I WAS tempted not to add what John Waters has been saying recently about the legal disadvantages of the Irish father, not least to spare John his feelings - it must be a sad day to find this column agreeing with him - but the sadder truth is that unless an issue is aired and reaired in this newspaper. It is not an issue. There is no other to rum.
The issue which I have spoken often enough about, and which John wrote with great passion about earlier this week, is this thing called equality. But equality does not exist. On the other hand, the rulebook does, and that rulebook has been changed; yet it remains the same.
Equality
The rulebook to which I grew up was that women were weaker and more fragile; it meant in my boyish perception that I, and not my sister, had to get in the coal at night. Then along came feminism, assuring us that; society was a patriarchy which must be demolished. The new Jerusalem of equality lay before us, promising equal parenthood, equal duties, equal top jobs, though it was quite clear that equality of opportunity was seldom an issue when the opportunity was to work down coalmines or to lay bricks on a cold winter morning.
The realisation that the rulebook has changed, but in a way was still the same, came, some years ago when a male sub editor working on an article I had written said a particular item would have to go because, "it was offensive to women". Offensive to women? What did that mean? He couldn't define it, just that he knew that women would find it offensive; and what about men? Was it possible to use an expression or phrase that was offensive to men?
He didn't think so. The weaker sex, in a bound, was weaker again; yet stronger. Just, as my father's generation was taught to mind its language in front of women, we are taught again to mind our language in front of women. There are words - especially the c-word - they object to, and will protest with a vigour approaching violence if it used in their hearing.
Yet such women reserve the right to use the equivalent malegenitalia words about men freely. Women freely use the p-word or the w-word or the various b-words about men; that dire piece of vileness called The Girlie Show on Channel Four does hardly anything else but trade in crude and sexist abuse about men. A show which treated women in such a fashion would not last five minutes, on air before being lynched by feminists.
Critical rules, the normal processes of debate and inquiry, have been crucially altered in the past 20 years to facilitate the portrayal of women solely as victims. Conversely, it became a norm for all books by feminists to be reviewed by feminists. No literary editor anywhere would do otherwise. When feminists - such as Germaine Greer visited Ireland, not merely were they uncritically received but they were, always put on television programmes with their native equivalents, without a dissenting view.
Branded a sniveller
Yet when a male decided to kick back, as Neil Lydon did a few years ago, he and his book were thrown to the wolves. It was reviewed throughout the British press only by feminists; and it was torn apart. The most common noise to be heard was a sneer that he was a sniveller, couldn't take it, didn't like women being equal, etc, etc, etc.
To his observation that far mare men died of cancer of the genitals than do women, yet the medical profession seemed to ignore the problem, one feminist memorably observed: "What's his problem? Has he got a thing about having a small willy or something?"
That reaction is, alas, not untypical of the response men critical of feminism can expect to receive - not reasoned discourse and logical refutation which they no doubt deserve but boots of mob derision; or more commonly in my own case, when I write about such matters, a certain aloof and icy disdain, as if my opinions, doubts or queries make me a lesser person unworthy of the normal courtesies of journalism.
What has formed around the central feminist creed of "equality" is a peculiar and intolerant orthodoxy which insists on the bending of rules to benefit women, where it suits them and which pen its no questioning of the new ethos. When I have written about men being a palpably more violent species than woman, I have invariably received letters of approval from women. But when I say that not merely are men more violent, they are also more everything - more creative, more energetic, braver, stronger - the approval dries up. Yet the obvious truth is that other than literature, the art of the world - music, painting, sculpture - and its artefacts - bridges, roads, theatres, galleries - are male creations.
Feminists' reaction
Merely saying that causes a small shiver to pass up my spine; as I contemplate the reaction from feminists, and the cold disdain with which I can expect to be greeted by certain colleagues. Yet everyone knows this is so. Possibly this merely reflects male positions of power, but I doubt it. Women have been writers within male society from Sappho through to the vast splendours of 19th century English literature, but they have not been painters or sculptors, or architects to be taken seriously, except as exceptions.
Yet artistic men, just like violent men, or imperial men, or financially creative men, are not within the male sex, the norm. They are the minority; and we cannot frame rules around them, but around instead the more humdrum requirements of the rest of us.
Feminists cannot plead a la carte equality, which is what they have been doing; they cannot cite the male child abuser as some kind of norm. He is no more the norm than the great artist or the architect. And, if parents have equal duties towards a child, they have equal rights too. If not for one, then, not for the other.
As John Waters has been observing so pungently, fathers have been deprived by the Irish courts of the rights of fatherhood while being burdened with the full range of duties. In this way, as in so many, we follow America. At least, may we not do so in silence.