Not him, too

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly.

Like me?!?

Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him.

Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today, in western society, they are oppressors. I’ve never experienced them as such. I come from a family of women who endlessly smashed their way through the glass ceiling. My mother was completely self-sufficient — a professor — as were my not-over–privileged great-aunts, one a surgeon in Delhi in the early 1900s, with her sisters variously a doctor, a headmistress and a mathematician.

Of course there are women all over the world who have been and still are being cruelly oppressed. Young girls are forced into prostitution by male sex gangs (but there again, so are young boys). In the Middle East there is an entirely patriarchal society, criticism of which frequently prompts defensive references to ‘cultural differences’ — an excuse that’s never wheeled out for the benefit of white working-class men.

In the UK, until quite recently, men — and only men — were conscripted into the army, many to face certain death. And there are men who have been completely cowed and often terrified by their womenfolk. Data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales show that men make up about 35 per cent of domestic abuse victims each year.