Why do people always assume critics are male?

I offer you a riddle. It’s worthy of the Sphinx guarding Thebes, but if you’ve got half the brain of Oedipus you might get it. A father and his son are travelling in a car. The father loses control of the steering and the car crashes. The father dies at the scene but his son survives. The son is rushed to hospital. Severely injured, the boy is sent down for surgery. The surgeon looks down at the boy and says, slowly. “I can’t operate. This is my son.”

How, you will ask, is this possible?

This riddle did the rounds about 35 years ago. It was probably old even then. But the other week, I was having a conversation with a friend about some of the below-the-bar comments a piece I recently wrote for Culture House received (not the contents of the comments, but the nature of the assumption common to all of the commentators), and the friend mentioned the riddle.