KEY POINTS:
Marc Ellis has laughed off claims that he's a male chauvinist, claiming he has it on good authority the woman who called him that is "ugly, wears bone carvings and her sexuality is questionable".
The television personality is responding to a report by sports sociologist Toni Bruce, who claims Ellis is reinforcing traditional male chauvinist attitudes to women.
In an address to the Sociological Association in Hamilton, Dr Bruce took particular exception to the show Sportscafe which she claims "reinforced the marginalisation of women".
But Bruce claims her comments have been misinterpreted. "We never made any claims about who he is as a person, we're all fans of Sportscafe. Who would have thought a small research project would create so much brouhaha.
"The point of the research was to show people can be affected by the humorous things they see on TV, without being aware of it."
She also dismisses Ellis' comments about her sexuality. "Whenever a female questions anything about sport her sexually gets questioned. My sexuality is irrelevant."
As he opened his wife's women's clothing boutique in Ponsonby yesterday, Ellis scoffed at the claims about Sportscafe. "She spent 10 years watching the show she hated so she could write this article.
"Some people take things way too seriously, we challenged all sorts of PC notions, we just had fun, did things with a smile on our face and a glint in our eye."
Ellis says he never set out to offend women. "No more than we intended to offend males, we actually intended to offend everyone at some stage. The jokes were on us, nine times out of 10 we were laughing at ourselves."
When asked what his wife would say about the claims, Ellis replied: "She'd laugh, I'm sitting here in my wife's store on a Saturday morning selling women's products."
