Neil Lyndon's case

Neil Lyndon (who is not a member of UKMM) has kindly given his permission to include his articles from The Sunday Times News Review 3/10 December 2000. We also include some responses of 17 December.

Acknowledgements :

- image from The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 10 December 2000

- articles from The Sunday Times News Review 3/10/17 December 2000.

Neil Lyndon's world came crashing down after he wrote a pioneering article in The Sunday Times attacking feminism. He was treated as a pariah, and his young son was taken from him. Now that his boy has grown up, the writer has decided to set the record straight.

Return of the Heretic : Neil Lyndon's world came crashing down after he wrote a pioneering article in The Sunday Times attacking feminism. He was treated as a pariah, and his young son was taken from him. Now that his boy has grown up, the writer has decided to set the record straight.

Ten years ago my life took a peculiar turn. From December 1990 until the middle of the decade, the common round was regularly spiced with unusual surprise.

One day, I would open a newspaper and find it telling the world that I must be impotent. Another day, I would read that I must have a little penis. While I was eating lunch at home with the woman I lived with, her eyes might drift over the page of a magazine and, seeing my name, she would read that I obviously couldn't get a girlfriend.

Walking through the aisle of a commuter train, going to the buffet car to get coffee, I would suddenly realise that many of my fellow passengers, casually turning the pages of their morning newspaper, were yawning over photographs from my wedding in 1977 and glancing at banner headlines which told them I had gone off my trolley.

In the middle of a winter evening, as we were dishing up our dinner, the doorbell would ring at the remote house in Suffolk, two miles down a farm track, where I lived with my girlfriend and her children and we would find a tabloid reporter and her minder standing on the step and saying: "We thought we'd just drop in." Turning on the radio on a Saturday morning, just as I was winding myself up to an attack on the household heap of ironing, I would hear Ned Sherrin observe as an aside that I was obviously very seriously disturbed by personal problems.

These unusual experiences came my way because I had written some articles and a book. The first and most controversial of these articles was a 5,000-word essay published in The Sunday Times Magazine in December 1990. That essay was given the title (which I felt to be misleading) "Badmouthing". In it, I committed the offence of writing sceptically, even disrespectfully, about feminism. I raised some doubts about the central claims of feminism and I questioned some of the fundamental tenets of its ideology.

Writing articles and books is my work. It is what I have done for 30 years and what I expect to do for the rest of my life. Until December 1990, I was among the highest-paid and best-established feature writers in British journalism, contributing regularly to every "quality" paper and writing about everything from sport to music, from politics to books. I had written the Atticus column in this newspaper. I wrote columns, profiles and feature articles in The Times, The Independent, the Evening Standard and many others. After Badmouthing, however, I became a pariah, a professional and social outcast. My income plummeted from many thousands of pounds a month to hundreds. In the whole year of 1993, I earned less money in total than I had earned each month in 1989.

I had achieved something that may be unique in our age: I had committed an unpardonable heresy.

In an era of no faiths, no moral certainties and no saints, it is almost impossible to say something that so outrages a common creed that its author will be banished or ostracised. Any view or opinion is permissible on the monarchy, the church, political leaders and other public figures. Treason has been abolished. Indecency does not exist. There are, effectively, no limits remaining on the licence extended to entertainers. Yet my writing resulted not only in my professional ruin: it also made me an untouchable. Over the 20 years of my career before Badmouthing, I had made friends with many fashionable people - writers, actors, sports and television celebrities, some of the best-known names in the media here and in America. After Badmouthing, most of these people cut off all connection with me and have never contacted me since. Neighbours looked the other way when they saw me in the street and strangers shifted away from me on the Underground. These things happened. Truly.

What had I said? What could I have written that was so violently offensive? The starting-point for this essay was to say that an atmosphere of intolerance surrounded men. In advertising, in entertainment and in the news media, it had become commonplace for men collectively to be seen as mentally and culturally inferior - idiotic, im-practical, ineducable, violent and slobbish by nature and incapable of love both as husbands and fathers. My article was probably the first to be published in a major newspaper in the West which said that the routine separation of tens of thousands of children from their fathers through the divorce courts was the most serious human rights issue of our time. I think I was the first journalist to suggest that boys, not girls, might share a collective disadvantage in schools. And Badmouthing was definitely the first article in the national media to observe that, while women's illnesses were the focus of immense concentration and spending on research, illnesses that affected men only, such as prostate cancer, were ignored by medical science.

Many of those observations are now commonly accepted. Government campaigns urge men to be screened and to check themselves for prostate cancer. The position of boys in education and of young men in employment is generally agreed to be a subject for concern. The divorce courts are, broadly speaking, a little more protective towards the relationship between children and their fathers. Looking back on what was published then, I think most people would now feel that the arguments I advanced were reasonable and the evidence I produced was sound.

