As with Ferdinand, political correctness is not in my vocabulary, but, unlike Ferdinand, I don’t condemn Kealy for being a bad satirist. Satire is very hard to do properly. It is neither humour nor ridicule. Rather, its power lies in the fact that the most outrageous of propositions are put forward with the straightest of faces and in the most temperate of language. It is only as the reader moves through the piece that, first, the enormity of the argument becomes clear, and, then, second, that the whole point is to undercut rather than to defend the outrageous. It is a very high bar to jump, and Kealy didn’t clear it. Indeed, his attempts at humour, ridicule and spice served to undercut rather than to emphasise the point he was making. But the fact that he did it rather badly doesn’t make him a misogynist, it just makes him a bad satirist.

Of course, he might have been going for something less than outright satire: he might just have been trying to write something humourous and tongue-in-cheek. But if effective satire is stealthy, then effective humour has to be obvious. And, in that case, the leavening of humour, ridicule and spice were insufficient to make it clear that he was writing with his tongue in his cheek. This is not as a high bar to jump, but it still takes considerable skill to pull it off, and Kealy’s piece doesn’t demonstrate sufficient skill there either. But the fact that he did it rather badly doesn’t make him a misogynist, it just makes him a bad humourist.

This is why Kealy is a scientist and university vice chancellor, and not – say – a participant on Mock the Week. I applaud him for the attempt, and am sorry that it was unsuccessful and misunderstood. I agree that “can’t you take a joke?” has been the chauvinist response to feminist objections through the ages. But sometimes a comment that is intended to be arch and witty is (mis)construed as chauvinist; and I think that this is what has happened here – the crime, it seems to me, is one of bad humour rather than of bad faith.

As for Sarah’s point that young women do try to use their sex appeal to ingratiate themselves with men in authority, that I think is part of Kealy’s point. Even if he doesn’t know about Sex and the City (though I can’t believe that he doesn’t), his references to Middlemarch and The History Man suggest to me that he had both the manipulative young woman and the lecherous old man in his sights. I just wish that his skill as a humourist or satirist had allowed him to hit his target.