Gail Trimble’s Oxford Undergraduate Profile mentions her educational background, her passion for Plato and Thucydides, her singing and the fact she enjoys trying to compose Greek metre verse over gin and tonics. Mercifully it hasn’t been updated to mention her record-breaking University Challenge run—making it the last place on the internet not actively objectifying her.

The lynch mob mentality of sizeable portions of the blogosphere isn’t the worst of it—though websites are running “why do you hate Gail Trimble?” polls are disturbing and the answers (“I hate all women”) doubly so.

No, it’s her alleged fans in the press whose comments make me reach for the sickbag. In the Independent Nicholas Lezard smarms:

Were I 20 years younger I would be using all the cunning at my command to get her phone number and ask her out on a date,” adding, “A date is, conventionally, an arrangement whereby a man sets aside some time to boast about his intellect and achievements to a woman, who then agrees to go to bed with him… But a woman who has almost single-handedly hauled her team to glory by knowing a staggering amount of stuff isn’t going to be easy to impress.

He only cares about her brain because he’s afraid it means she wouldn’t fuck him.

Even the women are at it. Jane Fryer, writing in the Daily Mail opens with:

Gail Trimble is all pink and flustered. She is sitting very neatly on a squashy green chair in a music room at Oxford University, fiddling with her waist-length hair, adjusting her specs and discussing Jeremy Paxman, who is said to be rather taken with her.

Not that he’s in awe of her performance, mind:

He’s been reduced to staring at her in rapt wonderment as she purses her glossy pink lips.

The message is perfectly clear: women are only of value as sex objects. Anything we accomplish that suggests otherwise will immediately be recast as a discussion of how said accomplishment affects our potential shag-ability. Depressed yet? I am.