So what was the trouble? If the essay had concentrated only on the dilemmas and difficulties of modern men and boys, it might have excited debate but probably not uproar.

But I went further. I connected the intolerance that was allowed towards men and the neglect of their disadvantages to the universal dominance of feminism. We could not see that men truly did share some serious social disadvantages, I argued, because feminism had appropriated all gender inequalities to women. If we lived in the society generally described by feminists - a patriarchal society organised by men for the benefit of men - it was impossible in logic for inequalities for men to exist at all. My article was received, therefore, as an assault on the foundations of feminism - and, indeed, that is exactly what I had intended it to be. It followed that, if everybody agreed feminism was correct, there must be something wrong with me. I must be mad. Or morally defective. Or several inches short in the penis. Or sexually inadequate. Perhaps my wife had left me. Or I couldn't get a girlfriend. It certainly was not possible that I might be right on some points or might have a good case in general. That possibility was unthinkable. Everybody at that time either agreed with the essential propositions of feminism or had the good sense to keep quiet. As my treatment was to show, any voice that was raised in dissent would be silenced.

George Orwell once wrote that "the Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent". Feminists, being the disciples of a creed, adherents of a faith, share the same attitude and assumptions. Because I had attacked their holiest of holies, because I was a barbarian who had broken into their temple and turned over the altar, I had let myself in for the contemporary equivalent of a tarring and feathering.

Even before my article was published, it had caused unprecedented trouble. A group of women who worked for The Sunday Times Magazine wrote a round-robin to the magazine's then editor, Philip Clarke, asking him not publish my essay and warning that it would leave "an indelible stain" on the magazine's reputation. Some of those women had not, in fact, read my article but that did not hold them back in their condemnation and censoriousness - a pattern to be repeated constantly in the years ahead. Clarke stoutly told them to mind their own business.

The public reaction began the week after my essay appeared, with an article by Kate Saunders in this newspaper. She had asked some women what they thought of my article. All of them guessed, she reported, that my wife must have left me. Clare Short, who had less personal knowledge about me than she had, at that time, about the son she had given into adoption, opined that I must be unhappy about being a man. The publisher Carmen Callil laughed, Saunders said, at my findings on the neglect of men's illnesses and wondered if the trouble with me might be in my trousers. "Could it be the size?" she asked.

Reading this, I wondered what the families of the 12,742 men who had died of genito-urinary cancers that year might feel about the size of Carmen Callil's brain.

During the week between these two articles, Kate Saunders phoned my home to speak to me and my wife. We told Saunders that we were not in the steadiest state to be interviewed, because we had just, that afternoon, got back from hospital where our eight-year-old son had undergone a minor operation; but that information did nothing to stay Saunders's hand in her eagerness to carve us up. Because my wife broadly supported my arguments, Saunders jeered at her for being a Stepford Wife. When I outlined my ideas on state support for the parents of babies, giving both of them the money to take extended time off work, Saunders trilled: "How marvellous!" Alas, she was not able to find space for that merry agreement between us in her article. I was dragged before the Senior Mistress in the dungeons at Broadcasting House and given a stern grilling by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour. Media figures of great weight and seriousness such as Lynn Barber began to write about me in their columns, implying that I might benefit from a quick bunk-up with Princess Diana or some such obliging personification of submissive femaleness.

A storm of zealotry was gathering and I was its focus. The modern version of a witch-hunt may be nothing more than a prolonged roasting in the media but, in my case, it felt as if it might be in danger of getting less metaphorical when a Cambridge history don told her pupils that she would like to see me shot. Around the same time, the president of the Cambridge Union urged her members to burn my writings.

There was another writer in that period whose books were being burnt and who had been threatened with death for heresy. One of the extreme paradoxes of the time was that some of the same western liberals who deplored the fatwa on Salman Rushdie were unrestrained in their zealotry towards me.

The storm broke over my book, No More Sex War: the Failures of Feminism, which I published in the autumn of 1992. It emerged out of more than 20 years' thought, reading and constant connection with feminism. I had not come to this subject as an ignorant novice.

In the late 1960s, when modern feminism was emerging from America and beginning to influence many of my women friends, I was a student at Cambridge, actively involved in radicalism. I joined the editorial board of the underground newspaper Black Dwarf at the same time that Sheila Rowbotham published a women's issue - probably the first such collection of feminist writings to appear in this country. I myself had edited underground magazines (Idiot International, Oz and Time Out) that led the early development of feminism in this country. Among my closest friends in the early 1970s was the Marxist feminist Beatrix Campbell.

