As time goes by

Until I had a daughter I used to think the problem with me and girls was me. But when you’re given the chance to observe the female of the species up close from birth onwards under home laboratory conditions, you soon lose any post-feminist illusions you might have about the blame for the war between the sexes being divided roughly 50/50.

Chicks are great. I love their poppety faces, their pretty girlie clothes, and their darling little whims. But the fact remains that they should never, ever be taken as seriously as they think they ought to be taken. Do that and you might as well say to the lunatics in the asylum, ‘OK, guys. You’re in charge now!’

Providing further proof was this week’s episode of Lefties (BBC4, Wednesday) about the revolutionary feminists of the late Seventies and early Eighties. There was a northern academic called Sheila Jeffreys talking about ‘penile imperialism’ and ‘problematising men’, and singing with much apparent mirth an unfunny song about all men being wankers. There were women sitting round a campfire making celebratory vagina shapes with their fingers. There were women who’d deliberately chosen to make themselves ugly (or rather uglier) and have sex with other women they didn’t necessarily fancy as a political statement against the oppression of men. And I thought to myself, ‘Blimey. You’d never get blokes acting as stupid as that.’

Not for a moment am I attempting to exculpate us men from our terrible selfish, aggressive, phallocentric ways. It’s just that I think we’re fairly familiar with our many faults by now and understand that this makes us very, very bad. Whereas women, I think, have not the slightest clue about how incredibly irrational, difficult, annoying, hormonal, strident, nagging, unfair, blinkered, touchy, changeable and crap-at-steering-correctly-round-corners they can be.