Regrettably, the backlash against feminism is growing. Much of the media gloats about the arrival of post-feminism, a golden era in which women supposedly have achieved the equality they have sought for so long. Individual feminists are derided as dinosaurs from another era or as simply mad. Raising the issue of equal opportunities is rapidly becoming as unacceptable as nose-picking in public. Many feminists themselves are racked with self-doubt following two exhausting decades of attempting to be 'superwomen' - model workers, model mothers and model lovers.
And now we have a new kind of attack on feminism. Neil Lyndon has recently published a tatty, poorly-researched, ill-thought-out book called No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism. Incredibly, Lyndon seeks to argue that feminism has achieved nothing except the poisoning of relationships between men and women. Even more incredibly, he goes on to argue that the only gender currently discriminated against is men. Lyndon is particularly critical of the divorce courts which usually award child custody to mothers.
This argument - also heard in recent years from groups like Families Need Fathers and Dads After Divorce - is surely misconceived. Although the divorce courts are by no means perfect, most of their decisions have a clear logic, reflecting the simple fact that, in most families, mothers assume responsibility for the bulk of childcare. Despite all the media hype about the 'new father', the majority of men spend only slightly more time caring for children than they did thirty years ago.
But what's much more interesting than the book's blatantly absurd thesis is the reception it has received. Reviewed in all the major newspapers and plugged on TV and radio, the book has generated a media blitz. For a time, it was impossible to enter a major London book-shop without coming face-to-face with acres of the book's striking red cover. Only Madonna and the Duchess of York have recently had more coverage.
It's clear that in the gloomy, run-down, recession-hit Nineties, an appeal to conservatism in gender politics strikes a deep chord for many, even if it's freshly dressed-up. But we believe that it's never been more important for men to reject the arguments of reactionaries like Lyndon and to acknowledge their debt to feminism.
Sure, feminism has its faults and it has challenged us and at times made us feel confused, rejected and hurt. It's also meant that we've been forced to at least consider doing our fair share of cooking, cleaning and childcare. But feminism has also shown us that our lives have been constrained by the ways in which we have been brought up to be men, that emotional literacy is a possibility for us and that reaching for intimacy with women, other men and children can be deeply rewarding.
And at a time when, on average, women's incomes are still less than three quarters of men's, and just nine per cent of Westminster MPs are female, there's surely never been a better time for men to support women's demands for genuine equality.
Despite the enormous coverage sport receives in the media, its psychological and political significance is seldom looked at. The relationship between the development of masculine identities and the structure of sport as a social institution is rarely acknowledged, far less explored. In this year of the Olympics it seems appropriate for Achilles Heel to start to explore this relationship.
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