Women don’t need an equality party: all our battles are won

As feminists launch their own political party, a blistering riposte

THESE days it would be easy to believe that women have never been more oppressed. A new creed is preached: that we are the victims, not victors, of the sex war. Feminists claim we are objectified by the builder’s whistle, that a strange man attempting to flirt with us is tantamount to sexual assault.

Just as it seemed we women were about to have it all, this new wave of feminists has begun to portray us as feeble-minded — unable to withstand a bad date, let alone negotiate a pay rise.

Worse still, they are ditching what was best about the feminist tradition: solidarity with the sisterhood and the freedom of every woman to do as she pleases.

Feminism 2015- style consists of freely attacking other women over crucial issues such as bikini-waxing, wearing stilettos and dressing girls in pink.

Well, if this is feminism, then feminism is dead, and the triviality of the fights feminists pick is the proof of its demise. What started as a genuine crusade against real prejudice has become a form of pointless attention-seeking.

Last week, the Women’s Equality Party unveiled its policies — such as quotas to boost the number of women in politics — seven months after it was co-founded by comedian Sandi Toksvig. How arrogant to position yourself as speaking for 51 per cent of the population.

I was born in 1983 and grew up in a country where it was blindingly obvious that women ruled: with a queen on the throne and a woman in Downing Street.

I was a grocer’s daughter, educated at a state school, living in the flat above the shop, and I looked to that real feminist icon Margaret Thatcher as objective proof that I could get wherever the hell I wanted in life, provided I sharpened my wits and gave it my all.

WITHouThaving to be told, I knew that where you were born was not necessarily where you’d end up, because Maggie bulldozed every obstacle foolish enough to stand in her way with an attitude that screamed: ‘Never say die!’

Feminists in the West, if they had any sense, needed to stop moaning and whingeing. The totemic battles were hard-fought — and they were won. The next generation should be encouraged to enjoy the spoils, not worry old wounds.

Today, girls outperform boys at school — and have done since the mid-Seventies. They are more likely to get five good GCSEs. A third of them go to university, compared with a quarter of men, and they are more likely to graduate with a First or 2:1 degree.

And equality? In many disciplines, it has gone a bit beyond that. Last year, women constituted 55 per cent of those enrolling in medicine and dentistry courses, and 62 per cent of those studying law. Business, banking and the professions may be dominated by men today but, judging by the rapidity of our ascent, this won’t last long.

As London Mayor Boris Johnson has observed that when my generation reach the peak of our careers, the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed — and feminised.

Since the Suffragettes won us the vote, women have made greater strides than men have made in millennia.

In fact, the demographic doing worst in schools is white boys on free school meals, only a quarter of whom gained five decent GCSEs. But who will wave placards, or lie on the carpet of film premieres, for the unfashionable cause of under-performing boys?

Most self-styled feminists argue that we still struggle in the workplace. on close inspection, this isn’t borne out either.

Women in their 20s have outearned men in the past few years. Now the under-40s are doing so as well.

Across the u.S. and Europe, particularly Scandinavia, women are pushing their way on to executive boards and into the seats of power. The French government has passed a law that will require two in five executive board members of the largest public companies to be women.

Feminists argue that we need quotas in this country, too. But isn’t there a sweeter triumph in sisters doing it for themselves?

The next generation have everything to play for if they don’t view themselves as helpless victims of an insuperable patriarchy.

only 19 per cent of women identify as feminist, which perhaps isn’t surprising since it has become so dull. In the Seventies, feminists were ball-breaking, asskicking, devil-may- care thinkers — Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Susan Sontag.

Now, the ‘voice of a generation’ is Harry Potter star Emma Watson, who delivered a highly praised speech to the uN lamenting that her female friends had given up competitive sport because they were worried it might make their arms look ‘muscly’.

But while Watson frets about the tyranny of the male gaze, it’s being eyeballed by a feminist, which is truly terrifying.

These middle- class aesthetes love to boss other — particularly working-class — women around, Sister act: The launch of the Women’s Equality Party. But what are they fighting for? sneering at how they dress and behave. They disapprove of Beyonce and Rihanna flaunting their beautiful bodies in pop videos with a vehemence you might expect from the Taliban.

In April, an advert featuring a busty model appeared on the London Tube with the tagline: ‘Are you beach body ready?’

Within hours it had been defaced; within days 44,000 signatures had been appended to a petition demanding that it be removed.

Making sure women are covered up in public is something you’d expect in Saudi Arabia, not here.

Why shouldn’t we wear make-up, stockings and suspenders if we like? But new feminists are determined to drain the fun from life, and illustrate how awful it is to be a woman in Britain.

Another challenge girls apparently quail at is internet trolling.

SoLET’S say you receive threats from a loser who disagrees with something you’ve said. Should you call the police? Abandon Twitter? or relish the insults, in the manner of Maggie, who said: ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding. It means they have not a single political argument left.’

or you could remain impervious to insult, like rock goddess Chrissie Hynde, who was trolled by feminists after confessing she had suffered a sex attack aged 21 and took ‘full responsibility’ for it.

Twitter lit up with the unedifying spectacle of hundreds of women attacking her for expressing her honest opinion, until even the feminist writer Julie Bindel felt moved to point out Hynde was ‘not a rapist’.

Hynde’s magisterial response? ‘If you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it.’

But when it comes to sex, new feminists are so squeamish that one timid male, Samuel Fishwick, has compiled a guide to romance in the age of equality.

Approaching feminist website Vagenda for advice, he was told a man must never ask a woman to meet him for a drink at a location near his abode: apparently, it makes women think you’re going to kidnap them, kill them and ‘turn their skin into a lampshade’.

Does it, though? or are feminists exaggerating ridiculously — spending so much time dwelling on their own bodies that they fail to use their brains?

Surely we should be revelling in the fact we’re the ‘second sex’ no longer, and teaching our girls how to rely on what Emily Bronte called our ‘no coward’ souls. A VERSION of this article appears in this week’s Spectator magazine.