I flinch when male columnists write about what they often sneeringly call feminism. The surrounding newspaper invariably has reports from the world as it is, of rape and murder and violence, and of the worldwide exploitation and abuse of women, and their exclusion from human opportunity.
Wouldn't you think that decent men, aware of their own privileges, would welcome the advances some women have made in this century? Wouldn't you hope that since they take no responsibility for other men, on the grounds that they themselves are not like that, they'd be similarly careful not to generalise about women? But no. Male columnists are almost by definition the only male strangers something of whose inner life we know about. And when they write with any passion about gender relations, the thing that is moving them is their own chagrin.
But that's how first-world women's liberation began, too - with the naming of personal hurts. Female readers might well respond with bitter cynicism to some recent outbursts. "So you're feeling misunderstood?" they might say. "You feel that things are stacked against you? Well, boys, join the club." But it is possible to transcend that response. John Waters, for instance, has returned several times recently to the theme of the powerlessness of fathers, like himself, of children with whose mothers they have no marriage or other contract. He expressed his central point like this: "If a mother desires, the apparatus of the State will move in to facilitate her in taking a child away from its father."
This is, of course, a sentence in a polemic. In real life, mothers don't dream of taking a child away from a father just because that is her capricious "desire": nor does the State just roll over and do whatever she tells it to do. I presume that arrangements about custody and access, where parents disagree, are made in the courts. Neither I nor John Waters knows how often, if at all, blameless fathers are denied access to their children by the Irish courts.
But John Waters is right when he says the whole bias in child custody is in favour of the mother. If for some reason a child had to be given to one or another of equally loving parents - who nevertheless don't love the child enough to make an agreement between themselves for its sake - the child would be given to the mother.
Partly, I suppose, this is because a mother has borne the child within herself, and fed it with herself, and a child "belongs" to its mother in a way that it cannot belong to the father. But mostly, the reason the law expresses a mistrust for father-carers is that the common experience of the planet is that if either parent is to desert the child, in practice, women don't do it and men do. There are, need I say, many exceptions to this rule. But in general, women are the protectors of the planet's children.
We don't have any figures for the numbers of children abandoned by their mothers in this State. Or by their fathers. But it is perhaps indicative that last Friday's census figures show there are almost 130,000 households where children are living with a lone parent and that four out of five of the lone parents are female.
Last week, too, figures from this year's report from the Child Support Agency in Britain were made available. It is the agency that tries to save the taxpayer money by finding the absent parent of children, establishing the parent's income, and instructing the parent to pay towards their children's maintenance.
The number of parents it assessed last year was 579,000. It traced, with a view to assessing, 67,000 parents who had completely disappeared from their children's lives. The agency's procedures include an invitation to fathers who dispute paternity to take a paternity test. In some 3,000 cases involving DNA tests which have come before the courts, some 90 per cent have turned out to be the biological father.
There are, of course, absentee mothers, too. The breakdown of CSA live cases is: absent fathers 94.9 per cent; absent mothers 5.1 per cent.
John Waters complained bitterly that "our culture tells us that unmarried fathers have no interest in their children, that they wish to evade their responsibilities and leave mother and child in the lurch . . ." Is it "our intention," he asked, "to produce a generation of fatherless children, raised on social welfare, and denied the protection of the Constitution?" He replied to his own rhetorical question with, "I wouldn't be surprised."
But who is the "our" in "our intention"? Who is shaping Irish social policy towards children with any other consideration in mind but the welfare of the children? The facts about men and women and children are what stand in the way of a crusade for equal rights for the male and female parent.
I know John Waters has thought about this complex situation far more deeply than most people. Can he outline a scheme, different from the present court-based one, which would better protect the interests of the largest possible number of children, mothers and fathers? And if not, would he consider adopting a less aggressive tone when he deals with this matter? Or could he direct his aggression at the irresponsible men who have weakened the position of responsible parents like himself?
The discriminations John Waters correctly identifies are there in the law. Women haven't made the law. Far from it. If men such as himself and his fellow-columnist, David Hanly, want changes in the law, they'll have to organise themselves and lobby for change, the way women have over the past 25 years.
David Hanly addressed an imaginary young man in his column recently and asked him whether he realised that if the marriage were to break down, "you are the one who will have to move out, even though on your salary you will be able to afford nothing but a broom cupboard? Are you aware that even after the children have grown and flown you will still be responsible for keeping your former partner in the luxury to which she has accustomed herself? And that if, in desperation, you take a case before a judge, it is entirely possible that this sober arbiter may direct that every penny you earn goes to your former wife?"
This is news to me. The average payment sought by the Child Support Agency, for instance, from absent fathers who are in employment is £37. I didn't realise that the separated high-earners I know are living in broom cupboards.
But the sharp resentment expressed here is important, as is John Waters's anger. We are all going to have to work out a society where those deep feelings are addressed. But I'm not sure whether progress is what the speakers really want. If it is, the hostility, the recriminatory tone, and above all the intellectual shoddiness of their present arguments stand in its way.