Jenni Murray would have me quaking in my boots and I haven’t done anything. Or rather, I don’t think I have, not against women. My raison d’être is women’s rights Jenni, you can’t be mad. However, for all those coming up against the Woman’s Hour presenter I think they leave with a personal resolution to really think about what they have done.

Had I stood up in front of a group of people and recorded myself telling a hideously misogynist joke about burying my girlfriend alive, then made that footage available to the public. Well, if I was the type to equate balls with braveness I’d say the guy who came out as a misogynist comedian on Woman’s Hour yesterday morning must regularly use a wheelbarrow to cart his cojones about town. I’m serious, this guy might be the first guy to have a legitimate reason to take that entire seat on the bus with leg spread (kidding, INEXCUSABLE).

Last week I spent some time talking about the more obvious forms of heroism, but don’t think that I’m going to stop there. I think this myth and obsession with being heroes, with being the stars of our own little novel, is seriously fucked up.

This week I’m drifting a little closer to home and going to talk about activists and privilege. This is, hopefully, going to be harder to read then my initial rant against the military and the oppressions of capitalism, I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard that argument before.

Now it’s your turn. And my turn, incidentally, because I am as guilty of this as anyone else, and it is fucking damaging to both me and the work that I might be trying to do.

TRIGGER WARNING. When I grow up, I want to be a seahorse. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a superhuman combination of mother, doctor, and astronaut; now, I just want to be a seahorse. It might seem irrational to you, but I do have logic on my side. Being a woman is hard; being a girl was hard too, but it's harder now that I'm an adult.

The main reason I want to be a seahorse is because (if you'll indulge my use of colloquial language) Mrs Seahorse lays her eggs in Mr Seahorse's belly and leaves him to do the heavy heaving. Yes, if you see a seahorse spewing a stream of baby seahorses out its belly button, that's Mr Seahorse, not Mrs. This would save me the weeks when Mordor invades my knickers; as an added bonus, my uterus wouldn't regularly (or not so regularly, as the case may be) graffiti my best date-night knickers with stuff that Vanish won't clean.

“Romance isn’t dead. It’s just fucking boring.” - Unknown Woman on Bus, day after New Year's Day 2013

Man presenting a documentary on nineteenth century fiction, in twenty-first century voice:

Women are romantic, aren’t they? You can be a hard, poe-faced old hag but it’s just a farce. You can reiterate it all over, and over, and over again. How much you don't care about Valentine's day. Your biological clock is anticlockwise. You're allergic to chocolates. Blah blah. We all know the truth. We know you go home, you lock the front door, you light some scented candles, you put your Grey's Anatomy on and you gets to it. The romancing. Doctor McBag-o-Buff is telling a lady doctor that he's into her and you just swoon, don't you? A generous dab of rouge, roses, a playlist that’s 95% Snow Patrol. It’s all there, hidden in amongst your non-romantic 'interests', like crime fiction and David Attenborough. But that girly shit is ready to lull your aching heart and untapped loins when needs be.

Today is the 123rd anniversary of Nellie Bly’s triumphant return from her attempt to recreate Phileas Fogg’s journey in Jules Verne’s book Around the World in 80 Days. We realise Nellie Bly achieved many things impressive even now, but more so considering she did them in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bly argued her way into a job at The Pittsburgh Dispatch paper after its editor mistook her letter of rebuttal to a particularly misogynist piece in the paper as the work of a man and offered ‘him’ a post. At 21 she was working as a foreign correspondent from Mexico and went on to the famous (ethically questionable) asylum expose, where she posed as a patient. Our favourite achievement of Bly’s that we’re taking our Friday 5 theme from today is her beating of Fogg’s (fictional) time – she made it round the globe in Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. This week we list fictional feats we’d like to have a go at…

Whatever gender you are growing up isn't easy. Worst of all it doesn't stop. You just suddenly realise the grown-ups you are referring to are your peers and wonder how they managed to work it all out before you did. Only of course they haven’t. We continue to make mistakes and then either take full responsibility for them or apologise. Every day there’s a small discovery to be made.

Perhaps, like Australian parenting guru Steve Biddulph you will discover how to bring up girls. Biddulph’s latest book Parenting Girls has been received by the BBC’s Women’s Hour and the Telegraph with a gusto that suggests girls have been roaming our homes and streets, feral. Sexting boys with abandon and marking their territory with fake tan prints.

“A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it”  President Bartlett, West Wing S2 ep1 ‘Isaac and Ishmael’ 2001 

“Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain”  Japanese proverb used in The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan 

Our definition of heroism is fucked up. Putting yourself in immediate physical danger is hard. I get that. And I am not indifferent to the fact that there are times when we might be required to fight for the things we value; for our families, our friends, and our freedoms. Or even for other people; defending one another even if doing so put ourselves in danger. These things are occasionally necessary. 

But to only value that? To lionise and praise that as the pinnacle of what we might hope to achieve? 

Mary Beard has been pulled up on this subject before. When the BBC went out on a limb and aired her series of documentaries Meet the Romans many people, specifically AA Gill took great offence that Auntie hadn't gone down the traditional Academic Sexpot documentary host route. No heaving bosom over any artefacts in Meet the Romans, no sir. Just Mary Beard in a red coat (so she would stand out in crowd scenes on camera) laughing at all the little in-jokes the Romans had left behind in Latin for her to find. 

I know this guy. I call him Video Games. He’s always been a good friend to me.

"Hey, let's go machine-gun a tank to pieces!" he says, when I'm bored. "God, you're just so heroic!" he tells me, as I take down the Capra Demon in a flurry of sword-swipes. "How about we go crash a Porsche into a wall?" he asks, after a shitty day at work.

And then sometimes he loudly and messily shits himself, in public, and makes me look like a complete asshole for ever hanging out with him.

Ah the classics. Dickens, Austen, the Brontës, Dostoevsky... we know them well. Well...we know of them. Look we know what you're talking about when you bring them up. Maybe you haven't read them either, although when people confess to a hole in their Dickens it is usually coupled with the great expectation everybody present is familiar with his oeuvre. It's quite possible many first year English Literature students fear having to fake sage nodding as people quote from the classics: “well you know what they say...'You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.'” “Tru dat.”  

It is only by second year you realise A) nobody's read anything on the humanities reading list, outside of coincidence and B) people rarely demand you cite author, title and year of publication outside easily googleable environments. This is, of course, no excuse. Here are the classics we have missed out on, feel free to scold us and give us your classic recommendations, what larks we'll have...