I went out with many committed academic feminists and my first wife was an ardent and prominent feminist who wore her women's liberation badge to our wedding ceremony. Feminism was constantly in my thoughts, reading and conversation and, broadly speaking, I supported the feminist cause because it appeared to be naturally on the side of justice, equality, progress and social liberation.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, I had felt uneasily unconvinced by many of the routine claims of feminists, especially on the topics of rape, domestic violence and the sexual abuse of children. I wrote occasional articles that wondered whether it could possibly be true, as feminists often told us, that all men were rapists or that one woman in four was the victim of male violence.

My scepticism hardened over the years when "feminist principles" seemed increasingly to be the excuse that unpleasant people gave for intolerable behaviour. Feminism began to appear to me to be reactionary and an agency of injustice and inequality. I increasingly felt that every one of the routine claims of feminists was nearer to the observable truth if you turned it on its head.

Researching my book in 1991 and re-reading many of the essential texts of modern feminism, I found that all the disparate elements of my disbelief locked together. The three months in the autumn of 1991 when I did nothing but write the book were the most thrilling period of my working life. I felt completely absorbed every day in managing a vast mental jigsaw and putting its pieces down in print. When it was finished, I felt more elation than I had ever known from writing.

In particular, I was happy with the chapters of forensic analysis in which I unearthed the cultural and psychological origins of modern feminism. The book proved, I felt sure, that change for women in the period since the French revolution had, broadly speaking, occurred with the consent of the whole population, including men. It blew away the ideological hokum at the root of modern feminism - the idea that our society is patriarchal in its organisation.

Most of all, I was proud of the book's central argument, which advanced the idea that change for women had been facilitated since the industrial revolution by mass-produced contraceptives: the origin of the decisive changes of the last 50 years, I said, lay not with women's liberation but in the pill and in abortion by vacuum curettage. Much of the book was scholarly, even turgid, and quite hard to read. My own personal experiences and reflections were mentioned on only 12 pages out of 250.

It is amazing now to read the press cuttings and look back on the riot of reaction that greeted publication and went on for years thereafter. More than 100 reviews and feature articles were published of which only three explained the book's central ideas and discussed them. Many of the people who wrote about me had clearly not read the book. Their articles were almost entirely devoted to personal attacks on me. Most reviews declared - on the basis of no evidence - that the book emerged from personal disturbance in my life and was largely about me.

Every literary editor gave my book to a feminist to review, which was like giving an anti-Catholic book to a cardinal. Those writing in left-leaning papers were the least scrupulous. The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, to both of which I had been a regular contributor, suggested that I had gone mad.

The Guardian published outright fictions about me and mangled my own writing to make it look as if I was writing from a right-wing perspective. When the Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett wondered in print "Why did Lyndon seem to hate women so much?" I offered to give �1,000 to the campaign group Justice for Women if she could find a word I had ever written or said that showed I hated women. Bennett did not reply so I raised the complaint with The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, who dismissed it as being unimportant.

The novelist and columnist Joan Smith gave it as her opinion that I might be sexually inadequate. She had recently published a collection of writings called Misogynies, yet she was able to go into print with an utterance of her own about another writer as barbarically sexist as anything in her collection.

At that time, Smith was living with the diarist and columnist Francis Wheen, who seemed to have a bit of a case about me. In anonymous columns in Private Eye, Wheen wrote about my evident inability to get a woman. This was thoroughly baffling and hilarious. Throughout my adult life, from the age of 15, there had never been a day when I had been without the love of a woman, sometimes more than one. At the time when Wheen was going to town on my failure to attract a woman, I was more happily in love than I had ever been and living with a woman so good-looking that she still turned men's heads in the street when she was in her forties. Knowing Joan Smith as I did - and though it may be ungallant to say so - I would not have been in a hurry to swap places with Francis Wheen.

The unwillingness of journalists to investigate and report the truth about me and their unswerving determination to write fictions was one of the most consistently weird aspects of the time. A series of women feature writers trailed out to Suffolk to interview me. None reported I was happily involved with a lovely woman, even those who had actually seen her. Angela Lambert told readers of The Independent that, when she met me, I had been wearing a pair of jeans I had meticulously ironed with my own hand. This made my girlfriend cross, since she had ironed those jeans with her own hand. Why did Lambert, like Wheen, assume that she knew the truth without asking?

Part of the reason was, obviously, that my second marriage had broken down. Between the time when the first Sunday Times article was published in 1990 and the publication of my book in 1992, I had left my wife and started living with another woman. This misfortune and upheaval supplied the zealots with the ammunition they needed to attack me. My estranged wife contributed to the mischief when my book appeared by writing a self-serving piece in the Daily Mail, which The Guardian deigned to pick up and reprint. Both papers offered me the opportunity to reply but I refused, until now, to say anything about that marriage. I wanted to discuss my book and its ideas, not my personal life. And I wanted to protect my son, then 10, whose circumstances had become unbearable and whose life was hell. I got a court order that forbade my wife and me from discussing our marriage in public until our son had grown up. He was 18 last month.

