Feminists hit back at Lessing

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, AUG 17. As expected, angry feminists have come down on Ms. Doris Lessing like a tonne of bricks for her politically incorrect defence of men in which she said the great energy of early feminism had been lost in a lot of ``hot air'' and an obsession with male-bashing.

The 81-year-old writer, who established her reputation as a literary ideologue for feminists notably with The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, has been accused of ``losing the plot'' and, like Mr. V. S. Naipaul, drifting into the ``end-of- everything'' syndrome. ``Is Lessing living on Planet Zog, or is it just that she is 81?'' asked a popular woman writer, Ms Jeanette Winterson, suggesting that Ms. Lessing's plea to women to stop harassing men in the name of feminism might have something to do with intimations of senility.

She thought Ms. Lessing's lament that men felt too intimidated even to protest was sheer baloney. For her own hairdresser - ``female, intelligent and sexy'' - clearly didn't share the great writer's perception, and nor did her taxi driver who insisted that he ``thinks of himself as boss in his marriage.''

And then, there were all those tell-tale statistics to prove that it was not Ms. Lessing's intimidating feminists but her ``scared'' men - the ``silent victims'' of feminism - who still ran the show.

``Lessing says we've have got equal pay and opportunity: is that why only three per cent of university professors are women? Is that why the highest-paid journalists and TV presenters are men? Why are here still so few women in Government at the top table in the boardroom?'' Ms. Winterson wanted to know in a Guardian article. ``What planet is Doris on?''

The Guardian has been flooded with letters from irate women after it published a front-page report on Ms. Lessing's merciless attack on female ``misogynists'' at the Edinburgh book festival. They have accused the newspaper of ``insulting'' its women readers by highlighting what they regard as Ms. Lessing's misplaced remarks. One woman academic said it was misleading to describe Ms. Lessing as a ``feminist icon'' as the fact was that she ``never supported women's liberation.'' There were traces of her ``fear of feminism'' even in her 1962 classic The Golden Notebook, and her ``mourning for heroic masculinity'' was old hat.

But ironically, even some men thought that Ms. Lessing had gone over the top; and at least one Londoner was bold enough to put it down in black and white. ``As a man, I feel Doris Lessing's comments are extremely wide of the mark. I don't feel at all `cowed' by feminism or feel the need to `fight back' against it. Fight back against what, exactly? That women have been demanding equal pay for equal work?'' he asked.

A feminist admirer of Ms. Lessing, the columnist Ms. Natasha Walter, wondered what the writer really meant. ``Where is she seeing men so rubbished and cowed, and women so crowing and triumphant?'', she wrote in The Inde pendent. Ms. Lessing was defending the very same men who quietly collaborated in keeping her novel Mara and Dan out of the Booker shortlist even as they made such a fuss about Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth.

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