First of all, let me just say that I do not intend to resign on account of what I am about to say. Or issue a grovelling apology, or cry in the loos.

So if you’re a touchy ‘feminazi’ with the sense of humour of a Ryvita, or just one of those weird people who like getting in a massive lather about things, save your spittle. If, that is, you have any left. Because you did it, ladies. You got your man. Sir Tim Hunt, 72, Nobel Prize winner, one of Britain’s top scientists last night resigned.

No doubt it will be extra helpings of organic non-GM muesli all round at breakfast this morning now that this scourge has been banished from scientific circles. After all, men like him can’t be allowed to go around the place making giant scientific breakthroughs of the kind that may one day lead to, oh I don’t know, a cure for cancer, unless and until they have fully submitted to the will of the mob.

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'Three things happen when girls are in the lab - you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.' Nobel Prize winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt has resigned following this sexist joke

Heaven forfend that an old fellow like Hunt should try to make a bit of a joke about the ladies and his own inability to resist their charms without being tarred and feathered and locked in the stocks so that he, too, like many before him, can receive his 15 minutes of hate.

It’s days like these that I despair of my sex. Of the stupid, pampered, spoilt women who have nothing better to do with their lives than whinge and whine about utterly trivial items of entirely innocuous cack-handedness by slightly inept men who have no intention whatsoever of offending the Sisterhood, but who, entirely by accident, end up getting it in the neck.

Girls, ladies, women — or whatever it is you’re calling yourselves these days: I hope you’re proud of yourselves.

After all, it’s not as if there are any other injustices towards women to worry about. No Islamic state militants raping 12-year-old girls in Syria, no sex slavery in India, no female genital mutilation here. Oh no. Nothing like that to busy ourselves with.

All that stuff pales into insignificance when you consider the crimes of Professor Hunt.

Which, when you boil it down amount to the following:

1. He made a joke.

2. There were some women in it.

3. It was actually a bit funny and self-deprecating.

I know, I know. For a clever man, that was a spectacularly stupid thing to do.

‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,’ said Sir Tim, who’d been invited to address his female South Korean hosts over lunch. ‘Three things happen when girls are in the lab — you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’

John Inverdale has now been replaced by Clare Balding on Radio 5 Live and BBC2's Wimbledon highlights show following remarks about tennis player Marion Bartoli which were considered by many to be sexist

There’s no doubt he misjudged his audience. According to science journalist Connie St Louis, who was at the lunch, Sir Tim’s toast was met with ‘deathly, deathly silence’. To them, he was toast. She said: ‘A lot of my colleagues sat down and were taking notes because they couldn’t believe in this day and age that someone would be prepared to be so crass, so rude in a different culture and to be so openly sexist as well.’

Immediately, like vultures over the desert, the harpies began circling. Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University, called for Hunt to be barred from ‘any committee that makes decisions about fellowships, appointments, promotions, policy, etc’.

To which I’m afraid I must say: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, get over yourself.’

Twitter started up its infernal whine. Pressure groups issued statements. The BBC interviewed several women, all of whom had had their sense of humour surgically removed.

By teatime, Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize, the Prof was out on his ear.

How can this be? I mean, fair enough, equality is no laughing matter. But is feminism still as man-hatingly insecure as it was in the Seventies? Have we learned nothing in the intervening four decades?

It would appear not. Indeed, if the overall reaction to what he said is anything to go by, women in science — and their advocates — are as po-faced as they are touchy.

There’s an extraordinary irony to this state of affairs. The last time ladies were generally deemed too delicate to be told the truth about the world was when Queen Victoria was on the throne.

Feminism was supposed to do away with all that: we fought hard to be allowed to engage with men in all the rough and tumble of life. Except that apparently we’re not capable of enduring even the slightest of injuries.

How can this be? How come the heirs to trailblazers such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Germaine Greer can’t cope with a bit of ribbing from an old-fashioned bloke?

And was Sir Tim being egregiously offensive, or just honest and — like so many scientists who exist in laboratories — a little socially naive?

As the Mail reports today, the Prof knows only too well how flirting can disrupt the chemistry of a laboratory. His so-called sexist remarks were actually, it turns out, more a veiled mea culpa.

His wife (an equally eminent scientist, immunology professor Mary Collins, who, ironically, has done much to further the standing of women in science) was once his student. She was already married when they met over the roaring flame of a Bunsen burner. They had an affair, she divorced her first husband — and she and Sir Tim have been together for the past 20 years.