I would not speak. But, if any of the journalists who wrote about me had investigated the truth of my personal life, they would have found an extraordinarily interesting and revealing story - one which, paradoxically, illuminated and reinforced some of the themes of my writing.

The truth was that my marriage, which had been impossibly unhappy on my side for more than 10 years, had broken down largely because my wife was an extremely heavy drinker. When she was drinking, I found her nightmarishly impossible to live with. She did almost no work and contributed little to our income. Our marriage ended over her drinking and our associated money troubles, among other things.

My book had nothing at all to do with the failure of my marriage. There was no more connection between my personal life and the ideas in my book than there would have been if I had written a book - as I have long thought of doing - about the origins of atheism.

But the failure of my marriage did have something to do with my work on feminism. My wife was disturbed and unbalanced by the published attacks on me and, to my horror, her drinking worsened in 1991. After we separated in September 1991, she took advantage of those attacks to tell our friends and neighbours that, as all the papers were saying, I had lost my mind.

Just before Christmas, in December 1991, she took our son to Scotland, where she went to court and, without my knowing that her application was being heard, obtained a temporary order giving her custody in Scotland. The reason she gave for abducting our son was that I was causing her embarrassment by openly conducting an affair in Suffolk, where we lived. In support of her application for custody, extracts were presented to the court from my writings about feminism, as if these proved that I must be a monster and an unfit father.

By order of the Scottish Court of Session, our son was placed in the custody of a person I believed to have at least a serious drink problem and given over into a way of life that severely damaged his boyhood. (My son has read this article and, while he would naturally prefer our private life to remain private and he is concerned for his mother who is seriously ill with rheumatoid arthritis, he agrees that the moment has come when I should make the truth known.)

Thus it happened that I, who had been thinking for half a decade about the courts' readiness to eliminate the natural rights of fathers, found myself comprehensively eliminated from the life of my only child, to whom I had always been absolutely devoted. And one of the instruments by which that evil injustice was effected was the work I had written about the injustices men endured in the courts.

Why was no journalist interested in this extraordinary story? Why - in all the thousands of inches of newspaper coverage given to me and my writings - did nobody investigate the truth?

Angela Lambert confidently informed Independent readers that I was all worked up because my child had been swiped away to Scotland and I had written my book because I felt I was being treated unfairly. A host of other writers followed this fiction, ignoring the fact that I had delivered my book to the publishers before my wife removed our son. The abduction did not provide the motive power for the book: the book was used in court as an excuse for the abduction.

The reason why they did not seek out the truth must be, I think, that the imaginary role in which I had been cast - as heretic, as moral derelict, as sexual inadequate, as maniac - was essential to the dismissal of my arguments. If the fact had been reported that my child had been abducted and that I had been driven so far out of his life that I had to get his school reports through lawyers, a different and more sympathetic attitude might have been required towards me and my work.

But - no matter what terrible trauma was being inflicted on an innocent young boy - justice and sympathy were not to be afforded to me. Who, after all, feels any need to be fair to a heretic?

Neil Lyndon has suffered personally and professionally for 10 years for rejecting feminism, while its high priestesses have become powers in the land. So why is he smiling now?

The bankruptcy order made against me in August 1992 was No 213 of the Ipswich county court. I shall not forget that number. Nor shall I forget the moment when the house I had loved most out of all my houses, the one in which I had hoped to live the rest of my life, was repossessed.

I am equally sure I will always remember where I was (sitting on a bed with a rose-patterned spread, in a hotel in Manchester, on a tour to promote my book) when a lawyer in Edinburgh told me that the Court of Session had awarded full custody of my son to his mother.

Those were among the more pointed consequences, direct and indirect, of the articles and the book I wrote about feminism in the early 1990s. Other effects took more time. For four years, I was enmeshed in divorce, custody and access proceedings that must have cost about �60,000 in legal aid. The professional and social ostracism I had earned continues to the present day.

Having kept the company, through my journalistic work, of presidents, Nobel prize winners and Olympic medallists, I was reduced for years to writing about motorbikes and cars (I am very fond of motorbikes and cars but never expected that they would become the only subject I would be allowed to write about).

Troublesome as they were, these consequences were trifling compared with the effects on my son, who had been abducted to Scotland under the pretext that my views of feminism made me unfit to be his father. He was estranged from me for six years and we were not to see each other at all for 2� years. When he was taken from me, he was a little boy who still liked to hold my hand: when he came back, he was 6ft 3in and his voice rose from some depth below his boots. In the meantime, he had been confined as the sole companion, supporter and carer of a woman who drank so much that she was frequently incapable of driving him to school in the morning or of picking him up in the evening.

