Dang , if it isn't the old perennial . . . Kevin Myers is still harrumphing at the horror of young girls getting emotional - screaming through their hands, if you please - when they get good Leaving Cert results. And making boys feel bad, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Still chomping at the old chestnut that if the reverse applied and girls were falling consistently behind the boys, the feminist rent-a-quotes (name them, for pity's sake, so we can deal with them) would be demanding retribution.
Still banging on that it's the system, the exams, the futility indeed of testing boys at all that's the problem, given the restless, brilliant creatures that they are, so easily bored with rote learning, so uniquely gifted in the kind of abstract or lateral thinking that those models of mediocrity - females - cannot begin to comprehend.
And what did women ever invent anyway? Nothing, not even the sanitary towel. And why is that, wonders Kevin, who bravely leaves the question hanging.
It is indeed a puzzle. Schoolgirls remain stubbornly ahead of boys on both sides of the Irish Sea. In Britain, the harrumphers blame it on the "system", where the emphasis is on coursework. "The extent of coursework is helping girls because they are more diligent. This is really unfair," moaned Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education. "Coursework is not as fair to any of the students as a sudden-death exam, a system we should return to."
Hey, Nick! Nick, over here! See, we still have the sudden-death system in the Republic and, um, guess what? Gosh.
Well, anyway, getting back to the sheer brass neck of those girlies, expecting to get anywhere by being diligent and conscientious and hard-working and forward-thinking and taking pride in their work. What's the world come to if this kind of stuff is considered important? Chuck it out and you'll see the lads streaking ahead and no mistake.
But hurry, oh harrumphing ones. You have much ground to cover. Four hundred years ago, John Locke was already addressing the problem of male underachievement, comparing the lads' poor performance at Latin with the girlies' fluency in French. And guess what? He blamed it on bad teaching methods.
Forty years ago, such was the harrumphing about girls outstripping boys in the British 11-plus that education administrators had to set a lower grammar school entry point for boys to ensure equality of numbers. Gender "equality" wasn't invented by feminists.
The plain fact is that girls work harder and are more determined than boys. Sadly, they also have less self-esteem, have a lower academic self-image, suffer higher levels of exam-related stress than boys (Hannan & Smyth, ESRI, 1996). No wonder a girl might scream through her hands - it's to keep the volume down, by the way - when she beats the odds so mightily.
BUT society levels things out in the end. Give her five or six years, and she'll be back in her kennel, puzzling over the fact that the lad with the same class of degree, same subject, same university, same job, is earning 15 per cent more than she is.
Or poring over the 52 Irish plc bosses, featured in the August issue of Business Plus, and noting that only one of these "fat cats who are creaming it" is a woman.
So that's all right then. But just in case those girlies start wondering what the hell is going on, drag up questions like - just what did women ever invent? Where is that priceless abstract or lateral thinking so evident in, um, men, etc?
Question: who first cracked the vital element of the German Enigma cypher machine, the element on which all other work depended? Don't tell me - a woman? Correct.
So she's swathed in glory, medals, hagiographies? No. The male codebreakers who dominated the Bletchley Park cypher school at the time, dismissed her idea; too simple, said those brilliant abstract/lateral thinkers.
This is more than academic; had they listened to her, the code could have been broken well before the second World War. And the name of this woman, this veritable exemplar of abstract or lateral thinking? Mrs B.B.
That's it? Yes. (Read Action This Day eds. Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine). You couldn't make it up.
Men have always excelled at hogging the glory; women reserve their energies for things they deem important. They don't compete for the sake of it. Anyone who has ever sat in an office - and shrunk from the relentless locking of horns - could tell you that.
Women can be scumbags. But for the vast majority, that sense of diligence and conscientiousness that is theirs in youth, remains with them all their years.
Name the whistleblowers at WorldCom and Enron? The special agent whose memo triggered the investigation into FBI incompetence around September 11th?
In a maelstrom of competing demands, women do the best they can. They try for their own and their children's sake not to betray that precious early promise.
But they also bear the brunt of domestic drudgery, lose three times more sleep than their partner in a baby's first three years, use their lunchtimes for the family shopping, never stop striving for the decent work-life balance so vital to us all.
And scream through their hands with joy when, very occasionally, it all works out. It's an odd fish indeed that would begrudge them that.