Women are the biggest misogynists

When I was growing up, the only girl among four brothers, my mother was always going on at me (and only me) about being 'nice'.

Girls had to be nice to everyone. Boys didn't share these restrictions. If someone wasn't nice to them, they certainly weren't going to be nice back.

But nice girls like me - well, we had no choice in the matter.

As with many things my mother told me, it is only decades later that I can see what good sense she spoke.

Because when you liberate girls - and women - to say what they really think about everyone else without censure or fear of disapproval, then you let the struggle for supremacy among females out of the bag.

It is an ugly and mean way of behaving - and I believe it is stripping away the bonds that hold females together as friends.

My mother kept on at me so tiresomely when I was a little girl because she knew female rivalry started young. My brothers would be encouraged to compete with each other at games and sports, while I was taught that comparing myself with others was not good for girls.

I know she would recoil in horror at the way young girls now eye each other up in public, checking out the colour of their Converse trainers or the Claire's Accessories bow in their hair.

I have watched my nine-yearold daughter pass a girl of a similar age in the street and they are like two stereotypical jealous women in a production of Carmen - all narrowed eyes and furrowed brows as they slowly look from the feet to the face and back again, often with accompanying adults blithely unaware.

Read the comments! It says what I have been saying for years, and will always say. Women are always so quick to label men 'misogynists' for two main reasons, first, to shame the man into giving her what she wants and two, she is projecting her own hatred of women onto him.