Without my having any voice in the decision, he was entered on an assisted place at an HMC school in a small town in Perthshire. This school, which proudly boasts about its excellence, apparently not only failed to notice that he was often standing outside the gates at the end of school for more than an hour waiting to be collected. It also saw nothing unusual in an average of 20 days' absence per term (those were days when his mother couldn't get him to school or she was so paralysed with drink that he had to stay at home to care for her).

The rector (head teacher) of that school went along with my ex-wife when she insisted that I should receive no information about our son and he even refused to promise that the school would let me know if my son was hurt in an accident. It was obvious that he regarded me as someone who had placed himself beyond the bounds of decent society - hardly surprising, after the furious attacks and condemnations that had been published about me.

As the 1990s went on, therefore, I had plenty of reason to be sorry that I had ever given any thought to feminism and I did get angry with myself for some of the ill-considered things I had written. If I could, I would have wanted to go back and expunge whole passages from my earliest articles on feminism. These were not, however, the parts where I had expressed doubts or dissidence about feminism, still less the overall case I had gathered. The sections I regretted were those where I had shown respect for the intellectual body of feminism, where I had uncritically endorsed any of its claims.

I mentally kicked myself, for instance, that - as a slack-minded graduate of the hippie school of politics - I had ever casually borrowed the feminist language of oppression to talk about the position of women in earlier ages and other societies. How could it possibly be true or fair, I began to wonder, to say that my grandmother, who had eight children, was more oppressed than my grandfather, who worked six 10-hour days every week in a factory and also had eight children? Did either of them oppress the other or were they merely presented with conditions and ways of life that were unavoidable and natural to their time?

Was their eldest son Tom the beneficiary of a patriarchal society when he was blown to shreds near Amiens in 1918, three months after his 18th birthday? And was their youngest daughter, my mother, more the victim of oppression when she was working in Marks & Spencer and married before she was 20?

As my scepticism grew, I found it embarrassing to realise how uncritically I had acquiesced to feminist ways of looking at the world. Once I started thinking more independently, however, it was exhilarating how quickly the feminist view fell apart.

For instance, the more I thought about societies other than our own - societies in the past, societies in other parts of the world - the clearer it became that the order of relations between men and women was determined, above all, not by the power-lusts of men, as feminists were wont to say, but by the availability of reliable birth control. Where women could not control their fertility - as in the West before the 20th century and in parts of the Third World today - they were inevitably confined within a domestic life. When women could control their fertility, they automatically gained admission to the public life from which they had been excluded - education, employment and political representation.

The class war between the sexes that had been declared by Engels and trumpeted by Germaine Greer and her 1960s sisters was nothing more than a historical and intellectual misprision - like something nasty on the pavement that had got stuck as human beings paced along and was difficult to scrape off.

The longer I went on thinking about feminism, the more I found that I doubted everything. It even happened that an ultimate Heresy of Heresies edged its way into my mind. Had I become the vessel of Lucifer himself when I began to question how much influence the suffragettes had, in fact, exerted to bring about votes for women? In what perverted state of mind would a man have to be to think such a thing, questioning the standing of the greatest saints of feminism?

Well, perhaps everybody should try thinking about it. The franchise was first extended to men in Britain in 1832 but universal suffrage for men of 21 years of age or over was not introduced until 1917. Only 11 years later voting qualifications were made equal for men and women. The normal view of this history is to say that suffrage for women was delayed and resisted by a male establishment desperate to retain its powers over women.

Another view is possible. You could say that the most striking feature of this history is the speed with which change for women was introduced and accepted. If you take that view, the history of women's suffrage is, among other things, a tribute to the willingness of men to embrace change for women. Men such as Gladstone and Disraeli did oppose votes for women (partly because they were toeing the line drawn by Victoria); but it is equally true that men were among the most active advocates of change for women. After Mary Wollstonecraft, the most influential 19th-century promoters of women's suffrage were John Stuart Mill, John Bright and Richard Cobden. The first British women's suffrage association was founded in in 1865 by John Stuart Mill - that rotten old patriarch.

Why, then, do we continue to teach our children in school that women got the vote only because heroic suffragettes rose up and tore it out of the ungiving hands of horrible men? The answer is, I think, that there is much about feminism, about the apparent victimhood of women, that our age profoundly needs to believe and we are determined to believe it regardless of reason, evidence and truth.

As Bertrand Russell said in Sceptical Essays: "The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders' lack of rational conviction." That remark applies generally to feminism. It applies in spades to the phenomenon of domestic violence.

In the mid-1990s, I co-wrote an article which proved that a number of accepted feminist claims about domestic violence were false. For all the difference it made to what people believed then and believe now, I might as well not have bothered.

