I’D LIKE to ask all my male readers a question. How would you feel if a woman grabbed your bottom at work or made smutty, suggestive comments about you?

I suspect you would be outraged, and so would any other male.

But if a man grabs a woman’s bottom or makes smutty comments about her, and she objects, she’s not being a sport.

It’s only a bit of banter or flirting, says the man.

Meanwhile a strict Muslim watching the perfect storm of sexual harassment allegations in the Western world will be thinking, thank goodness Muslim women are protected from that kind of treatment by their burkas and obligatory male companion.

They don’t have to fear wandering hands, and any man making smutty comments about them will be dealt with immediately by their male companion.

I am not defending the use of the burka.

Personally I would hate to wear it and find the idea of a man dictating what a woman should wear repugnant, whether it be a burka, high heels or any other dress code that treats women as eye candy or objects.

I choose what I wear, not my father, not my husband, not my brother, not my son, not my employer.

Nor am I suggesting that women should have a male chaperone wherever we go.

We should be able to walk around as freely as men where we want, when we want and in the company we choose.

But when you hear the ever-increasing number of accounts of sexual harassment in the workplace, the sexual favours demanded in the entertainment and media business and so on, you do see how a society could introduce burkas and male bodyguards to protect women.

When I lived in Italy, I noticed that foreign girls such as myself invariably attracted unwelcome attention from males, but Italian girls did not, and I wondered why, because they were in many cases more attractive than the foreign women.

Ah, said a friend, Italian girls have Italian brothers.

Italian men, it seems, are quite capable of controlling themselves and restricting their unacceptable behaviour to occasions when they are unlikely to get a comeback.

British and American men are from the same species as Italian men. So why are so many British and American men unable to control their wandering hands, smutty minds and lips perpetually pursed to give a wolf whistle?

I can only think it is the culture we live in and that men grow up in.

Men don’t want to take responsibility for their own hormones.

If they behave inappropriately, it’s the woman’s fault.

“What else is a red-blooded male supposed to do?” say men. “She was wearing a short skirt” - ie, a millimetre above her knee.

“She was flirting at me,” they say, by which they mean “I found her attractive and my sex drive kicked in”.

A woman in an inferior position socially or in the workplace is in an even more vulnerable position than the woman in the street.

Then the Alpha Male rears his ugly head in her superior’s mind, telling him to treat the woman junior as he would never dream of treating a male junior.

Would the MP who sent his female secretary to buy sex toys have done so had she been a male secretary?

Of course not. Males are treated with respect by fellow males. Why can’t males do the same to females?

Men are thinking beings.

They can control themselves, if they want to.

The best protection for women is not a burka or a chaperone or an outraged brother but a culture in which any man behaving inappropriately towards a woman is treated by all in the vicinity as a disgrace to the name “man” - including by all other men.

So to my male readers – next time you are in a woman’s company, imagine she is a man and decide whether what you are about to do would be appropriate towards a man.

If it is, well and good. If not, lock up your sex drive and behave like a decent human being.