Sir, - It seems the cat is out of the bag. Well done to John Waters (Opinion, August 27th), for finally exposing the malicious feminist conspiracy whose protagonists occupy classrooms throughout the English-speaking world, their goal being to inhibit the academic progress of male students from early childhood onwards.
As Mr Waters astutely points out, one of the more spectacular successes of the conspiracy has been the use by female primary school teachers of their amazing ability to afflict little boys with dyslexia.
More usually, however, (and equally dangerously if less dramatically), the conspirators operate by subjecting their victims to repeated humiliation by means of comparisons with their female counterparts. What, after all, could be more humiliating than being outperformed by a girl?
Eventually the unfortunate victims are left with no choice but to abandon the road to academic stardom and, "deeply shamed" by their experiences at the hands of the wicked witches, under-achieve (stardom and under-achievement being, as Mr Waters tells us, the alternatives for males in terms of academic performance). All this in order to pave the way for female students who are, after all, genetically programmed only for academic mediocrity.
It hardly seems fair, but now that the truth is out I suppose we women will just go back to accepting our biological predisposition to intellectual inferiority. I'm sure this will be accurately reflected in the Leaving Cert results within a few years. - Yours, etc.,
Rachel Quinlan, Rialto, Dublin 8.