January

Good old Georg Baselitz kicked off the year in spectacular sexist style with the confident declaration: "Women don't paint very well. It's a fact." As it turned out, he was just the first in a long line of prominent men to confuse "prejudiced opinion" with "fact" over the course of the year – an easy mistake to make. Meanwhile, the New York Post took it upon itself to set the tone for a year of misogynistic media with a front-page picture of Hillary Clinton mid-passionate speech, with the headline: "No wonder Bill's afraid". This would have been brilliantly original were it not for the well-trodden path of decades of similar pieces attempting to discredit female politicians as shrill harpies. Yawn.

February

Seth MacFarlane presents the 2013 Oscars show in Los Angeles. Photograph: AMPAS/Rex

Ah the Oscars! An opportunity to celebrate the fine talent and superb skills of Hollywood's male actors, and (thanks to Seth MacFarlane) the "boobs" of their female peers. Anne Hathaway picked up the gong for best supporting actress, but it was her nipples that scooped the press prize, acquiring their own Twitter account along the way. The sheer sexism of the entire debacle is perfectly summed up by the fact that, 10 months later, if you Google "Anne Hathaway Oscar", the top hit is an article entitled: "Why is Anne Hathaway so unlikable?"

March

Kim Kardashian. Photograph: MIKE NELSON/EPA

Given their unfortunate habit of mistaking the natural process of growing a baby inside you for becoming fat, tabloids and women's magazines alike took Kim Kardashian's pregnancy as an opportunity to display unprecedented levels of scathing criticism. But it was Now magazine's website that truly took the crown with this breathtakingly horrific headline: "Is it just me, or is Kim Kardashian giving birth out of her bum?"

April

Amanda Thatcher, granddaughter of Margaret Thatcher, leaves the funeral service at St Paul's Cathedral Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

The death of Margaret Thatcher, our only ever female prime minister, was the perfect opportunity for the press to demonstrate just the sort of sexist reporting that remains a significant barrier to other female politicians following in her footsteps. Among a crop of gender-focused headlines, perhaps the worst was the Times's "Margaret Thatcher: a better politician than wife and mother". Meanwhile her granddaughter Amanda, arriving in the UK to read at the funeral, found some 13 pictures of herself emblazoned across the Daily Mail website in a feeding frenzy reminiscent of the Pippa Middleton arse affair.

May

Angelina Jolie Photograph: Joanna Scheffel/DPA/Corbis

Angelina Jolie's decision to write candidly about her double mastectomy truly revealed the filthy bottom layer of the internet, as unsolicited opinions poured in from the Twitter trash. "Brad Pitt is gunna [sic] be fucking the nanny" and "What a waste of a banging set of boobies" were true lowlights. Meanwhile one shrewd Ukip donor, no doubt threatened and alarmed by some miniscule reduction in the gender pay gap, dramatically exposed the Machiavellian racket women had been running beneath everybody's radar. Women were, he revealed, "deliberately" wearing trousers – an act of "hostile behaviour" that "flies against common sense, and also flies against the normal human desire to please". Who knows how long it might have gone on for, had he not alerted us? Ladies, we've been busted.

June

Caroline Lucas was told her 'No More Page 3' T-shirt was not in line with regulations. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

In possibly the clearest display yet of the ironic anachronism of Page 3, Caroline Lucas was asked to cover up the No More Page 3 slogan on her T-shirt by putting her jacket back on as she stood in Westminster battling to arouse the faintest flicker of understanding or concern in the sleeping dinosaurs around her about the damage caused by displaying teenage tits in one of our biggest-selling "family" papers. Needless to say, they didn't cotton on. So bare boobs continue to be available to purchase in eight different locations on the Palace of Westminster estate. Lucas's T-shirt, on the other hand, was in outrageous contempt of the rules. If only she'd gone in topless, there wouldn't have been any problem.

July

Marion Bartoli celebrates her first grand slam title at the age of 28. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

It is difficult to choose a highlight for this month, whose sexist gems included commentator John Inverdale marring Marion Bartoli's Wimbledon triumph with his own insightful assessment of her attractiveness; Boris Johnson's razor-sharp deduction that women only go to university to find a husband, and OK magazine's foolproof plan to publish a post-baby weight-loss regime for Kate Middleton all of 24 hours after the poor woman popped out Prince George.

August

Conductor Vasily Petrenko, who has said that women conductors could be a distraction for musicians. Photograph: Chris Christodoulou

Perhaps hoping to become chums with fellow female talent-denigrators Baselitz and Johnson, conductor Vasily Petrenko went for the triple with the sweeping statement that women conductors are detrimental to orchestral performance because "a cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things". It's hard to say who should be most insulted by this – female conductors, straight female musicians, or those rarest of creatures: talented male musicians who somehow manage to display the superhuman ability to keep their eyes on the music.

September

Virginia Woolf, the only female writer who Canadian author and professor David Gilmour will deign to teach Photograph: CSU Archv/Everett / Rex Features

Almost as if there was something in the water, author David Gilmour muscled in on the action, announcing: "I'm not interested in teaching books by women … What I teach is guys." To avoid any possible confusion, he helpfully clarified: "Serious heterosexual guys." You can only hope there weren't any aspiring female authors among his students at the University of Toronto to have their ambitions crushed by their professor's prejudice. One imagines Oscar Wilde would have been gutted. Meanwhile "brogrammers" Jethro Batts and David Boulton nobly did their bit to help tackle the notorious gender imbalance of the tech world by presenting Titstare – an app on a par with the innovation of a fart joke – at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 Hackathon. (In case you're wondering, the app pretty much did what it said on the tin.)

October

Uni Lad has stopped selling the T-shirt with the slogan "Keep Calm, It Won't take Long" on its website

With the return to university came the return of student sexism, with certain "lads" at universities up and down the country apparently vying to outdo one another in the dual stakes of offensiveness and stupidity. From the cricket team who went out in "casual rape" polo shirts to the Leeds club night tastefully titled "Freshers Violation" and advertised with a video of a male student stating his intention to rape a female peer. Because nothing says party like a rape threat, right?

November

New XBOX ONE – men-only? Photograph: MICROSOFT/EPA

What's even more offensive than the outdated assumption that girls aren't interested in gaming? The idea that they have to be patronised, wheedled or tricked into doing whatever their devious male partners want, of course! Xbox suggested this in spectacular style with a massive advertising fail when it promoted its new console with a "useful" letter for prospective gamers to help them get their loved ones to agree with the purchase. "I know, I know. You'd rather knit than watch me slay zombies" was a particular highlight. The ad was quickly pulled, but how Xbox managed to find an advertising copywriter from the 1950s remains a mystery.

December

Labour MP Stella Creasy. Photograph: Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images

The Sun's political editor Tom Newton Dunn deserves an honourable mention this month for his embarrassingly weak attempt to undermine MP Stella Creasy's challenge to the Sun's Page 3 by drawing attention to her – *shock horror* – blue PVC skirt! Boldly, he himself wears a provocative scarlet tie in his Twitter picture. Whether or not that should discredit his incisive political commentary is unclear. But the undoubted winner of December's sexist crown is gift website askherfriends.com for its tantalising advert assuring male customers that buying their lucky lady love the perfect Christmas gift would make them statistically more likely to get laid. Because, of course, when all is said and done we all know that women are essentially just glorified slot machines. Who says romance is dead?