribunal, knowing the reaction of countless men would probably be: "Can't they take a joke?"

Yes we can, lads, but can you? If a group of women started demeaning a lone man's penis at a dinner table he'd be the first to squawk.

Battle

Women are far more likely than men to suffer from Impostor Syndrome, where they think if they have got somewhere it must be by luck and that any minute someone's going to find them out.

Look how many bright women defer to their man when they're out. We do it to make them feel good, and so that we'll be liked.

Roseanne Barr is most men's nightmare. A woman who speaks her mind, using their language, and who has enough clout to tell them to get lost when she feels like it.

She reckons men are useful - for lighting barbecues - and is on her third husband while fighting a legal battle with her second.

This week, she told Ruby Wax - who clearly went to the Terminator school of interviewing - how her parents committed her to a mental hospital in her teens.

Now she says: "In the hospital I wanted to get out so I learned to set goals, visualise them and then attain them."

When she launched her own series, if she didn't like a line she was expected to say she'd lock herself in her dressing room until she got her own way. But the show's success proved she was right to stand her corner.

"Didn't you worry if people would still like you?" asked Ruby. When women stop worrying about things like that, said Roseanne, maybe they'll get somewhere. And she's right.

Speaking out hasn't done Roseanne or Ruby any harm. And Joanna and Deborah won their case and a payoff.

So, come on. Are you a woman or a mouse?

TROUBLE IN SCORE

A FEW years ago you couldn't take your kids to a football match for fear of violence on the terraces.

But tragedies like Hillsborough led to all-seater stadia and better facilities. Hooliganism plummeted. Football cleaned up its act.

At least on the terraces.

On the pitch and behind the scenes our national game has turned into a sewer. Last week a leading manager put his best player in hospital after attacking him in the dressing room.

Meanwhile Vinny Jones was fined again for a savage foul and a sneer about "squealing foreigners" aimed at Ruud Gullit.

But it's not just violence that's spoiling soccer. The smell of money now dominates the game.

While families struggle to find the pounds 60 entry fee to a Premiership match, players like Newcastle's Faustino Asprilla are earning pounds 30,000 a week - twice the average fan's annual salary.

Insult

And sleaze abounds. Allegations of bungs, backhanders, and games being thrown for cash are becoming all too commonplace.

It's an insult to fans and to small clubs keen to keep standards - and stadia - up to scratch.

My local club can't do enough for children who want to play soccer, running tournaments and courses. But they are small fry struggling to survive. Those at the top couldn't give a damn.

In America the game is more aggressive and the crowds bigger, yet there is no violence and little sleaze.

But then their game is run by professionals who love the sport and respect their supporters. Fat chance of anything like that here.

THAT OLD LOVING FEELING

THERE was a lot of nonsense talked on Valentine's Day (all right, I didn't get any). But one line shone out amongst the dribble from "Fluffy Bunny" to "Big Todge".

It came from Britain's longest-married couple, Walter and Fanny Scott, who wed 74 years ago in 1922, at a church just a mile from where they still live in South Yorkshire.

Fanny, 93, who likes to play with her granddaughter's grandson, says: "The trick is to renew your feelings for each other every day. Never stop courting or caring. That's the recipe for a happy marriage."

Remember that, Fluffy Bunny, when life with Big Todge starts to sag.

MY eight-year-old son asked me what a teacher I'd met had said about him, so I told him she'd sung his praises.

"She didn't really, you're only saying that because you're my mum," he replied.

"But if she'd said really bad things I'd know because you'd have broken her legs."

Right on both counts.

Shameless and proud

HAVE you no shame, Joan Collins was asked in court last week.

Of course she hasn't. Joan has made a career out of playing shameless hussies, on and off screen. And she's proud of it.

Equally shameless is Random House, the publisher who paid her to write a book, said it didn't like it, so sued her, and lost.

The trend in publishing is to sign up famous people then wait for the great work and a fat profit to roll in.

Random House is always looking for writers - as one American magazine put it, "like that Rushdie guy". But it ends up with "authors" such as Naomi Campbell and male hunk Fabio, whose combined brain cells make the pig from Babe seem like Prof Stephen Hawking.

Deal

In fact, I've heard Random House is negotiating a three-book deal with the Babe pig, as I write.

What did Random House, an American conglomerate that's swallowed numerous small British publishers, expect from the woman who starred in The Bitch and dated a man called Bungalow Bill? Shakespeare?

Joan's writing ability is on a par with her acting. Did you believe those tears in court, or lines about being "a poor woman in an octopus's tentacles"?

Me neither.

But she's a national institution (I did not say ancient monument) and a true star with all the presence and style of that dying species.

And she's won a bundle of money and so much publicity for her book you have to wonder if it was all a stunt. Shameless? You bet.

CRYING FOR HELP

CHRISTIANE Carter was just eight when her 15-year-old sister Dannielle was blown up before her eyes by an IRA bomb at London's Baltic Exchange.

"I still talk to my sister," says Christiane. "She visits me sometimes in my bedroom and I take a watering can and wash her headstone, and joke with her."

Christiane underwent months of surgery to repair her battered body, surrounded by the love of her family. And others.

"The man who tried to save Danni came to see me and I cried and cried and talked and talked," she says.

Now she wants to help victims of Friday's bomb blast at Docklands.

She should tell them about that meeting with the man who tried to save Danni.

Crying and talking is the best therapy there is.

A STAR IS SEAN 

AS AIDAN in EastEnders, he was the dozy drip who made Ricky Butcher look like Jeremy Paxman.

But actor Sean MacGuire has been a real star to eight-year-old Heidi Falconer, who suffers from a skin disease and whose specially-made protective coat was stolen.

The thieves returned the coat to Heidi's home - cut to shreds. Now she must wait weeks for a replacement to be made. Sean has offered to cough up the pounds 1,200 cost when it's finished. Good for him.

I just hope the low-lifes who stole and shredded Heidi's coat one day need help - but only have selfish sickos like themselves to turn to.