LOCKER ROOM:Women in sport are demeaned and diminished all the time, in terms of funding, in terms of coverage, in terms of attitude, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

I’M OBLIGED to warn you. The following dish may contain camogie. There may also be some trace elements of political correctness. Get over it . You’ll live.

We’ll start with the finger food shall we? What were the creative ponytail types at Hunky Dory thinking when they went back to about 1973 to create their startlingly insulting and demeaning new “tits and ass” flavoured advertising campaign? If it happened on Don Draper’s watch in Mad Men heads would roll. And those guys knew their casual sexism.

The chaps who have steered rugby away from the laddish “bestiality is best” days must have despaired when they saw the posters. I wasn’t best pleased myself. With official sponsors like Hunky Dorys who needs chip-on-the-shoulder columnists scrumming against the head? Hunky Dorys are a few notches up the market scale but let’s face it, Mr Tayto would never have done that to a friend. Mr Tayto has a decency which extends to both sexes, bless him.

Hunky Dorys need to do penance by throwing many packets of crispy high denomination notes at sport for young women. Email me here chaps and I’ll give you the names of a few camogie teams who could use the bobs. In fact, seek out just about any branch of women’s sport and you’ll find they are crying out for the irrigation of cash.

Then the lads who choose to depict women in sport as an opportunity for male leering and ogling might get out and watch a few games and try to engage their mono-rail minds on what makes women’s sport different and uniquely heroic. They won’t though.

The reason Hunky Dorys didn’t have to think twice about descending into the world of dreary single entendre with their ad campaign is that women in sport are demeaned and diminished all the time, in terms of funding, in terms of coverage, in terms of attitude.

It’s not a scientific study (although with grant aid it could soon become one) but this column has noticed the effects of our casual prejudices. Whenever we write about camogie, albeit in the sort of sparking, effervescent prose which normally draws bouquets and literary awards in the real world, we are greeted with such a torrent of whingey, moany abuse from the readership that we are forced to go and lodge with Salman Rushdie for a while.

Naturally the abuse doesn’t amount to a full scale fatwa, but for months afterwards little reminders come in the post and by email. Write anything out of line about the four main sports which the male readership lusts after (GAA, Premier League, rugby and golf) and the standard term of abuse will be “stick to writing about effing under-10 camogie, it’s about your effing level”.

It probably is my effing level but there is no shame in that. Working with girls in sport is a radically different experience to dealing with boys. And more enjoyable, yet distressingly few men (or women for that matter) tend to get involved.

Ask the under-10 rugby boys or Gaelic footballers to go and run headfirst through that wall over there because it will help win the match on Saturday morning and you’ll have 15 little under-10-shaped holes in the wall within a minute of so and dazed young fellas on the other side waiting to be told what to run into next.

Ask the under-10 camogie side to run into the wall, though, and they’ll want to know why the wall is there and if you want them on the other side should you not have put a door or an arch in the wall, and in what way will making the other side improve their chances of winning on Saturday morning. Do the other team have a wall? Will they be using it on Saturday morning? Could they climb over it? What would happen if we don’t go through the wall? Are you wearing gel in your hair? And so on.

It’s better than that though. Male sport is dominated increasingly and regrettably by the tyranny of the gym. Players from their mid-teens onwards are bulked up and conditioned to absorb a massive amount of physical punishment every time they play. Games have become wars of attrition. Earn the right to play. Do it to them first.

I watched an intercounty hurling team train a few weeks ago and a good portion of the evening was spent with guys sprinting at full pelt towards colleagues who were brandishing rugby tackle bags. Sometimes they would hit the bags and be physically rebuffed. Sometimes they would topple the two centurions with the bags and, occasionally, they would burst between the bags and through to the other side. It was magnificent and it was ferocious but it wasn’t hurling.

Women’s sport suffers crushingly and depressingly from the embarrassing levels of testosterone we males bring to the business of games. Camogie played well doesn’t lack aggression (although the rule forbidding shoulder-to-shoulder contact is antiquated an needs revising) and allows more room for expression than hurling does. The same is true across the broad panoply of sports. Males look at them and can’t discern that the difference is the point. You can’t say that jazz isn’t as good as heavy metal; just that it’s different. You can’t say that the phenomenal effort submitted by a women’s team in any sport doesn’t match up to the male equivalent because it isn’t heavy metal. It’s jazz and improvisational and is absorbing for what it is.

The sadness is that the attitudes are virtually all-pervasive and it is only when we are faced with an effrontery like the Hunky Dorys nonsense that we even go through the lip-service of pretending that we all take women’s sport terribly seriously.

We don’t cover women’s sport because people don’t watch them. And people don’t watch women’s sport because we don’t cover them and tell the stories. And there are too few stories to tell because there are too few funds and too few facilities and too few people of quality will to get involved in coaching and encouraging girls to take themselves seriously as athletes to fully explore their potential.

And so too many women in sport, if they aren’t being depicted leaning in a pout towards the cameras for Hunky Dorys, have settled for passivity and watching and supporting male sports, and the whole thing declines in a dreary spiral.

The Hunky Dorys debacle has provided us with an easy leg-up onto our high horses. We have galloped to the high moral ground where the air is thin yet satisfying. We haven’t really got the right to our indignation, however. Not yet.