Perhaps feminism goes to far? Perhaps the pendulum has stuck and needs nudging back to a more moderate position? Britain's young men, it seems, are in a sorry state: under-achieving in educational matters, if we are to believe a new report from London's Wandsworth Council, from the age of four. Parents don't bother to read to boys, apparently. These days, everyone wants girl babies, very few want boys. Males, disheartened, grow up to be, on the whole, unmarriageable. If one is to believe young women, that is.
When I was at college in the 1950s, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, faced by a small, hard-won female quota after centuries of male-only classes, would tell us: "Women have no capacity for rational thought or moral judgment." Not strange to us that he said it: strange now in retrospect that we young women didn't find the remark offensive. It was just the way the world was. We were going on to be wives and mothers anyway.
In the 1960s, the Professor of English was still returning essays to male students one by one, but throwing the rest in a heap, saying: "And those are the women's. Help yourselves." By the 1970s, all kinds of other things began to get annoying. Job opportunities for women were opening up, but not promotion. Husbands were still "allowing" their wives to work, or "forbidding" them to join political parties and complaining about the size of their tits over dinner. Feminism took off. It could. Women were no longer dependent on men for their living. Women controlled their own fertility.
By the late 1990s, find the gender switch thrown. It is men who complain of being slighted, condemned by virtue of gender to automatic insult by women. "Oh men! What do you expect?" They hear it all the time. Men, or so the current female wisdom goes, are all idle, selfish bastards/potential abusers/rapists/think with their dicks. So men shrink, shrivel and under-perform, just as women did once. Serve the men right, I hear women say. After all those centuries! But feminism was not after punishment or vengeance, simply justice.
Men grow restless; too many women, they complain, continue to believe that they are automatic victims, entitled to insult an oppressor who no longer exists. It is true, they acknowledge, that men continue to own and control what used to be called "the means of production", but the glass ceiling begins to shatter; below the age of 40, men and women level-peg in the promotion stakes. In 20 years' time, expect more women than men to be in top management, the gap between male and female earning capacity to be reversed.
In the 1970s, men were able to say: "Feminism will never work. Women are too catty, too bitchy to one another, too competitive for men. They'll never get together." They were wrong. Women did.
"If you feel so bad about it all," I found myself saying the other day to a suffering young man, "why don't you do something about it? Get together with other men. Start a masculinist movement." I was irritated, half-joking. "Because it would never work," he replied. "Men are too competitive with one another for women. They'll never get together. They want female approval too much." Oh gender switch indeed! It is left to me to speak for men, it seems, while they get their act together.
Let me put it like this. Young 1990s men complain that they are in a hopeless double bind. They care desperately for the good opinion of women. They want nothing more than to live a domestic life. If they show sensitivity, strive to be New Men, they are despised as wimps. If they keep a stiff upper lip, they are derided for their insensitivity.
Women, young men complain, want them for only one thing. They find themselves treated as sex objects. If they make sexual overtures, they are accused of harassment. If they don't, the same thing happens. If he wants children, he has to search for a woman prepared to give him one. If he succeeds, if the woman doesn't have a termination without reference to him, he is expected to bond with the baby and do his share of child-rearing, but given no rights if the relationship goes wrong.
Fathers can find themselves driven from the home with no warning, the locks changed, a new lover in the bed they once occupied, minimum visitation rights to the children but obliged to support them financially. (Yes, yes, I know that for every one male horror story, there are probably 10 female ones, but 10 wrongs don't make a right.)
Girls are seen as having a better life. Girls do better at school, gain more qualifications, give you less lip, find it easier to get jobs, are better able to live without men than men can live without women. (Unmarried men die sooner than men who are married. Unmarried women live longer than their married sisters. Marriage for women is a pain.) Sons are more likely to be schizophrenic, autistic or criminal and not to survive beyond the age of 25. You don't see many girls sleeping on the streets. Daughters are more likely to grow up to look after you in your old age.
Girl power triumphs, certainly in the metropolitan areas, though the farther you go out of town, the more the old ways survive. See the current fashion for male loutishness, as a desperate cry for help - hopefully female help - from a drowning gender.
I do not think for one moment that women should be complacent. The price of female liberation is eternal vigilance. Maintaining a just society in an unjust world is no easy matter. This is still the age of the Taliban. In Afghanistan, women who were once engineers, businesswomen, teachers, writers, social workers, earners of all kinds, have been driven back indoors and shrouded in black by fanatical young men who live by principle, however odd that principle seems to us.
It is not likely to happen here, but nasty surprises can still occur. (Hitler solved Germany's high unemployment at a stroke by barring women from the workplace.) The answer is not to rouse the antagonism of men by insult - but to remember that men are people, too, and to try to see them as person first and of a certain gender second, as once we beseeched men to do for us.
Back in the 1970s, the personal became the political. The speed and energy with which the notion took off startled everyone. On the whole, the revolution succeeded magnificently. The female predicament, once it was shared with others, acknowledged by all, swiftly became a matter not just of common concern but of social significance. Weeping into the solitary pillow turned into banners at the demo.
Once women began to compare notes, it was no longer possible for men to pick them off, one by one, to bully and insult. Dish-washing, childcare, the until then invisible occupations of women, could be seen as "work"; marriage could be viewed as a form of slavery. Now literature and art could take on the domestic themes at the heart of personal life and be taken seriously. And the only sanction ever applied was female disapproval. That was astonishing. It may have gone to our heads.
The impetus for change rolls on, perhaps after the necessity has passed. Forget the personal becoming the political; the political is now becoming the personal. Some remark on how government itself has recently become feminised. In Britain, New Labour certainly presents itself as female, using the language of compassion, forgiveness, apology, understanding and nurturing, qualities conventionally attributed to women. It wants to be loved. The old, traditionally male, values of constancy, gravitas, restraint, heroism, dignity and honour are seen as belonging to a past world. Perhaps they do. Perhaps it is no bad thing.
Where the feminist revolution failed, where women still have cause for lamentation and where they are least powerful, is when it comes to their children. Sure, fathers now bond with babies and are seen in number at the school gate, but it's the problems of the working mother everyone talks about, not of the working parent and certainly not of the working father. The dream of equal parenting has not come true. Exhaustion takes its place.
Women may have achieved equality and even be on the road to superiority, but mothers somehow remain a separate case. The child cries, her heart hurts, that's it. While she looks after the baby, someone, somehow, has to support the pair of them. Some women solve the problem by not having children at all. For others, the state takes the place of the husband or partner and does the providing.