Last month Dublin was host to an Amnesty conference on the subject of violence against women. It had the usual headline act such conferences go in for, Bianca Jagger in this case, and the usual ration of declamatory half-truths and utter falsehoods which are simply too ridiculous to merit refutation - until, of course, you realise that these fantasies are being accepted as gospel truths.
So, for example, the conference was told, and in all seriousness - heads nodding gravely, note-taking pencils leaving trails of smoke - that the prioritisation of international security over human rights, especially since 9/11, has "disproportionately affected women".
Now this is such barking nonsense as might be more probably heard ringing down the corridors of a home for the bewildered. For no women are being held in Guantanamo Bay. No women were deliberately killed by allied forces in Afghanistan. No women have been assassinated by the Israelis in targeted killings. No
woman. . .and so on. Indeed, as I pointed out, in almost all conflicts everywhere men are the primary victims of violence - as indeed they are its authors.
I added: "What is truly flabbergasting about victim-feminists is their inexhaustible ability to scan a landscape of facts and merely see the topographical features in which only women suffer. How often does the noble Erin Pizzey have to repeat that her surveys into domestic abuse showed female-triggered violence constituted nearly 50 per cent of the total?"
A few days later, Fionola Meredith provided the very proof that feminists see only what they want - and in the personally abusive way that critics of the feminist agenda have long come to expect. Referring to the UK Men's Movement, she wrote in The Irish Times: "Its slogan is from Edmund Burke: 'It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph,' (or: Don't take your eye off them or those wicked harridans will walk all over you with their sharp, sharp stilettos).
"Some Irish commentators have leapt on the bandwagon. Kevin Myers of this newspaper only recently lambasted 'the sick and vile set of values' that 'feminist cant' has created. . .But what undermines all this hysterical misogynist bluster is the fact that we've heard it all before."
Now firstly, there is no "bandwagon" - a meaningless American cliché - but a tiny and largely powerless group of critics who, unlike their feminist opponents, receive no money or support from governments, the UN, Amnesty or anyone else. Moreover, it wasn't Edmund Burke who spoke about good men doing nothing, but John Philpott Curran; yet her "wicked harridans" parenthesis of those words perfectly encapsulates the feminist dialectic method, which runs: Don't reply to the contents of an argument, but misrepresent them, and then mock the result.
Which is what she did to me. I had used the words "sick and vile set of values" specifically about a BBC television programme on men and violence, to which - naturally - she made no reference. In the course of that programme, we saw film of men actually being shot dead, and of a Japanese soldier being burnt alive. Yet, as I reported, when a British soldier casually called a colleague by a feminist-disapproved term for pudenda, the word was beeped. It was also deleted from my copy.
What have we come to that there is now a total televisual - and indeed, also journalistic - taboo on an ancient Indo-European word which we all know and which is, phonetically, a cross between "cant" and "cult"; yet there is no taboo at all on showing real men being incinerated alive or murdered by rifle-fire? Is this not proof of the moral confusion which feminism has helped create? Instead of addressing that real issue, Fionola Meredith lifted my words out of context in order to prove my arguments were all "hostile and hysterical misogynist bluster". Well, of course, when in doubt, reach for the m-word: an accusation of misogyny is of course a professional libel, but it is also the trump card feminists invariably play when they run out of any other arguments.
Yet she had, earlier in her article, even conceded some of the anti-feminist case when she admitted the glaringly obvious truth that young men are twice as likely as the average person to be the victim of violent crime - which was largely the point I was making. So why is such an assertion accepted only when it is being marshalled in favour of a feminist argument, and not when adduced by the critics of feminism?
She added: "It seems that male reaction to even tiny improvements in women's rights and opportunities is traditionally hyperbolic and disproportionate." Tiny? She thinks the arbitrary confiscations of fathers' rights to their homes and their children by secret courts "tiny"? She thinks the creation of an entire and massively funded branch of government to impose the feminist agenda "tiny"? She thinks the imposition of physically incapable women on armed forces "tiny"? She thinks the male reaction to all this has been "hyperbolic and disproportionate", when it has in fact been supine, abject and cowardly?
Still, she ends with a reassuring note of maternal condescension towards us poor lickul boys. Maybe, she simpers, as a culture we haven't come close to acknowledging male vulnerability and fragility. And perhaps, she muses, beneath the sturm und drang of the anti-feminist male backlash there's an almost inadmissible sub-text of uncertainty, fear and confusion.
"Maybe," she concludes, with an unconnected pronoun and a sanctity as glutinous as marmalade, "What they're really trying to say is: 'I'm scared'." Vomit.