When The Times published my article last month on how feminism’s silence over the past decade has ushered in a grim, sexualised culture, I was astonished by the response. Hundreds of women — and some men — commented on the website, many more e-mailed me directly. The message overwhelmingly was: thank God, someone is saying this — I thought I was alone.

Reading these letters, I too was overjoyed to discover that I wasn’t the only person buying a KitKat in the newsagent who resents a tit-fest of lads mags at eye-level. Or who is incensed that Channel 4, with its public service remit, broadcasts shows such as Ten Years Younger, which encourage women to chop up their bodies with unnecessary and dangerous plastic surgery. Or who is simply weary to the verge of despair that every single women in British public life is relentlessly judged for her hair, figure, clothes and “hotness”.

As if to affirm this, that very week, Rod Liddle, dragged out his knackered old bête noir routine with a Spectator article beginning “So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober”. It was the sort of hateful wind-up — calibrated to provoke female outrage, while playing to a sniggering, pot-bellied tap-room misogyny — that Liddle could always shrug off with the age-old refrain: the trouble with you birds, is, you can’t take a joke.

But how exactly were women readers supposed to respond to this? Indulgently? Oh, naughty old Rod! What I actually felt was not anger but disgust. The cover story on our leading political weekly magazine was a beery and cretinous assessment of our women politicians’ shaggability. I was reminded of an old remark by Gloria Steinhem that “any woman who chooses to behave as a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.”

A week later I was still fuming about this when I spotted the Spectator editor at the time, Matthew D’Ancona — who I know a little socially — at a film screening. I sat throughout the movie planning what I would say: how disappointed I was that such a celebratedly clever and cultured man could print such garbage. But in the end I just left. It was easier to say nothing than to risk weary accusations of being a strident old ranty-pants, him laughing behind his hands later. Yet it is such silence that granted him permission to publish.

It was Times readers who inspired a new column, launched today, by sending me examples of what I can only classify in my mind as — sorry! — sexist bollocks. One woman was appalled to overhear a male personal trainer in a park addressing his clients as “bitches”, another reader wrote to me about a chain of coffee shops in the United States that hopes to attract male clientele by putting its baristas in bikinis; another about a “fittest freshers” beauty contest at her university.

I received a link to a story on the British Army’s website about how Corporal Katrina Hodge has become the face of La Senza lingerie, complete with an FHM High Street Honeys-style picture. Aren’t you reassured that our servicewomen are treated with respect and seriousness, when you read that Cpl Hodge, who received a medal for bravery for disarming an insurgent in Iraq, is known as “Combat Barbie”?

Sometimes a quote from some idiot leaves you fuming all day; an advert on the Tube makes you itch for a marker pen. Because now even the word sexist is seen as yawny and outmoded, it is hard to know what to do with these outrages except rant to your friends. When the Lawn Tennis Association decided to award Wimbledon Centre Court not to the best women players but the “sexiest”, I was bending the ear of anyone who’d listen. But now you can send your bugbears to us and we’ll publish the most offensive.

Does casual sexism matter any more? Aren’t we all too cool and liberated to care? It is always crass and reductive to draw up cause and effect. But there are certain things that make you wonder. When Britain, with just 19.7 per cent women MPs, is 51st among democratic nations for female representation — not just below the groovy progressive Scandinavians but Bulgaria, Latvia, Eritrea and, for goodness’ sake, Pakistan — you have to ask if the stench of misogyny deters good women from standing, or insinuates to those who might select them that really they have no place being there.

Harriet Harman seems to think so. On Saturday, she told The Times of her plans to try to force companies to include a quota of women on their boards. She believes that we need to to be more like Norway, where all private sector boards are at least 40 per cent female (and where, incidentally, sexist advertising has been banned since 2003).

Does a deluge of pornified images in magazines and ads, plus the flood of internet pornography, have any connection with Britain having the lowest rape conviction rate in Europe?

The New Yorker critic David Denby has coined the term “culture of snark” to describe the relentless, nihilistic meanness that characterises contemporary discourse, which is aimed disproportionately at women. All those spiteful digs at a woman’s breasts, bums, wrinkles, cellulite ringed in Heat, dissected in chatrooms.

The other day I read a report about Ulrika Jonsson going to the supermarket in which an onlooker was quoted as saying: “It seemed to be just one of those days. Her age and her mood were printed all over her face.” How dare she grow old. How dare any woman over 40 think she has any place on TV.

So much hate begetting further self-hate — food disorders, self-harming, the constant, low-level buzz of a woman’s unhappiness with her body. Hate that leads only to a “kerching!” in the tills of plastic surgeons. Indeed, the clinics that profit from women’s insecurities deserve a whole category of shame. Scanning the back of women’s magazines, you learn about parts of your body you hadn’t even thought about hating. “Areola reduction”, “genital reshaping”, “eyelid correction”... Meanwhile “Hannah, 28” says that cosmetic surgery is “the best thing I have ever done”.

But there is no point making an official protest about a sexist advertisement: a friend who complained to ASA that a huge, soft-porn hoarding advertising a lap dancing club opposite a sixth form college degraded women was outraged by the judgment that “in the context of an ad for a table-dancing club, the image was unlikely to be seen as unduly explicit or overly provocative.” So that’s OK, then!

Somewhere in the free-market driven moral relativism of the past decade, we have lost the ability to say, without fear of being called uptight or fun-sucking, that selling sex on the high street, raunchy outfits for toddlers or scabrous attacks on female public figures based upon their looks just ain’t right. And our best weapon for changing things is exposure and ridicule. So send your clippings, quotes, anecdotes or ads to us. Feminism — or whatever you want to call it — is back, and we’re not going to take it any more.

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