Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

 “So when he says that, by the end of his time with the Rape Crisis Centres, he had “become thoroughly disillusioned with what I saw as a deeply hypocritical strain of anti-male sexism” there, and had come to see their attitudes as “fundamentally disempowering of women” thanks to a “constant tendency to portray the female of the species as helpless lumps of victimhood”, then he surely deserves to be heard.  Jackie Hayden is not some caricature bar room boor, after all, but a child of the Sixties, fully signed up to anti-sexist, anti-racist spirit of the time. When he speaks out now against the disintegration of the feminist ideal into bitter sectionalism, it genuinely is more in sorrow than in anger.Will Irish feminists listen to the advice of an old friend any more carefully than they do to those they see as their enemies? It’s doubtful.  Feminism long ago retreated into its shell, dismissing all criticism as a misogynistic backlash — which is why it is more like a cult, a cabalistic inner circle, these days than the intellectual and political force for change it could and should have been. The sisters simply don’t listen anymore to anyone who doesn’t sign up 100 per cent to the catechism. In that respect, Hayden is most likely wasting his breath, but he does it with such vigour and honesty that we should just be glad he did it anyway.”

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