Jo Brand's week

It seems the last bastion of sporting male pride may have fallen to the women. An article this week tells us, following research, that women are better and more loyal football supporters than men. Sick as a parrot, boys? I bet you are. Lots of men I know take the attitude that women only go to matches because their boyfriends do and spend the match looking at footballers' legs and making comments like, "What's the off- side rule again?"

I make no claims to be an obsessive football supporter, but I like the game and follow my team in a vague sort of way. I don't know their middle names and how many corners they took away against Scunthorpe in 1957. To qualify as a bona fide football supporter, if you are a woman, you have to know these things to prove your allegiance. Men are also very scornful of women's football. Lots of them assume the woman pops the ball in her handbag and gets her husband to drive her up to the goal on the way to the shops.

Look, blokes - isn't it about time you stopped being so possessive about the game and just let the women who want to go and enjoy it do so without your macho sneering? We don't harass and humiliate you about moving into traditionally female areas like purchasing beauty products, do we? Well, not yet, anyway.

The new Kevin Costner film, Waterworld, has baddies in it called Smokers. These marauding, emphysema-ridden ne'er-do-wells obviously come wheezing across the waves, lighting a tab as they cough up last night's excesses over the side of the boat. No wonder they probably don't win in the end. Too busy panicking about where the nearest 24-hour garage is, or furtively gathering up nubs from the ashtrays, to worry about pursuing our apple-cheeked, super-lunged Kevin. In America, there is a much more concerted effort to outlaw smoking than over here, although we do seem to be heading down that road. I tend to steer well clear of preaching about smoking, and that includes films in which there is some adolescent attempt to combat our habit further. I will never go to see Waterworld. Well, you can't smoke in cinemas these days, can you?

I don't want to devote much time to the current speculation concerning the relationship between the Princess and the rugby player. I once spent a couple of hours on a train with Mr C and I thought he was a nice bloke. One big disappointment though - he didn't show me his bottom once.

BBC Television's You Decide - with Paxman tackled the problem of single mothers this week, following John Redwood's impression of the unreconstructed Scrooge in suggesting that teenage mothers put their children up for adoption. I don't suppose it'll be long before he proposes the idea of just shooting them. A sour-faced panel, which included a philosopher, an anvil-faced housewife and a female barrister who looked like a refugee from The Addams Family, argued in effect that they, wealthy and comfortable as they probably were, should not pay for the indiscretions of working-class girls. This obviously meant that our poor posh ladies were having to economise with inferior smoked salmon, duff nannies and substandard polo ponies for the old man. They also displayed a fair amount of paranoia about the number of women who are defrauding the system, although perhaps we shouldn't forget that the amounts we are talking about for individuals probably wouldn't pay for a pinkie manicure for these hardened old trouts.

I think perhaps we should pay attention to the fathers in this situation, the ones who leg it off faster than a Jehovah's Witness from Bates Motel. It is time someone had a tete a tete with these guys. Or as I like to call it, head-butted them.

Apparently, sirens that warn of impending nuclear war are being dismantled this week and we will just have to listen to the radio or television to discover if everything is about to go off. This makes the assumption that we are all glued to either enough of the time. I personally would prefer to have a good old-fashioned siren. What if I'm in the bath and I don't get my full four minutes to run outside and grab a big, muscly, glistening ... chocolate eclair?

Female tourists all over the world must have been very distressed to learn this week that a character known as Tarzan, who stalks the beaches and discos of Rimini picking up women, is about to throw in the condom and retire. At the age of 39, with 6,000 lovers behind him, (his figure), he's knackered. He has blow-dried blonde hair and a hairy chest and stomach (yuk), and reckons that eventually his technique was so good that women would flock to him.

Well, obviously they were all so drunk by that point they didn't care that they were getting an arrogant Seventies footballer lookalike. Having been to Rome on holiday, I found the men had a rather predatory attitude to women. Every man seemed to be constantly on the lookout for a bit of how's-your-father. Being matron-shaped, I seemed to appeal to the more mature male, so I had to endure Marlon Brando types in vests whispering unintelligible comments into my ear, the sense of which was made perfectly obvious by the simultaneous leer.

It was like being in a land of medieval sex offenders. This also included a very unpleasant encounter with a security guard in a museum who exposed bits of his anatomy to me that were best left in the Y-fronts.

An Italian friend of mine who often works in Milan and has short, dark hair tells me she is constantly regaled with shouts of "You're a boy!" because she refuses to conform to the long-blonde-haired ideal, accompanied by a fluffy angora jumper with a bunny on the front. I would rather have my ears torn off than wear an angora sweater with a bunny on it.

So farewell, Tarzan. I'm glad you've enjoyed yourself and I'm dead relieved to be able to say: "Me not Jane."