'You couldn't make this up," a BBC source observed last week after it emerged that, in the course of the previous night, two male actors on EastEnders had allegedly been assaulted and beaten up by women.
The implication is that these were such extraordinary and unusual events as to transcend fiction, that here was some bizarre trick of statistical theory. The other possibility is that female assaults on men are now so commonplace that this episode merely hints at a new reality of modern living: you don't have to make it up.
One of the women involved was Rebekah Wade, editor of the Sun, who had been arrested and held for eight hours after she allegedly assaulted her husband, Ross Kemp, splitting his lip. Kemp and Steve McFadden play the no-nonsense Mitchell brothers, Grant and Phil, in the BBC soap opera. McFadden had that same morning been punched in the face by an ex-lover in the presence of three police officers.
Unsurprisingly, the British redtops, including the Sun, got full tabloid value from the story. "EastEnders hard man is beaten up by lover," was the main headline on the Sun. This - oddly, or perhaps not - referred to the McFadden story, with the Kemp assault disposed of in a modest panel piece inside. "The Bruise Brothers" was the front-page headline on the Star, which inside treated both stories fairly even-handedly under the respective headlines, "Tough-guy Grant gets floored by the wife", and "Philled in by his ex".
"Bish! Bash! Bosh!" screamed the headline on the front of the Daily Mirror: "Are the EastEnders hard men just a pair of big girl's blouses?" The Daily Express put the phrase "beaten up" in quotation marks, the Independent likewise with "assault". A (female) Guardian columnist wrote that Ross Kemp had been made to look like "a great big Jessie".
We hear a great deal nowadays from the media about corruption: conflicts of interest, insider trading, brown envelopes. But here is corruption of a far more insidious kind. Propelled by the mendacious and poisonous propaganda of state-funded feminist groups, the media in both Britain and Ireland regularly warn of the scourge of domestic violence, but so selectively as to amount to systematic lying.
Since Rebekah Wade became its editor, the Sun has run numerous campaigns on this issue - or, more precisely, on the issue of "wife-beating thugs" - and has even carried photos of "wife- beaters" on its front page. But it has nothing much to say about husband-beating harridans.
Following her release from police custody last week, Wade told her staff that, at a loss for a lead story, she "gave Ross one". She also confided that the incident was "just the normal kind of thing that happens" between lovers.
This seems plausible until you recall that Wade has been to the fore in promoting a definition of domestic violence that embraces virtually all forms of conflict within couples - provided the accused party is a male.
Some weeks ago, the Sun published an article by Sandra Horley, chief executive of the anti-domestic violence charity Refuge, in which she said: "Most of us are shocked by rape, a beating with a pickaxe handle or attempted strangulation. But domestic violence is emotional, psychological and verbal abuse too. When you're in a relationship it can be hard to recognise what is abuse and what isn't . . . We've got to understand that domestic violence is wrong and stand up to say we won't tolerate it. The Sun is right to keep reminding us that many thousands of women across the UK have their lives ruined by this serious crime . . . If we speak out, children will learn it is wrong to hit loved ones."
This is typical of the cant served up by the British and Irish media on this subject. "Domestic violence" and "wife-beating" are coterminous concepts. Domestic violence is a serious crime only if the victim is a woman. If the perpetrator is female, it's all a big joke.
Concepts like "hypocrisy" and "double- standards" are inadequate in seeking to comprehend the nature of this corruption. The prejudices are hard-wired into both the language and what passes for thought, making it impossible to address the issue without falling foul of the corrupted logic. The term "hard man", for example, employed in this context, instantly unscrolls a ream of cultural assumptions, rendering the reality of what has happened impossible to convey.
A man has been assaulted by his wife, but his reputation for toughness - or the fact that he plays a character with a reputation for toughness - means he encounters derision rather than sympathy. But what is a "hard man" to do if assaulted by a woman? Hit her back? Bish! Defend himself physically? Bash! Either response would result in him being barred from his home, delivering another "wife-beater" for the Sun's front page. Bosh!
A man who becomes embroiled in a physical disputation with a woman stands to lose either way: if he resists he is a "wife-beater"; if not, he's a "big girl's blouse". As propaganda campaigning goes, you have to concede that this is a truly awesome achievement.