This article in The Sunday Times was written with the statistician and social analyst Paul Ashton. Drawing upon published and reliable research, we showed that only 5% of women claimed to have been attacked by the men they live with. This compared with 11% of men who claimed to have been attacked by the women they live with. Violence seems to be at least as common between gay couples as between men and women and, whether between homosexuals or heterosexuals, violence in the home usually follows the consumption of drink and drugs. In some measure, domestic violence, like much other violence, can most usefully be seen as a correlate of excess drinking and drug-taking.

In other words, this article showed that women are not so much in physical danger from the men they live with as everybody has been led to believe; and it also showed that domestic violence is a more complex subject than we have been given to understand.

How much difference did these interesting findings make? Not a jot. In newspapers and on television, domestic violence is broadly portrayed today in exactly the same terms as it was 30 years ago, when feminists began to monopolise the subject. Campaigns supported with public funds such as zero tolerance continue to allege that one woman in four suffers domestic violence - even though there is not one scrap of dependable evidence to support that claim.

Police forces continue to report the number of calls they receive asking for help in domestic conflicts as if those numbers give a reliable picture of domestic violence (they don't). Decent people everywhere believe that good, defenceless and non-violent women in millions are knocked around by brutal men ("everybody knows men in the northeast beat up their women" protested a lady editor on The Independent when I wrote a piece for it about domestic violence).

Our society has sealed its mind shut on the subject of domestic violence and no argument, no evidence will open it. We profoundly would prefer not to know anything that contradicts our beliefs.

That, in my experience over the past 20 years, is true of feminism as a whole. My sorest self-reproach is that, when I was younger, I really did take it for granted that, as feminists claimed, feminism was a catholic body of thought, with sophisticated intellectual standing. I believed - because they assured us that it was true - that feminism was open to debate and was evolving through argument. My experience has taught me that feminism is more accurately described as a closed system of prejudice which its adherents are terrified of opening to question.

Take, for example, my friend G. She is a university teacher. When I first met her, more than 20 years ago, she described herself as a Marxist feminist. During the decades we have known each other, I have moved from a general conformity with feminism to a position of outright opposition. G still describes herself as a feminist (the Marxist tag seems to have slipped off some time ago) and it is obvious she still likes me, but what is most peculiar about our friendship is that she will not read my book.

I gave her a signed copy. She promised to read it and send me a letter, setting out her disagreements (the implication was that she would put me right on my errors). She never read the book. I kept on nagging her and teasing her and, year after year, she would say "I'll definitely read it this summer" or "I promise I'll read it by Christmas". Ten years have passed. I think it's safe to assume she is not going to read it. This is peculiar. The etiquette between friends who write books is well understood. The author gives a copy of the book to the friend. The friend then reads the book and concludes the transaction by telling the author that it is wonderful. The process is then ready to be repeated in reverse.

I have read G's books. She won't read mine, even though she knows that I, her old friend, believe my book to be the most radical, progressive and egalitarian critique of feminism published in the past 50 years. G was not the only one of my friends who would not read my book. Nor was she the only one who promised to write a letter and defaulted (two other academic feminists made the same patronising undertaking and never delivered). But she was the only one who gave an insight into her reasons when she said: "I am afraid to read it in case it makes me think that I have been wrong all these years." She cannot afford to have been wrong.

She is in her fifties, internationally recognised in her field, on course for a chair if she wants one, perhaps a peerage, certainly a spot on a quango or two. Her entire career depends upon the veracity of the feminist viewpoint. If she had to change her mind about the fundamental claims of feminism now, all the work of her adult life would have to be re-examined. It might turn out to be worthless. She dare not face that risk.

An entire literary, journalistic, academic and political establishment in Europe and America now takes the central components of the feminist ideology to be unquestionable articles of faith. That establishment stretches from the German Greens to Tipper Gore. It includes both Blairs and both Clintons (probably not a Putin). Its members cannot conceivably embark on an intellectual re-examination of the credo they have shared since they were young. They have too much to lose.

Take editors like Rosie Boycott of the Daily Express or Janet Street-Porter of The Independent on Sunday; take columnists such as Polly Toynbee of The Guardian or Jenni Murray of Woman's Hour and the Express. Every week, their work includes some direct or tacit reassertion of feminist principle. It is as likely that they might reconsider the notions that have propelled their professional lives as it is that the Pope might own up to having second thoughts about women priests. Feminism will remain a forceful element in the establishment's attitudes so long as the present generation of feminists, now in their fifties and sixties, retain their powers (not much longer, therefore, thank God).

A review of my book in the New Statesman asked, incredulously: "Does Neil Lyndon really imagine that we are all going to say that we were wrong about feminism and think again?" Something like that had indeed been my hope when I wrote No More Sex War.

How hopelessly naive I must have been to expect that the 1960s and 1970s generation of leftists - of whom I was one - might think again and admit the possibility that they (we) might have been mistaken. The beautiful people of the 1960s, the generation of love and revolution, do not have it in them to admit error about anything at all, least of all feminism. If they were mistaken about feminism, somebody might see that they actually have been wrong about everything.

