THIS COLUMN (Neil Lyndon please note) can now exclusively reveal all you need to know about the Sex War: which is that it is over.
Victory was finally conceded in January 1998 with the publication of two sets of official statistics. They showed that, for the first time in the history of the United Kingdom, there were more women in paid employment than men. They also showed a decline in literacy and numeracy on the part of male school-children, which is alarming the government and has resulted in predictable calls for more male teachers (as 'role models') in our primary schools.
Of course minor skirmishes will continue. Female academics will still whine on about glass ceilings, and female canons will long, incomprehensibly, for archdeaconries which remain beyond their grasp, But they should be taken no more seriously than Welshmen who apply for redress to the Race Relations Commission. The real battle has been won, and a once proud sex has been reduced to rubble.
When, towards the end of the next century, a suitably detached analytical historian reviews the root causes of this remarkable triumph, she will no doubt blame men. Certainly men were major contributors to their own downfall. In the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century they forged the intellectual weapons of destruction (legal and functional egalitarianism); in the medical revolution of the 1940s and 50s they gave Feminism the essential engine of its rapid expansion (reliable means of contraception); and in the sexual revolution of the 70s they traded the family (which many men had always found irksome) for what they had always wanted, and the feminists had the ability to deliver: concupiscence without responsibility.
Of course it will also be seen that certain male sub-groups were partial beneficiaries of this self-inflicted defeat. Lads (of all ages) are finding themselves happily confined to the idleness and alcoholism which was always their preference. Probably a post-feminist society will find suitable means of further restricting them (in a very caring way) to the world of football hooliganism and social security which they willingly inhabit. Panem et circenses was ever the response of an elite to an underclass.
Campaigning homosexualists, too, have benefited. Where the sexual blitzkrieg had left barely a social role undemolished they stepped in to re-erect cherished shibboleths in unexpected places. Who would have thought, just as the last pockets of uxorious fidelity were being eliminated from the heterosexual horizon, that there would be a gay resurgence of faithful monogamy? Today's revolutionaries look set to become the conservative role models of a rising generation. 'Mummy, mummy, why can't you and Dave just live together in a real family, like Steve and Mike?'
But, if she is honest, our putative historian will have to admit that the victors in the Sex War have paid a horrendous price. And, as in every army, it was paid by the common soldiery - dragging up their own children (though they could not afford to have them) whilst performing the menial and domestic chores which the achievements of their superior sisters had rendered suddenly inappropriate. Every high-flying Horlick needed a team of menial wage-slaves to keep the show on the road.
How it must have rankled, in the tenements of Peckham and Bethnal Green, when single mothers on incomes well below average turned on their teles to be regaled with the femacho fantasises of Lynda la Plante! What comfort for them in being shown that resourceful women could compete in a man's world - could be detective chief inspectors, governors of prisons and ambassadors to the Irish Republic - when in fact very few, if any, women were in such roles; and when all they wanted for themselves was the love of a good man and a house on the by-pass?
But all that will soon be over, and things will even themselves out. Every girl has won her putative right to become an astro-physicist, a foul-mouthed alternative comedienne, or the Vicar of Dibley. We should neither rejoice nor complain. The world will be as it will be, and we can do nothing to alter it, as Dr Johnson wisely instructed the lady in the Bath diligence.
What we should complain of, however, is the moral impertinence of those who have sought to bring it about. They promised a better world: where wars would cease, politics would become consensual and churches would be full. But of course, as all but the fanatics knew, such could never be the case. A world run by women would, after all, be just the same crippled, fallen, tragic thing it was before the epic transfer of power. In matters of sin and matters of righteousness, at least, the old feminist adage proves to be true: we are just 'the same thing with different fittings'.
'I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another' said the good Doctor on another occasion. 'It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.'
Geoffrey Kirk is the Vicar of St. Stephen's Lewisham in the diocese of Southwark. Neil Lyndon is the author of 'No more Sex War: The Failures of Feminism', Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1992. ISBN 1 85619 191 5