Well, we've had a woman as Prime minister, why not a robot?
This is why. This is why, despite my misgivings about some of the louder and more restrictive elements of popular feminism that are floating about just now, I remain nonetheless a feminist.
That little sentence. That no-doubt fleeting and unthinking comment that was made by a robotics expert in a news interview. It is the answer to that perpetual question, which outspoken feminists ever get asked - 'But is there really still that much to do?'
It just keeps coming. Sitting on the tube, I look up, and am confronted once again by those age-old, damaging gender stereotypes that are bandied about as if they are just part of the scenery. Accepted. Blending in, looking as if butter wouldn't melt.
Floating into our ears, straying into our eyes and creeping into our business minds. The Harvard Business Review. At the least a relatively respected and well-sourced publication. But let's look into 'How Culture Shapes the Office'.
Maybe a more pertinent question to have asked would have been 'How Culture Smuggles Discrimination into the Office'. But then no one would read that would they? I mean, the Big IF, attended by Bill Gates no less, garnered plenty of press coverage. I don't suggest it shouldn't have. World hunger is a shameful and tragic reality.
But what about Chime for Change? Beyonce, Madonna, Timberland. These are pretty big names, and they all appeared at the Chime for Change concert just a week before. And how much did we hear about that? I'm not the only one to think the BBC's coverage verged on the despicable. So women can be sexy, but women's issues - oh no - no one wants to hear about that.
Constant pressure to conform to impossible body shapes. The fear of failure doubling because to fail as a woman is expected. (And to fail as a woman brought up in a single parent household, well that's just a disaster waiting to happen. Why even try?)
Exhaustion at always seeing this cultural battery. No, not seeing. Feeling. Feeling the repeated battery by a complacent and discriminatory culture and being told it's my fault for choosing to feel it. And standing up to it and questioning it?
Well, that makes me the aggressor. Always angry, don't go near her, careful what you say, oh you've done it now. That's just not attractive. Really though? So why do you shave your legs?
I'm a feminist because I cannot stand it.