Feminism was the last remaining conceptual spar from the wreckage of the 1960s to which that generation was clinging. Though we might not admit it, we had achieved nothing to change or stop the progress of the Vietnam war.

The cold war had threatened the extinction of the planet and then come to an end without its leaders showing any susceptibility to the thoughts of our generation. Far from ushering in a new epoch of love, peace and a saintly renunciation of property, my generation had let in Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and then taken material greed to new heights. Former hippies became billionaires and competed for the most exclusive possessions. Former revolutionaries spent fortunes on cocaine and exercised their free-love philosophies on each other's spouses.

The changes that had incontestably occurred in the position of women were my generation's only claim to have achieved anything lasting in the world. If the assertions of feminism should turn out to be bogus - if it was recognised that women's lives had changed for reasons that had nothing to do with feminism - my generation's most radical and original contributions to the political world would be the penological thoughts of Jack Straw, George W Bush and Ann Widdecombe.

I think that was one of the reasons why, when my book was published, the establishment of beautiful people closed together to annihilate the danger that it might have posed. Their desperation not to allow debate was startlingly naked. "What I hope most of all is that people will not read this book," said a feminist on Start the Week. The feminist QC Helena Kennedy even included my book among her selection of books of the year in a newspaper's Christmas list and urged readers not to buy it.

There was an incidental benefit for me in this expulsion from London's fashionable media establishment. It also freed me, at last, from my lifelong attachment to the left.

Having joined CND in 1961 when I was 15 and dallied throughout my teens with the Young Communist League, the left had been my political family home all my adult life. All my closest friends share roughly the same kind of political history.

Belonging to the left must be like being a Catholic or a mason because it imposes a permanent sense of collective loyalty and mutual admiration. I always be-lieved as an automatic creed that, as a Cambridge girlfriend said, "the best reason to belong to the left is that you meet the nicest people there". No doubt Young Conservatives feel the same thing about each other but there was a particularly powerful tribal sense of belonging about the 1960s generation of the left. Anybody who had been on an Aldermaston march with the Committee of 100 (I had), to Grosvenor Square in 1968 (I had) and to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 (I had), had secured lifelong membership of a political and social club that may not have been as exclusive as the Athenaeum but whose members would ultimately wield serious power.

When I published my book, I effectively tore up my membership card for that club. Just as those bastards turned their malevolence on me, so I washed my hands of them. My book had been, in many ways, a characteristic product of the 1960s and was written in the authentic voice of that generation - egalitarian, libertarian and absolutely non-sexist. It had been intended to reinvigorate discussion about gender on the left, instead of which it was denounced by leftist halfwits, most of whom had not read the book, as being right wing.

I was glad to free myself from those people, even if it meant that I would never write about anything in the future except cars and motorbikes. If that is my punishment, I can take some more of it.

Meanwhile, things have been looking up. Nearly all the inequalities for men that I described 10 years ago have been recognised to some degree and are being considered. Last week, the government announced proposals to give fathers paid leave when their babies are born - a recommendation that I think I was the first to make in 1989. Last week on Woman's Hour, Jenni Murray gave a grave hearing to a medical expert who said that men's illnesses were neglected because, as a society, we prefer to see women as being natural victims. This is precisely what I was ridiculed for saying in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1990. I do not see any immediate sign of ratification for my idea that every MP's job should be shared by a man and a woman, thus eliminating the gender imbalance of parliament; but it has only been 11 years since I first advanced this suggestion and changing parliament, as the suffragettes discovered, takes at least half a century.

So far as the position of men and boys is concerned, I am more optimistic now than at any time in the past 15 years because it is obvious that rapid change is in the works.

For myself, too, some improvement can be reported, if anybody is interested. The 1990s continued to visit upon me some trials that might have tested Job. These included the death of a baby in 1994; a near-fatal accident in 1995 when the horse I was riding was hit by a lorry (my skull was saved by my riding hat but the horse's pelvis and spine were smashed and he had to be destroyed); and the failure of another marriage, which finally broke under the strain of so many relentless troubles.

But my son and I were reunited at the beginning of 1997 and he came to live with me later that year. During the years when we were apart, I once told an Edinburgh barrister that I imagined and feared that my son's circumstances might be so nightmarish that he could be thinking of killing himself.

The advocate's reply began: "Setting that aside . . ." When my son and I were reunited, however, and he began to talk to me about his life in the previous six years, it became apparent that my most terrible fears were not far from the truth. When he was still only 14, he had been contemplating the possibility that he might end up in care.

