A wee light goes off in the back of our brains, right back there in the primal part, telling us something is wrong. This is not a real man, we think.
Carpet-gate wouldn't have happened if John Key was a woman.
In fact, if he was a woman we would democratically bully him into applying copious amounts of dye to those frizzy greys before catching a jet plane and representing us on the world stage.
If John Key were a woman he'd buy Adrienne Winkelmann jackets just like Judith and Metiria.
He'd put on a lunch for Obama, not play a round of golf.
And maybe he'd carry one of those little perfumed credit cards they've started dishing out to ladies in the Middle East. Credit cards for her.
Because standard, odourless cards just won't do.
Now, there are some who will be furiously typing out very long blogs about what hair dye and smelly credit cards tell us about gender stereotyping.
Yes, they will be reading that much into it.
I don't care much for social constructions of masculinity or femininity. I thought it was mildly ridiculous when they told us not to buy Barbies for girls and trucks for boys last Christmas.
The toys were setting the wee ones up for lives of pink or blue, babies or breadwinning, submission or dominance, we were told.
No Gender December! they cried.
Other than wobbling about in uncomfortably high heels, I mostly ignore what I'm supposed to do as a woman.
I don't do much of the cooking in my house, I like a beer a lot more than my husband does, and I didn't take a married name.
But just the fact that I'm telling you I don't conform shows we still expect women to behave like women and men to behave like men, and accept the benefits and disadvantages our genders are entitled to.
And I start to care when I hear that being female may be hitting me in the pocket.
I know a woman who was offered a job a couple of years ago. She negotiated hard for her pay.
The boss negotiated hard, too.
Apparently, when he ran out of options, he quipped something along the lines of: "You don't need that much money. Doesn't your husband earn plenty?"
Maybe our lingering expectation that men are the breadwinners explains what the Sallies were talking about when they released their state-of-the-nation report this week.
We've heard it plenty already, but they pointed it out again: women are paid less than men.
For every dollar a man earns, his female colleague probably earns 75 cents.
That's not a huge difference, sure, but multiply it by a thousand and it does start to rankle a bit.
I'd like equal pay. I'd prefer banks to give me free money, not smellies, on my credit card.
I'd like to be able to dye my hair or not dye my hair without judgment on it.
And for that matter, I'd like men to be able to do that, too.
