IMAGINE this. You’re a woman weighed down with shopping bags trying to push your way through a hefty shop door.

The bags are heavy enough to feel as though they are sawing through your fingers. You are a beast of burden bringing home the old man’s tea.

Then an apparently chivalrous apparition with chiselled Take That features springs to your aid, holds open the door and offers to help you carry the bags to your car.

What a gent, you think. The age of the gentle parfit knight is not dead… But that, according to some oddball organisation called the Society for the Psychology of Women based in Washington DC (it would be wouldn’t it?) is an act of sexism that damagingly helps to create a culture of women being seen as the vulnerable sex.

And get this – women themselves are guilty of encouraging such behaviour because they show themselves apparently unable to cope without men’s help.

“Women,” says the society, “endorse sexist beliefs…. because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives.”

Other examples cited of such obviously inappropriate “benevolent” sexist behaviour include men helping women to choose the right computer or offering to drive on a long journey.

Even showering a woman with unwanted affection or a man telling his muse that he cannot live without her is also thought to be sexist, according to a study published in the obscure Psychology of Women Quarterly.

Well, the 100 or so women who found themselves drunk and incapable in accident and emergency units in Manchester following a night on the sauce at recent Take That concerts might have ended up vulnerable, but they certainly didn’t need any help from a mere man when it came to quaffing the booze as they waited for their chiselled heroes to take to the stage.

Bizarrely, pubs in the vicinity of the concert venue agreed to a police request not to sell drink to concert-goers, but inside the ground fans could buy large plastic bottles of wine for 18 quid and were Taking That instead. In apparently vat-like quantities.

These women were undoubtedly leading from the front when it came to the booze stakes. They quite clearly didn’t need any male help when it came to choosing bottles of cheap wine to pour down their necks. Just as they probably don’t every Friday and Saturday night when they hit the bars and clubs in their local town centre.

No batting of eyelashes for them, or gazing simperingly at chivalrous heroes holding doors open for them because their happy night cocktail concoction is too heavy for them to lift unsteadily to their pillar box gobs.

In the state they usually find themselves in, if some man declared undying love for them, he’s either not got two brain cells to rub together or just wants to get his leg over.

And said women would probably smack him one for his efforts. Sexist? Never mind those wimmin over in Washington DC, rampant feminism is alive and well in the back streets of Manchester. Or any English city on a Friday night, come to that.

• FACEBOOK creator Mark Zuckerberg must be poking himself in disbelief at the rampantly outrageous success of his social networking site.

For apparently users spend 23 hours of their lives every month browsing the website.

How sad is that? Maybe they are so desperate to be seen to have “friends” that they have this unquenchable urge to tap in every weird and wonderful and invariably irrelevant thought that flits through their head just to ensure their presence is felt.

And I’m not talking about teenagers who use Facebook as their preferred method of contact over and above emails and text messages when they are supposed to be revising for exams, but those of a more mature ilk, the so-called silver surfers for whom tapping away on the internet is the modern-day equivalent of a Saturday night down the social swapping the week’s stories over pickled eggs and pints of mild and bitter.

I joined Facebook to see what my teen was up to when he was supposed to be doing that revision. But I have now apparently committed “Facebook suicide” because I use it less than I used to (the exams are almost over, after all) and might even leave it all together.

Some 100,000 British users de-activated their accounts during May reducing the total number to 29.8 million, with six million logging off for good in the US. Maybe it’s what’s called getting a life...