How feminism evolved into a brutal war on men

Fay Weldon rightly sought to liberate women, but could only watch in horror as that cause was hijacked

This is spooky: I was thinking, the other day, wouldn’t it be sad if Fay Weldon died? The next morning, I read that she had. Well, she was ready for it. Fay, a comic novelist with a taste for the supernatural, once had a near-death experience under anaesthetic. She said that the gates of Heaven were brightly painted and double-glazed.

I interviewed her for a student rag in 2001, the first proper journalism I ever did, and I came away confused. I thought she was a Left-wing feminist. She turned out to be shockingly Right-wing. Now I understand that she was coming to terms with the consequences of her own ideas, for Weldon regretted her literary feminism. She blamed herself for pitting women against men.

Born in 1931, she grew up in an era when we needed a good dose of feminism. She told me her tutor at St Andrews didn’t believe girls should go to university, so he acted as if Fay wasn’t in the room and, if she asked a question, pretended he hadn’t heard. A single mother, desperate for security, she married a demonic headmaster 25 years her senior. He encouraged her to sleep with other men and work as a hostess.

She found liberation via a job in advertising, where she cooked up the slogan “go to work on an egg”. Her suggestion for vodka – “vodka gets you drunker quicker” – was sadly rejected, though her reasoning behind it, that people who want to get drunk need to know this, was logical. She began publishing novels in 1967, introducing us to heroines who were neglected or abused, as was she, running the gauntlet of husbands, bosses, shopping and chocolate.

In 2001, Bulgari offered her an undisclosed sum to write a book on any subject so long as she name-dropped their jewellery 12 times. “But my reputation will be ruined!”, protested Weldon. Then she realised she didn’t care. She wrote it and mentioned Bulgari 34 times. By this point, when we flirted shamelessly in the university bar, as only people of such distance in age feel comfortable doing, she was regarded as divorced from the Left. Up for anything. In my company, she extolled the virtues of grammar schools, Israel and employing a cleaner. “Just a wicked controversialist,” said the critics, but, to quote her most famous book, The Life and Loves of a She-devil, “doubt afflicts the good, not the bad”.

By the turn of the millennium, feminism had vanquished the worst oppressions of women – yet the idea that men are inherently awful and always in charge had taken root. Weldon gave a talk in Boston at which she read out a list of the awful things she had once written about males, intended as a mea culpa. To her horror, the audience erupted into cheers. “I had done something dreadful,” she realised. She had helped to form the cultural “habit” of finding fault with men, of pinning the blame for every personal crisis upon an entire sex.

This is bad for men, obviously, because the myth of a “patriarchy” is at variance with their own “lived experience”: far from being in charge, they’ve lost their jobs and status, and are ridiculed by the culture they supposedly dominate as moronic or savage. Some boys are being persuaded by online demagogues that women are emasculating them and must be put back in their place. Thus women are hurt by the backlash to feminism – but also by the price of success, for they all, sighed Weldon, “look tired”.

The economy has not changed: until we work less, or until childcare is affordable, women having it all will look suspiciously like women doing everything, while men retreat into an angry sulk. This is why identity politics is such a dumb cul-de-sac. Suggesting that men and women are inherently at odds, as apparently the races are too, undermines the cooperation needed to change things for the better. It’s no surprise that so many 1960s socialists have matured into reactionaries. It’s not that they’ve lost their idealism so much that the equality they desired turns out to be impossible if the oppressed are set at each other’s throats – yet the contemporary Left sees this war of all against all as permanent, almost innate.

Weldon found peace by joining the Anglican Church. She pushed open the pearly gates from her operating table and got a glimpse of the world beyond: “It was just more of the same,” she reported back. “Hard work.”

I’ll give you a concrete example of the discrimination against men: diaries. I went to buy one at Paperchase at Victoria station. All of them were feminine – pink or covered in butterflies – because only women, it seems, have an interior life.

So I went to Smiths, found a relatively butch diary (flowery but blue), bought it and took it to a café to plan the year ahead. It had no forward planner. I took it back; the woman at the counter sympathised but said she wasn’t qualified to give me my money back, so she had to call someone on her phone. Finally, a man in a fleece said he could refund me but only if I showed him a statement (I hadn’t taken a receipt). “I’ve no idea how to do that,” I said, so handed him my phone and invited him to look for one, which he found on a credit card app I’ve never myself been able to work. No doubt he is now on his way to Las Vegas with my entire life savings.

I settled for the least girly diary I could get in Paperchase, which is black with a golden moon. It looks like a witch’s journal.