How easy it is to dismiss violence against women, with the smallest of arsenals. On Tuesday Rashida Manjoo, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, released a preliminary report based on her 16-day visit to Britain. It makes grim reading if you get that far, which most won't: her observations were swiftly buried under a mighty triptych of ageism, racism and misogyny. She could, on reflection, pen an appendix about herself, with particular emphasis on intersectionality; if she does not, here is mine.

Manjoo's error was hyperbole, which is apparently forgivable in a commentator native to Britain – and indeed governs entire swaths of our media and ruling class – but is seemingly offensive in a stranger, for we British do practise a kind of cracked and counter-intuitive national pride. The statistics on domestic violence, for instance, or the disproportionate impact of austerity on women, or the peculiar predicament of women from ethnic minorities are not a matter for national shame and urgent attention – until a female foreigner of a certain age points them out. Then we must get busy saying well, at least we aren't as bad as South Africa, Manjoo's native land, or – and here we really clutch at the flimsiest of straws – Saudi Arabia.

Not as bad as Saudi Arabia, eh? That's a banner for feminists of all stripes to march behind. Perhaps, when next attempting to overcome his "women problem", the prime minister can stand beneath a sign reading: "Britain. Not as bad as Somalia." I have heard of a race to the bottom, but never one as desperate.

At a press conference Manjoo remarked that in no other country she has audited (this includes Somalia, Jordan and the Solomon Islands) has she encountered "this level of sexist culture. It hasn't been so in your face." There is, she added, "a boys' club sexist culture" in Britain. She was speaking of media culture, rather than the wider culture, which is – and I say this as a British woman with more than 16 days' exposure to the beast – perfectly true. And, in case there was any confusion, Britain swiftly moved to prove her point for her. She was misquoted, misrepresented, and mocked.

This backlash will be familiar to Raquel Rolnik, the last UN special rapporteur to dare to visit Britain before Manjoo. Her primary error was, I think, choosing to wear pink Sue Pollard-type spectacles on her nose: our media culture is, as Manjoo points out, so misogynistic that almost nothing beyond a photo of the spectacles was required to damn her. Always judge a woman from the outside is the lesson. Observe the Duchess of Cambridge in Australia, doing good by dressing well while in possession of a baby. Such precision of branding is capable of ensuring republicanism is thwarted for as long as the perfume holds.

Rolnik made a few righteous observations about the housing crisis – that is, we have a housing crisis and should probably do something about it. In the meantime might we repeal the bedroom tax (or, as I will call it so as not to annoy the Tory chairman, Grant Shapps: "the under-occupation penalty")? The nation looked owlish. Do we really have a housing crisis? Shapps, the raging face of nationalism, called her "a woman from Brazil", a country "that has 50 million people in inadequate housing". The Daily Mail, always fascinated by the minutiae of the housing crisis, said Rolnik practised witchcraft and once sacrificed an animal to Karl Marx.

No, we are not as bad as Saudi Arabia; here all worthy feminists can cheer and resign from feminism, because we are not as bad as Saudi Arabia, now established as the standard we never fall below.

But before we dismantle the movement, its aims being achieved, may I note, as Manjoo did before starring in her own case study, that we have a well-trod response to a woman telling truths about the failures of our country, particularly if she is so unfortunate as not to resemble the women in the Bravissimo catalogue, who have their own struggle? It is to ignore her professional expertise and paint her as insane. It is very difficult to imagine Manjoo or Rolnik enduring quite the same reception if they were not, in this order, female, foreign, ageing and right.

Twitter: @TanyaGold1