This has been a year of living dangerously. You never knew what the day would bring. 

It could be the message saying: “Good morning, the sweetest of relations are like pillows, when you are tired you relax on them, sad you drop tears on them, angry you punch them.”

Or it could be an image of a candle claiming: “I just passed the light of love for the year 2017 to you.” 

WhatsApp is a minefield of Love, Friendship and Good Morning. And of sexist jokes, which alone seem to make up the volume of Love, Friendship and Good Morning taken together.

But most of it I can deal with — easily. With my wide experience of social media — and real life — I can easily sidestep a simple, crude bomb like “20 Reasons Why Beer Is Better Than Women”.

In case you — I assume “you” would be a man here, as is the author of the joke — didn’t know, beer is better than women because 1. You can enjoy a beer all month; 2. You don’t have to wine and dine a beer; 3. When beer goes flat you toss it out, etc. etc. The text is accompanied by the silhouette of a nude woman across whose figure runs a red line. Crossed out.

But this is also a bit like baby puke. Vile, but not the product of an adult system. I-G-N-O-R-E.

What I cannot deal with is the clever stuff, usually sent by people I like. They make me laugh and that is the problem. 

Take this joke, done up in sharp line drawings. 

A couple are watching TV and the anchor has announced: “Archaeologists found a hundred-thousand-year-old jawbone of a female.”

The wife asks: “How do they know it was a woman’s jaw?” The husband answers: “It was still moving.”

At this, you — and here the “you” switches to the female gender — can only laugh. Helplessly. Because with a stroke of genius the joke has brought to life — but it was alive! — the one eternal body part of women, the jawbone, that doesn’t stop generating chatter.

You see it floating right there, at your eye level, like Macbeth’s dagger. A classic, though blunt, weapon that will not go away.

But even as you hold on to your belly, you wonder what you are laughing at. If the jawbone has persisted through the millennia, so has man-talk about women talking. It could also be argued that through the same millennia, women have also been identified with their body parts, right down to the pre-election campaign of Donald Trump. 

Nothing has changed  about some things. 

If you don’t laugh, however, you will be branded a humourless feminist. Which, according to some, is worse than being dead. 

What are women supposed to do? One option is to stop thinking. But we can’t even do that because the jokes, they keep coming. 

The same nice man who has sent the joke above sent me this soon.

Judge: What is the proof that you were not over-speeding? 

Man: My Lord, I was going to my father-in-law’s house to bring back my wife.

Judge: Case dismissed. 

Another arrived from another good friend. 

A woman gets cheated by her husband. She goes to a wise monk. She tells him that she had spent her whole life with her husband, but he left her for a younger woman. 

The monk gives her a cookie. She finishes it. The monk gives her another. She finishes the second one, too.

“Do you see the problem now?” the monk asks the woman. 

“Yes,” she says. “I guess human nature is greedy. You have one; you want a new one. I can understand why my husband did what he did.” 

“No,” said the monk. “I mean you are too fat, you should eat less.” 

As you recover, you also feel like hitting the author of the jokes: he is telling you that it is okay for men to leave their wives when the latter are fat. 

In reply, I can only reproduce the best joke that I got this year. 

Two portly, elderly women with short hair and holding teacups are in a discussion. 

“A virgin birth I can believe,” one is saying. “But finding three wise men?”