A feminist rallies behind men

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, AUG 15. She has said it before, and had the sisterhood kicking at her heels. But she believes it needs to be said again, and loudly. For even men, according to novelist and apostate feminist, Ms. Doris Lessing, deserve mercy.

In a hard-hittting defence of men at the Edinburgh book festival on Monday, she said they had been flogged enough and felt so intimidated that they ``can't fight back.'' She was shocked at the ``unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men'' in a gender war that had clearly lost its way. ``The most stupid, ill- educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, the kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests,'' she said at the Edinburgh book festival on Monday in a savage attack on old- fashioned feminism that still retains a lot of its bark.

Ms. Lessing, who became a darling of the feminist movement with ``The Golden Notebook'' and ``The Grass'', was angry that men were ``continually demeaned and insulted'' with little boys at school made to feel guilty and almost apologetic about their gender. Feminism, she said, had become a kind of religion which ``you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause.'' She recalled visiting a school where a woman teacher was telling the class that the reason why wars took place was the inherently violent nature of men.

``You could see the little girls fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives. This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing,'' the octogenarian writer said, prompting even the politically correct Guardian to acknowledge her remarks. ``Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists'', it said in a front-page story quoting her as suggesting that men are the ``new silent victims'' in the sex war.

Hers was not an attack on women's fight for their rights, but on the idea that good feminism meant beating men till they became blue in the face. ``Men seem to be so cowed they they can't fight back, and it's time they did,'' she said in what might be seen as an instigation to men to take up arms.

Ms. Lessing, who has angered feminists with her outspoken views and is seen as someone who has gone beyond the pale, acknowledged that the women's movement had made some significant gains but it was time to move on rather than go on bashing imaginary enemies of the opposite gender. ``Great things have been achieved through feminism,'' she said but the ``great energy'' generated by the movement had been lost ``in hot air and fine words''. A view shared by many of the veteran feminists, including that icon of militant feminism, Germanie Greer of the ``Female Eunuch'' fame.

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