You would need a strong stomach to view the usual television coverage of the Leaving Cert results: all those squealing girls kissing each other and screaming, I don't believe it, seven hundred points! Somewhere, out of camera, clusters of disappointed youngsters are slinking off to try and make sense of the rest of their lives, their furrowed brows bearing the brand "failure". No celebration for them, merely the certainty that they have been judged by society, and found to be useless.
The majority of these disappointed ones will be boys, just as the clear majority of successful students will be girls. If the ratios were reversed, there would of course be uproar about how our education system was failing young women, and the National Women's Council of Ireland, for whom victimhood is a central icon of identity, would demand that our educational hierarchy be packed off for gender-sensitivity reprogramming. But fortunately, the young men of Ireland have been gallant enough to offer themselves as failure-volunteers, and in sacrificing their futures, have spared the Government, and its many feminist quangos, the need for action.
By Gad, sir, makes you proud.
Back door
Now I feel a particular sympathy for those bemused lads shuffling out of the back door of the school while the television cameras record the rapture of the girls out front, for I sort of know how they feel. I achieved the singular distinction of completely failing two A-levels and scraping a pass in my third, a result which was bettered that summer by - among others - a Friesian heifer and a fire engine. My life did not end there and then, largely because I was middle class and had notions, but most of all because I had the great good fortune of being young before the state-assisted feminist industry had begun to pour scorn and venom on men at every turn, as it does today.
This is the venom which my colleague John Waters has unremittingly endured since he began a campaign to point out the alarming disparities in treatment which men and women receive from the State, the law and medicine. It is a poison that has repeatedly caused him to be dismissed as a pathological crank who has simply been embittered by personal experience.
Yet a woman's personal experience is usually seen as a validator of her political opinions, not a reason to dismiss them; thus the 20 years of stories about violence against women. But now that the originator of the campaign against such violence, Erin Pizzey, is trenchantly and repeatedly declaring that responsibility for starting domestic violence breaks down equally between men and women, she is no longer the darling of the feminist press.
State resources
And John Waters's essential case is irrefutable. The differences in State treatment of men and women are extraordinary. Vast amounts of State resources are spent on mass-screenings to detect cancer among women; there are none for men. A woman who alleges her husband is violent can without further evidence get him instantly barred both from the family home and his children, essentially for all time. Lawyers can - and do - as a standard ploy in custody cases allege that the male in a relationship sexually abused his children; and from then on, he almost has to prove that he didn't. Which of course, he cannot do, any more than I cannot prove that I have never had sex with a seal.
Women comedians, especially in Britain, make jokes about the size of men's penises, though we know beyond any doubt that all male jokes about vaginas and clitorises are utterly taboo. Nor is it merely women who isolate and humiliate boys. Some men are accomplices to this. The very nadir was reached in the Graham Norton programme on Channel Four recently when a mother described (with the boy beside her) how she had walked into her teenage son's bedroom and found him masturbating; roars of laughter from the studio audience. We know that no television station would even dream of allowing a father to describe how he had discovered his teenage daughter engaged in the same pursuit - indeed, a prison cell would probably await him if he did.
It's hardly surprising, given this torrent of abuse and belittlement, that so many young men, already unhinged by the endocrinal explosion of adolescence, are unable to cope. Mental illness among young men is probably 10 times the level than among young women (the figure is difficult to quantify). Less difficult is the proportion of suicides: nine times as many men as women kill themselves. And we know with even greater certainty that if such male-female proportions were reversed, there would be an outcry from that risible shower of blinkered whingers, the National Women's Council of Ireland.
Easy targets
Still, there's hope. Many women deplore the genophobia which has turned men into easy targets for casual, unthinking hatred. "The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest and most intelligent man, and no-one protests," complained Doris Lessing recently. And Ruth Lea, of the British Institute of Directors, partly attributes the failure of British male students at A-level to a deliberate policy of designing examinations to be girl-friendly.
Future generations will regard this state-sponsored femidiocy as being as bizarre a disorder, and as counter-productive of human happiness, as Victorian sexual hypocrisy or US Prohibition. It will, sooner or later, pass. In the meantime, it is an abomination which young males must endure. Thank God for middle age.