I had the great good luck to be able to look after him for the last three years of his school career (he stayed at the same school in Perthshire, where the rectorship changed hands). He is on his way to university now and, so far as I can tell, he seems to have survived intact the unendurable horrors of his earlier life. When he left school, his school magazine described him as "the star of his year both intellectually and personally: one of those comparatively few pupils whom many teachers will always remember." You might guess that I am proud of him.

So the only regrets that I am left with from my years in the lists with the feminists are that I wish I hadn't held back so much and been so polite about feminism.

And, yes, just in case anybody is wondering, I have got a lovely girlfriend. "Magical," my son calls her. Some guys get all the luck.

If Neil Lyndon was one of the millions of women stalked, raped, beaten and murdered by men each year - two a week murdered by male partners in this country alone - he might really know what it is to be "hounded by hate" (News Review, December 3 and last week). As it is, what he is complaining about is women who have had the temerity to disagree with him, including an ex-wife who - incredibly - wanted custody of her own child. I wonder if she drank that much before she married such a whining bore? Next time William Hague disagrees with Tony Blair during Question Time, can we expect the PM to squeal, "Ooo, William, stop hounding me with hate"?

Surely this is the me-too victim culture gone mad? I'm afraid the reason why Lyndon is not a household name in his chosen profession is far less exotic than a feminist cabal keeping him out; it is simply that he is not a very good writer. In a piece of hate-driven rhetoric such as his, even he should have been able to make a few phrases dance and sparkle. Instead it had all the fire and dazzle of a complaints letter to the Radio Times attached to a lead balloon.

Julie Burchill Brighton, Sussex [Editor's note : in case you don't know, this woman is regarded as a fanatical feminist].

Why has feminism gone unrefuted, when its philosophical foundations are so obviously weak? Lyndon blames the feminists for destroying his already failing marriage, and for his loss of custody of his child - all because he wrote an article attacking them. He obscures a real issue of justice: the rights of fathers in divorce. He wants to engage with feminism, take its arguments seriously, and there lies his error. Every man knows it is pointless to fight a woman: if you lose you're a wimp, if you win you're a bully.

Educated middle-class men soon learn the new verbal rules; we don't say chauvinistic things any more - openly. Feminism is merely frivolous wordplay. Journalistic fashion has favoured women over men for 30 years. Let them twitter. They're still frightened to go out at night.

I was not surprised Lyndon received a trouncing at the hands of his female journalist peers. I have encountered the same closed-mindedness whenever I try to discuss the same issue with my female peers at University College London. I have now been labelled a sexist, male chauvinist etc and I am growing weary of these unoriginal names.

With the current mood of girl power, are we heading for a society where the role of men is so marginalised we are nothing more than genetic code carriers? There was one occasion when the lady I offered my seat to on the Tube blankly refused and ranted at how my action was a sly way of "keeping her in her place".

At the time my reaction was that the only thing which would keep this woman in her place was a backhand across the face. Such a response would not have maintained the gentlemanly act I initiated and so I retreated at the next stop. I think it's time men stood up for ourselves. We should go back to the old code of the gentleman.

Three quarters of the way through Lyndon's extended self-justification (and quite a lot of "poor me"), he gets cross and accidentally reveals himself as the unreconstructed male chauvinist pig he clearly is.

Lyndon's recollections of his disastrous tangle with 1980s feminism show that we do not live in an enlightened society at all. He encountered head-on what others have termed liberal fascism - the tendency to shout down anybody who is churlish enough to criticise or question a fashionable cause. Unfortunately for Lyndon, that hard-nosed credo which he sought to expose has now been distilled into what The New York Times called "bimbo feminism", hardly worth a protest march let alone a fatwa.

I still have Neil Lyndon's original article. He was right to have written about such issues, but he should have published it under a female name. It has always been okay for women to criticise men, but not the other way round.

I can see why Lyndon and his book were treated like this. They expose feminism for the deceit it is. My only criticism of his thesis is that, like so many men, he tries to look on the bright side and hopes he can see light at the end of the tunnel. How wrong could he be? This nightmare will end only when everyone stands up and says no more.

Feminism is not to blame for the loss of Lyndon's child, the legal system is. At present, because of the volume of divorces, the level of behaviour exhibited by the mother has to be extreme for her to lose custody. The current draconian system of confrontation does nobody any good, especially the children.

Lyndon must have realised that he would once again release the hounds of hell, so full credit to you for going ahead anyway. No doubt the more unreasonable brand of feminist will again oblige by demonstrating a level of sexism the average "lads mag" editor would be embarrassed to be caught in possession of. If he were a woman behaving in the same way, his detractors would characterise him as "feisty" and "outspoken".

Must we really be subjected to Lyndon's paranoid rant about the dissolution of his marriage? I vaguely remember his view on feminism and thought then, as I do now, that it was personal vitriol thinly disguised as crusading journalism.