If it was me, then I should say "I screwed up, I have no excuse, and I'm sorry."

But you are being self-righteous. That is, completely ignoring the possibility that it was you that was wrong in this instance.

With the best will in the world, how con you place your guess as to a women's sensibilities above the expressed opinion of a women who makes her living studying and teaching on that that very subject?

(And BTW, whom has spent the last year of her life in Iraq, unpaid, applying her knowledge, skills and time, at not inconsiderable risk, to helping women directly; and trying to change the culture in that country to prevent the on going and systematic mistreatment of women. Ie. Dealing with *real issues*!)

A little game.

• Someone pops up a PerlMonk's complaining that the first three letters in the word "title" -- used in various places around the site -- might be offensive to women.

  Do we dragnet the site and expunge them all? Of course not.

• Another someone pops up and claims that T.I.T.S. Or, Try It To See. is offensive to women.

  Do we expunge it? After 6 years We haven't, despite some expressed reservations about it at the time.

• ... various increasing levels of possible offense ...

• If someone else had popped up and complained about the use of what is widely regarded as the "the most heavily tabooed word of all English words", "The Most Offensive Word in the English Language", that creates a huge furore, even when only used by implication by one of the nicest, most PC women in broadcasting...

  Then I would have backed any call for its removal.

  But no one did!

  Ever wonder why?

The point is, there is a sliding scale of what might offend someone somewhere, and it is literally impossible to try and avoid all the possible sources of offense, and certainly counter-productive to try. So we -- individually and collectively -- have to draw a line somewhere.

You popped up to complain -- to me, despite it having earlier linked by someone else -- about a cartoon.

In my opinion -- and, according to my best endeavors to get an authoritative opinion of the matter -- your suggestion that the cartoon in question is abovebelow on the wrong side of that line, is incorrect. So I rejected your suggestion -- not rudely or aggressively -- but by explaining why I thought you were wrong.

And what do you do? Instead of conducting an open discussion on the subject -- as advocated by Swearn in the keynote you linked -- you take your wounded pride elsewhere to assemble the hoards to come here in -- clumsy, ad-hominem, and in most cases, far more offensive, both to me personally and in two cases, women in general -- defense of that pride.

There is an interesting phenomena that has gained increasing recognition in media and media study circles over the last few years that has sometimes been termed "offense by proxy". There are several well documented cases of this. I will describe one I was personally witness to.

An little known, unfunny, "shock jock" so-called comedian, was taking part in an equally obscure comedy panel show, late at night on a little watched to-air channel. He cracked a joke made a crass, sexist, bigoted remark about a female athlete's looks. It drew groans and boos of shock and offense from both the audience and the other panel members -- despite several of them being known for their near-the-mark humour. I turned over.

Over the next few days the story made headlines in the press and on TV and the communications watchdog (OFCOM) received huge numbers of complaints. The comedian in question was roundly barrated; he has since disappeared from TV -- both the panel show in question and others he sometimes appeared on.

A few weeks later, OFCOM held a hearing and passed their judgement, and called for both the comedian and the TV channel to apologise.

One interesting fact came out of the whole thing. The total number of complaints OFCOM received exceeded the audience figures for the program by a factor of 2 or 3 depending on who's audience figures one used. Since statistics show that at most 2% or 3% of a programs audience will every put pen to paper even for the most grievous of offenses, it is estimated that of the thousands of complaints received, 90%+ must have been written by people who could not have seen the original program. (The segment was cut from the on-line catch-up service version.)

Offense by proxy.

Looking at the time-lines, all those "offenderati" that came along to attack me as a result of your blogging, would almost certainly never have seen the cartoon had you not called attention to it by blogging.

And of those, the only women who, -- by her own admission -- was more concerned with how you were treated, by another responder to your original post, than the cartoon. I did not construct the cartoon. Or post it. Or even provide the original link to it. And I do not control the opinions of that other poster.

So, the ultimate result of your misguide attempt to "be sensitive", targeted at the wrong person, and your actions to call wider attention to it, had exactly the opposite affect than (I hope) you intended.

And as a result, I've had to suffer 10 days of offensive, ad hominem attacks. Thanks!

I'm not apologising, because I did nothing wrong.