Initially I thought number 20 was a massive liar. I only saw him once, but he was great – beautifully scruffy, with a lopsided smile and a penchant for getting so stoned I could feel the high through his tingling skin. It was good, for a first date. But I still thought he was a liar.

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Recently I received a text message that contained this gem:

“you’re waiting, bent over the desk, chemise immodesty parted…”

Now, sexy though that may be (for the record, it is), it is not something that I want to have bleeped to my pocket. Texts have a disturbing immediacy that emails don’t. An email says ‘I have something to tell you, and I have taken the trouble of sitting down and composing it.’ An email elevates you to a status of importance. It usually contains more information, some gossip and, if you’re lucky, a link to something that you might like. An email respects you, it lets you know that you can take your time in replying, mull over your response, and consider carefully before you commit to anything in writing. I love email.

A text, on the other hand, is a conversation killer. You could be halfway through a gripping novel, a relationship crisis or a cheese soufflé and your mobile leaps up; blaring, buzzing and all but hitting you in the face screaming ‘pay me attention! I’m important! Feed me words, you fucker!’

I don’t like texts. My friends complain that most of their texts go unanswered, but that’s because most of their texts come when I’m in the middle of something that I think is more important. I frequently experience irrational bursts of hatred towards my nearest and dearest because they text me inanities while I’m at work, inanities to which I feel duty-bound to reply.

And if you (get ready to shudder) “sext” me at work, chances are it will enrage me even further. Lovely though it is to imagine you bending me over something solid then humping me frantically like a bonobo with an audience, it won’t help me get this strategy document written.

Here’s where I backtrack so you don’t think I’m a giant bitch

I’m not always a terrifying harridan – I think some texts are great. There is nothing I love more than a good old romantic text, particularly one that doesn’t invite an immediate response. A well timed:

“It might be the whiskey talking, but the whiskey says I miss you every day.”

can be the best thing that’s happened to me all week. A romantic text is always welcome. And on the few occasions when I am in the mood for conversation or sexy chat I’ll leap to my phone like an excited teenager, cradling it in my arms and soaking up the misspelled words and predictive-text fuck-ups contained therein.

But these moments are few and far between. The fact remains that, on the rare occasions when people do text me with sexy content, there is an 80% chance it will make me want to punch them.

Sexy emails? Great. I’m sitting at my computer so would probably have been planning a wank anyway. Sexy texts? It’s like a double glazing salesman ringing your doorbell during dinner and then slapping you in the face with a semi-flaccid dick.

Don’t even get me started on phone calls.

I don’t want to cause alarm, but it turns out that despite years of battling for equality, there are some people in the UK who have completely missed the memo about women being independent, equal human beings.

I was in the pub on Friday with some friends, and one of my favourite boys. We danced, drank, flirted, and occasionally snogged each other like teenagers with a bucket of cider in a park.

After a couple of hours, a kind gentleman from the bar decided that the situation had reached tipping point. He could no longer stand by and watch the horror of the unfolding scene – what I can only describe as ‘some people having some fun that caused no harm whatsoever to those around them.’

With a slightly drunken leer, and eyes sparkling like those of someone who is about to make a truly knicker-wetting joke, he marched up and spoke to one of the boys I was with:

“You should control your woman.”

There was a distinct absence of laughter. ‘Control your woman’? Anyone would have thought that I was robbing the pub, or having a violent altercation with one of the other customers. But no – it turns out I was just dancing with someone who a passing stranger had identified as Not My Boyfriend. And he obviously felt that the boy he had mistakenly identified as My Boyfriend required help in handling what he perceived to be a crisis situation.

I can only begin to imagine what was going on in the mind of this gold-plated cretin. What is this woman doing – dancing? With a man? What if she gets pregnant? What will happen next? After all, dancing has been known to lead to so much more – women expecting oral sex, for example, or owning their own passports, perhaps even trying to have jobs with equal pay or something equally unconscionable.

omg it was just a joke lol

Perhaps I’m overreacting here – he was just trying to make a joke. He was a reasonably friendly dude and by the looks of it he mainly wanted to start conversation with a friendly-looking bunch of drunk strangers. I didn’t overreact and follow my immediate instinct – to piss into his pint glass then cackle like a terrifying harpy, but nevertheless I felt angry and uncomfortable.

Not only has someone told me that I am effectively ‘out of control’ for having the kind of fun that would happily be shown before the watershed, but he’s also implied that some other people see me with boys and infer ownership.

So instead of actually confront him about it, I thought I’d tackle it in the traditional nerd way, by retreating to the internet to have a bit of a rant. Because although this guy was joking, jokes like these are far, far too common for my liking.

“Blimey, she’s a fiesty one.”
“Looks like she wears the trousers in your house.”
“I’m surprised he lets you do this kind of stuff.”

One of the reasons I don’t have a boyfriend is that I don’t want any unrealistic expectations placed on me. I don’t want to have to remember birthdays, leave parties early, go to things I won’t enjoy, or not occasionally rub my crotch on people in the pub. In telling the boy to ‘control’ me, this guy reinforced everything I hate about relationships, and the expectations placed on you within them.

He also, even more hatefully, implied that once you have entered into a relationship with a boy, that boy has not only a right but a duty to control you. God forbid men should let their guard down in a public situation – the scorn of sexist pub men will be brought to bear on you if they witness your girlfriend dancing with another dude.

So in conclusion: no, I don’t want to let it go. Despite the no doubt side-splitting hilarity of this throwaway sexism, I’d urge sexist men to avoid ‘controlling their women’ – instead, why not learn to control your fucking self?