BY FRANK HAVILAND

No one knows what a man is anymore; at least no one permitted a voice. Labour Party  Women’s Officers are now invariably male. England Rugby has a sudden influx of 20-stone ‘ladies’ keen to scrum down. Even female prisons cannot raise an objection to inmates with willies, if only they’d keep them zipped up.

Through their insistence that identity is a social construct, the Left have trained us all not to notice anything; and so we no longer do. We are remarkably uninquisitive about the demography of London stabbings, the convincing link between suicide bombers and beards, and the outrageous degree of paternity fraud committed via certain other types of ‘beards’.

We repeat the mantras: ‘not all Muslims’, ‘not all immigrants’, ‘not all trans’…until it’s time to pick up the tab; at which point the patriarchy steps in – the one group it’s still acceptable to stereotype. Whatever your problem, you can blame it on men (preferably just the white ones): climate change, female alcoholism, ISIS, obesity, we’re here for you.

Thanks to an intricate web of dishonesty: campaigns like #MeToo, woke brands like Gillette, an over-feminised education system, the APA guidelines for boys and men, and deceits such as the gender pay gap, the feminist canon now confines men to two discrete categories: genuflecting sissies like Keir Starmer and increasing numbers of the Old Bill, who cower before anything in a BLM T-shirt, and Neanderthals who must be denied a voice (the caricature of Tommy Robinson). One need only consult last week’s reprehensible Sunday Times cartoon to realise how far this has seeped.

So, while Baroness Green’s suggestion of a 6pm curfew for men has been rightly criticised, it is not enough to simply ignore it. Like all moronic political ideas, left unchallenged they have a tendency to become law, as per the corrupt Scottish Mayoralty’s Humza Yousaf’s travesty of a hate crime bill, which now criminalises private conversations in the home.

It is no surprise that poor, beautiful Sarah Everard’s murder is being used to stoke the war on the Y-chromosome, but as emotional an issue as it is, it would be nice to see some facts creep into the discussion. First off, how exactly would a 6pm curfew work? It’s charitable to be let out to clean the streets and pay all the tax of course, but most attacks occur within the home, by people known to the victim. Furthermore, while men commit the vast majority of murders, they also constitute the majority of victims, as well as being twice as likely to be violently assaulted on the street.

Rape is a heinous crime, but feminists do themselves no favours conflating rarity of prosecution with the narrative that all women are victims, and all men latent rapists. Our sexual etiquette has never been so confused: from Andrea Dworkin’s ‘violation is a synonym for intercourse’ to #BelieveAllWomen (they lie too, you know?), and the continual gerrymandering of boundaries which would see misogyny, wolf-whistling, and even ‘non-consensual’ kissing prescribed hate crimes, you have to feel sorry for today’s young men.  

Here are the facts: rape in general is down 58% since 1994. And despite the fact that male victims are even less likely to come forward, rape is known to be far from an exclusively-male domain: 35% of male victims are raped or sexually assaulted by women; female prison inmates are more likely to be abused by other inmates than male inmates are, and more than 90% of juveniles who report sexual assault were abused by women. Women are also more than happy to abuse their husbands – it’s just that no one cares.

I do not say this lightly. As the anxious father of two girls beneath the age of four, there is nothing I take more seriously than their safety. I’m just not convinced that inflating the prevalence of genuine sexual misconduct is useful (misandry aside), and whether crimes committed by women or against men are any less serious.

There is something more insidious at work here, something you might hope I’d have the good taste to omit (I don’t however, so here you go). The empathy shown to Sarah Everard is in ugly contrast to the almost universal oblivion met by victims of Muslim rape gangs. What was it about these poor ‘white slags’ and their Muslim assailants which so embarrassed the left? Was it their glottal stops or the inability to find assailants hitting the coveted ‘straight, white, male’ trifecta?

Sarah Everard was a middle-class girl, killed by a white man – at last, a crime the Left feels comfortable pursuing. There is something profoundly wicked in that.

For all its obvious flaws, ‘toxic masculinity’ is our one and only line of defence. It’s who feminists call every time they’re in danger, and like it or not there is nothing waiting to replace it. It may even be on the way out – have feminists shot themselves in the stiletto by pushing #MeToo too hard? It appears men are not only avoiding women at work, but are even unwilling to perform CPR, because of possible accusations of sexual misconduct. How far down this road do we really wish to travel?

It’s time someone stood up for men; you know the real ones, while we still have some left.