‘I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen for me, and it’s very disruptive to the science,’ he said yesterday, trying in vain to calm the story and explain why he’d said what he’d said. ‘These emotional entanglements make life very difficult.

‘I’m very sorry if I caused any offence. I just meant to be honest.’

Matt Taylor, the British astrophysicist whose team landed a tiny space probe on a comet four billion miles away, was made to publicly apologise for the 'inappropriate' shirt he wore while accomplishing his feat

The problem for men in the public eye these days is that whether they are being honest, let slip an ill-judged sentiment, or are simply perceived by women to be ‘off message’, they can be pilloried in the court of female public opinion as never before.

Take John Inverdale. In 2013, the veteran Wimbledon presenter compared the French player Marion Bartoli with Maria Sharapova, adding on Radio 5 Live that the former was ‘never going to be a looker’.

Yes, his remarks were crude; but what he actually said was this: ‘Do you think Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little: “You’re never going to be a looker, you’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight”?’

I think he was trying to make a point about how the modern game of tennis is at least as obsessed with looks as with ability. He wasn’t saying Bartoli was ugly; just that she didn’t have the kind of Hollywood looks that, regrettably, seem to count so much in female sport now.

And yet the world seemed to go nuts. The BBC was inundated with complaints, and the then Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, wrote to the Director-General expressing her dismay.

Two years on, hey presto: John Inverdale has been airbrushed from the coverage. He has already lost his role as a Radio 5 Live presenter to Clare Balding. Now, it’s been revealed she will also be taking his place as the presenter of the nightly BBC2 Wimbledon highlights show.

I love Clare Balding, of course, but Inverdale is a fine broadcaster and will be missed in the studio. He is, it seems, paying a heavy price for his ‘sexism’.

Perhaps the most infuriating and unfair case of recent times, as with Sir Tim Hunt, comes from the world of science. Remember Matt Taylor, the British astrophysicist whose team landed a tiny space probe on a comet four billion miles away?

It was an astonishing scientific feat by any standard, yet he is now primarily remembered not for his genius, but for breaking down in front of the cameras as he was forced to offer a tearful apology soon after his moment of greatest triumph.

His crime? Wearing a shirt emblazoned with scantily clad women of the comic-book variety. The sort of illustrations that used to grace the covers of sci-fi paperbacks, and which now hold a certain iconic-cum-ironic status.

Thankfully, Sir Tim Hunt is too old to burst into tears. But the fact remains that the man who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine has quit his job.

Just to be clear: he landed a 15-stone exploratory probe on a hunk of rock travelling at 135,000 miles per hour — and all anyone seemed to care about was the man’s shirt.

An entire galaxy of enraged, offended harridans descended on him via the internet and dragged his hard-won scientific victory from his hands and smashed it over his head. Encouraged to apologise before the cameras at a press conference, he began to weep as he said sorry for any offence caused.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t die in a ditch to defend any of these three men as being entirely innocent. You might say they were all a bit silly, or you might say they were just being men. But I would argue that the enraged response from women in all cases was wildly disproportionate.

Thankfully, Sir Tim Hunt is too old to burst into tears. But the fact remains that the man who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine has quit his job.

The fact is: the man may be a bit on the fruity side — but I would argue that his inability to grasp the latest nuances of the PC lexicon is immaterial given his far greater achievements. Like many great men — and women — he’s not a polished self-salesman, a canny marketeer who knows which buttons to press in order to please the massed ranks of the media.

He is good at his job and a hopeless communicator, and frankly, far rather that than the other way round. It’s a theme that extends to other areas too. In politics, literature and art the people who produce the best work aren’t necessarily the ones with the most user-friendly personalities.

But the feminists aren’t prepared to cut them that slack. They spot a potential target, zone in on their off-the-cuff remark, or their lurid shirt, or their ill-advised joke, and harry away until they achieve their goal: emasculation, defenestration, prostration or gibbering apologies. But what does this tactic actually do for the feminist cause?

The people who really suffer when these sorts of storms blow up are women. Because all this kind of hoo-ha does is reinforce the stereotype of the shrill, ranting feminist zealot.

It risks people who, while they might have some sympathy for the cause, being repulsed by the sight of the pack in full cry.

And when it comes to the real sexism that exists in society — the battle for equal pay, under-promotion of women and, yes, a shortage of women in laboratories — those people are less likely to get involved and lend their support.