No, I do not think all men are beastly

IT’S important to engage in debate, so I must take up a point made by a reader. He quotes me talking about a wife screaming abuse at her husband when he called to pick up their child: ‘It goes without saying that he’d been unfaithful and broken up the marriage.’

My reader (let’s call him Mr S) threw his newspaper across the room in a fury! He asks why I ‘persist in the notion that only men break up marriages’ and says that my ‘bigoted attitude against men’ astounds him.

I wrote back begging him not to ill-treat this newspaper! Mr S does me a grave injustice because, again and again on this page, I point out that women as well as men break up marriages.

Indeed, last week’s lead letter was from just such a woman who still feels guilty.

Women can behave as badly as men — especially when it comes to with-holding access to children. It always breaks my heart to hear of a man whose wife calls time on the marriage and deprives him of love, his home and precious children — s ometimes because she has a new squeeze, who gets the lot.

I rresponsible passion knows no gender (though it knows plenty about sex).

I could have given Mr S very many examples of my impartiality, but just sent him an extract from my forthcoming book.

The quote comes from a few years back, when I wrote to one chap: ‘It’s good you read this column every week because you will know it to be even-handed.

‘Unlike some women, I have never subscribed to the “all men are bastards” prejudice — despite the fact that, very often, some are! ‘ Fo r eve r y woman abandoned by a husband, I can show you a man whose wife has packed her bags.’

Oh, but you know about that side of things, don’t you? It’s only human to construct a world view based on our own experience; the danger is that it can be pitifully one-sided.’

As I try to be fair, so I ask readers to be fair to me.