Moronic, immature, stupid. By now, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers has heard all of these words in the wake of some of its male employees passing around pictures of women they deemed shaggable in their Dublin office. The email referred to "new clunge" and attached pictures of young female recruits. For those of you not au fait with the boisterous day-to-day, towel-snapping office language of PricewaterhouseCoopers, "clunge" is a slang word for a woman's genitalia. It's up there with c**t in terms of it being not a very acceptable word for men – or anyone – to use. Of course, reducing women to their genitalia is the ground zero of sexism, and although women are used to such objectification, perhaps it's a good thing that this email rout has been made public. Now we know what these boyos are really like.

As the week rolled on, the commentary became slightly more muddled. Women do it too, we were told. If women are just as guilty about objectifying men, as many people testified last week, then why are most of the sexual harassment cases in the corporate world against men? Why do these stories of women being treated like the waterbunny at the sidelines of the rugby pitch – objectified, left out of corporate trips to the golf course or informal business meeting at the strip club – surface time and time again, yet cases of women doing the same to men are extremely rare? Because women don't actually objectify men in the same way. They just don't. Sure, women talk about the appearances of other women and of men. They rate how cute the boys in the office are. But at least women have the smarts to do so in private conversations. Can you imagine if the same email was sent containing images of besuited, gel-headed boys with the introductory line of "new c*ck"?

But look at reruns of Sex and the City, and look at TV ads, some said in their arguments about how women objectify men. Well, now and then, Diet Coke or some other product will come up with a television ad featuring a steaming hunk and this is used as an argument that women do actually collude in such objectification. Generally, the man will be involved in some kind of manly pursuit, like fixing cars, window-cleaning or building, but in the real world, women don't objectify men in these roles. It's the women who get whistled at uninvited as they walk past a building site, or get their breasts stared at in the garage, not the other way around.

It's fair to say on inspection of multiple issues of the Irish Daily Mail over a sustained period of time that for all its rabid desire for a female readership, the newspaper hates women. Along with the Evening Herald, the Mail fell over itself to splash the pictures of the women on its front page along with the headline 'Rated Like Prize Cattle'. Eh, who is exactly rating them like prize cattle? It's not just PwC who are rating them when the pictures are republished in a newspaper. The Irish Independent, confirming its recent status as a tabloid in content, also led with the pictures on the front page.

But the real issue here, according to several commentators last week, including Mary Carr in the Irish Daily Mail, is those women who were left out. In Friday's Mail, Niamh Lyons, a competent and intelligent reporter, penned a column about how she was once subjected to a similar ranking in an office. She made number four, for the record, and while she "immediately sympathised with the girls from PricewaterhouseCoopers," wait for it, "if they are anything like me, they had a secret giddy satisfaction that they made the list, while equally feeling let down by their colleagues' locker-room nonsense". Excuse me? Have we been transported to an episode of Mad Men all of a sudden? Any woman who feels a sense of accomplishment by being rated by her male colleagues is obviously completely institutionalised by sexism.

Upon the publication of Ariel Levy's excellent book Female Chauvinist Pigs in 2005 there was much discussion in feminist circles and elsewhere about the complicit nature of sexism. It's there when delusional women don't have a problem with some idiot jocks drawing up a hit list of hotties. It's there when female teaching students at St Patrick's College think it's appropriate to pose in bikinis for the tabloids in order to raise money for Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin. It's there when women willingly enter beauty contests.

What we need to do now is question the level of compliance that women have in their own sexist exploitation, before these comments from women who should really know better become the norm. And for the men passing around pictures of women in their work place like some kind of game of teenage sex Top Trumps – wake up and cop on, you bunch of sad, pathetic saps.

Hold me...

Thirty-thousand students protest in London and they wreck the gaff. Thirty-thousand students protest in Dublin and most are impeccably behaved. Perhaps our academic English friends need to study the actions of the young Irish.

Thrill me...

Listed by Time as one of the most influential people in the world, civil rights lawyer Evan Wolfson comes to Dublin this weekend to speak to civil marriage campaigners. Wolfson was the co-counsel on the first marriage equality case in the world in Hawaii, and will hold a free talk at the Westbury Hotel tomorrow. Visit www.marriagequality.ie for details.

Kiss me...

Taking the piss out of Cosmopolitan is pretty darn easy, but the magazine reached an epic level of ridiculousness last week with the cover blurb of 'Your Breasts Called... And They're Feeling Neglected'. My breasts called? That's the last time I lend my tits my iPhone to play Farmville. Hang up!

Kill me

So I was in the cinema the other day to watch Easy A when the trailer for Burlesque came on. If you're not familiar with it, it's the most anticipated film of my life, starring Cher as a frozen-faced burlesque overload who is shaping mega-lunged young protégé – Christina Aguilera – to be some kind of hero. Potentially the best crap film since Britney Spears' epic Crossroads. I can't wait.