An excitable Martin Bashir landed himself in trouble last week when he gave voice to the apparently sexist undertow of his inner world at a journalists’ banquet in Chicago.

It’s not so much that he addressed the assembled women as “Asian babes” that so appals, or even that he did everything except demand that his co-host, Juju Chang, drop to her knees

in front of him when he said a speech should “be like a dress on a beautiful woman — long enough to cover the important parts and short enough to keep your interest — like my colleague Juju’s”.

No, it was saying all this to the Asian American Journalists’ Association that was hilarious and stupid enough to justify a gold in the Doofus Olympics. Bashir also declared himself “happy the podium covers me from the waist down”. Chang’s impressively restrained response was, “See what I have to put up with?” Indeed we do, Juju.

Most guys keep this sort of thing to themselves, rather than blurt it out under a spotlight and into a microphone for everyone in the audience to listen.

“Gee,” the fried meanderings must go, “I’ll just whisper sweet nothings and get all these sweet, sexy Asians aroused and compliant just like in Patpong.”

Asian women who aren’t soft-spoken, submissive and permanently on heat seem to short-

circuit many western males’ brains.

If you are tall, opinionated, effeminate and transgressive they call you sissy or a ladyboy, who is not much different than most beauty without brains.

Among many things, I’m a babe to my nearest and dearest.

And I’m Asian (in the United States, “Asian” is shorthand for east Asian, unlike in the United

Kingdom, where it is more likely to refer to someone from the South Asian subcontinent). But put the two together and you’ve got a fistful of porn.

“Asian Babe” reeks low-life desperation born of economic disadvantage: not the best description of a hall full of high-powered media professionals gathered there at the banquet.

Certainly not of journalists from America’s East Asian ethnic minority who have had a gut full of fighting ultra-low status with ultra-high achievement.