In the unforgiving sex war, I prefer to remain a conscientious objector

It is absurd and unfair of feminists to use the language of ‘hate speech’ to label all men bad

Columnists are supposed to have strong opinions. I do my best to oblige. For this reason, I rarely write about what are rather clumsily described as “women’s issues”. Possibly this proves my cowardice, but I claim a different reason. In the sex war, I am a conscientious objector. I start from the once-commonplace position that the difference between the sexes is deep, but the need of each for the other is deeper. After all, the future of the human race is at stake.

If I were a conscript in the sex war, I might not be steady on parade. I don’t enjoy things which traditionally obsess my sex – team sport, machines with wheels or wings, DIY, computers, formalised jokes (“there was this man who went into a pub…”), Jeremy Clarkson. Indeed, I prefer activities which might be considered fraternising with the enemy – areas traditionally dominated by women, such as gossip, clothes, novels, pictures, talking about children and relationships, food, feelings. The only “female” subject which bores me is health.

It is not, I hope, that I am disloyal to my sex – I am as competitive, argumentative, boastful, pseudorational, evasive of housework and fond of lists as the next man. I even believe that there are distinctive male qualities and roles which should be defended. It is just that when battle starts, each side deteriorates.

You can see this among men who hit back when assailed by feminism and political correctness. There is something unappealing in the semicomic terms we use – “the sisterhood”, “harpies”, “cat-fight”, putting the word “la” before the name of the woman we are attacking. “Where’s your sense of humour?” we ask, displaying a defect in our own. In the 1970s, whenever Margaret Thatcher entered the Commons chamber, male Labour MPS used to make squeaking noises to mock her voice. Social media reveal that many men today still want to make such noises against women, especially anonymously.

Besides, there are some real issues with which women, much more than men, must contend. The most obvious is physical fear of the opposite sex, including fear of rape. The next most obvious is the work/life balance for mothers. Less obvious, but perhaps no less real, are the issues about power, status, independence, looks, age and so on which characterise our time.

A trivial example illustrates this. When I edited this paper, a distinguished American liberal columnist came to see me. I had someone else with me, so the first person he met was the deputy editor, Sarah Sands (now the editor of the BBC Today programme), who is small and was then young. He immediately said to her: “Coffee with sugar.” Sarah found his mistake more funny than shocking, and soon got her own back, but the point is that this happened to her solely because she was a woman. Women still have many such experiences, or much worse. As men, we don’t often have them, so we often don’t notice them.

All of the above being so, why should we not be deluged, as we have been recently, with stories about man’s inhumanity to woman? What’s wrong with #Metoo, Time’s Up, exposés of the gender pay gap, Amber Rudd’s penalties for non-violent domestic abuse, claims that the ghastly John Bercow bullied a female Commons clerk, Birmingham City Art Gallery removing a Victorian painting because of its supposed attitude to young women, Manchester being renamed Womanchester for International Women’s Day and goodness knows how many other stories?

Not easy to say, since some of the wrongs highlighted are real. Yet I think the sheer accumulation is a bad sign. We are being propagandised.

On Thursday night, I took part in a very enjoyable Telegraph evening, called “One Year to Brexit”, with Boris Johnson. Boris was wearing a badge

– a gold-rimmed triangle with a red middle. What did it signify, I asked, before we went on stage. He said it was to oppose female genital mutilation.

Why that badge, I found myself wondering? I don’t doubt Boris’s sincerity: FGM is a horrible thing. But so is North Korea’s nuclear bomb. So is the neglect of the old in British hospitals, or Russia’s habit of murdering its enemies. So is Isil, a grouping so monstrous that FGM (in which it exults) scarcely comes in the first rank of its crimes. There are a thousand evils against which you could wear a badge.

The fact that the Foreign Secretary chooses FGM shows the way morality is becoming a permanent PR campaign rather than an answer to the eternal question, “How should we live?” No doubt if he had refused to wear the badge he would have been accused of callousness by pressure groups. This is virtue’s fashion statement, not virtue itself. Our Cabinet ministers should be unbadged.

As with all fashion, absurdity passes almost unnoticed. In her famous “carcrash” Channel 4 News interview of the anti-feminist thinker Jordan Peterson, Cathy Newman passionately asserted that senior women BBC presenters getting less than the men is proof of the oppression of women worldwide. Since the entire BBC debate is about people who earn more than the Prime Minister, out of a compulsory tax levied on millions who are far, far poorer, hers was the voice of privilege. She could not see that.

Fairness drops out, too. The “gender pay gap” is treated as an indisputable fact, yet the assumption on which its computations are based – find out the average pay difference and you can measure the injustice – is highly contestable. In the debates about the economic wrongs done to women, the situation of men is less heard. Among couples,the man is still, in the majority of cases, the breadwinner. Women may suffer from the social expectation that they should be paid less. Men may suffer from the expectation that they should work more.

Worse than absurdity or unfairness is what, to use the language of the activists, is “hate speech”. In the prevailing discourse, men are bad; white men are worse; “privileged white men” are the only group about whom anything nasty can be said. If such men defend themselves or their fellows, they are guilty of “himpathy”.

More than 50 years after Martin Luther King called for people to be judged, “not…by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”, this reverse discrimination is a regression. He had a dream that little black boys and girls and little white ones would be able to “join hands”. He cannot have envisaged a culture in which girls would be brought up to regard boys as the untouchable enemy.

I often think that the relations between the sexes are a better subject for literature than for politics. This is because they depend upon the imagination, the capacity of human beings to understand difference and to enjoy it. A great novelist enters into the character of the opposite sex – think of George Eliot and men, Anthony Trollope and women.

This is more difficult than entering into the character of one’s own, but correspondingly more exciting. It is the encounter with “the other” – an exercise which, in other contexts, the politically correct strongly advocate.

Few of us are great novelists, but most of us know a little of what it means to trust and love a person born different from ourselves. It sometimes feels as if modern feminism is trying to forbid this, which is desperately sad.