My husband is irritating me because he is messing around when he should be dressing the children.

When the time comes to leave for school, I find my undressed boy child whimpering next to the heater, complaining about the cold. A furious rush follows. Finally, he's dressed. We are late for school. I'm late for work.

I turn on the radio as I race through leafy suburban Johannesburg. The newsreader talks about the 'Sunday rapist'.

This man is accused of murdering two schoolgirls and has been charged with 11 counts of rape, 10 of sexual assault, 10 of kidnapping, one of attempted sexual assault, one of attempted kidnapping and two of assault.

I arrive at work. My newspaper's front page story is about a 94-year-old woman who was raped in front of her two great-grandchildren.

Castrate the lot of them, I say, furiously throwing the paper aside.

I don't mind if we all die off. If we are raping children and grandmothers, we don't deserve to breathe the air which has so miraculously blanketed planet Earth.

I know men and women are very different. My son last night asked me to read a chapter from his thick The Ultimate Questions and Answers book. It was about the structure of soil. Interesting? For him it was fascinating. Rather dull, I thought. But I can't allow my own fluffy preferences to interfere with his interests.

I read Princess Poppy's Twinkletoes to my daughter. At the end, with gleaming and tired eyes, she said, "My book is the best."

Better, not the best, I thought.

As they closed their eyes and struggled against the sleep that overcame them, I sat amazed. Again. I often wonder about their differences.

My sweet, gentle boy and my thuggish, extrovert daughter are stereotypes. He likes boy books and shooting. She likes stories about princesses and wearing pink tutus. But what makes these seemingly innocuous differences between boys and girls become differences that are so huge and incomprehensible?

What makes a man think it is in any way okay to rape a woman? What drives millions of women to read Fifty Shades of Grey? Can it really be our different levels of testosterone?

Could the threat of castration make a difference to the way men treat women?