You've got what you want, girls, stop whining: Has feminism made women unhappy? (well THIS certainly will)

One of these days, women really ought to make up their minds about what it is exactly they want. Then they could do us all a big favour by stating, unequivocally, what they have decided it is they want. And then they could cover themselves with glory by sticking to what they say.



In other words, it's about time women - especially their self-appointed mouthpieces - started behaving like fully grown-up adults and citizens. Or is that asking too much? Apparently, it is.



A survey published this week tells us that women today are far from happy with their lot and wish they could live more like their mothers and grandmothers - not having to work so much and free to spend more time with their children.

The fact is, if women do succeed in having it all, the effort and the burden will probably break their back

The survey, The Paradox Of Declining Female Happiness, reports that women of all ages and income are less happy than women of 40 years ago and less happy than today's men.



Despite sexual and marital liberation, massively increased career opportunities and earning power, educational privileges and the wholesale demolition of the inhibiting conventions that restricted the lives of women in the past, today's women report themselves as feeling a low sense 'of life satisfaction and well-being'.

Well, men might be entitled to retort, welcome to the real world, sweethearts.



What you are complaining about is the very same life that you promoted and celebrated when you were swanking around chanting 'sisters are doing it for themselves'.

One woman commentator perfectly expressed the problem illustrated by this report, explaining: 'It's almost as if, in some ways, we got it all and then found out it wasn't quite exactly what we wanted.'

This is exactly what I have been predicting - against a torrent of vilification and derision from feminists - for more than 20 years.

My book, No More Sex War: The Failures Of Feminism, was not only the first radical, egalitarian, progressive critique of the ideology of feminism (the last and most durable of the 20th century's false secular faiths, like the Marxism from which it drew its cardinal tenets).

The book also analysed in detail the intolerable consequences that were bound to result for women if they were expected both to contribute substantial earnings to family life and, at the same time, be solely or even chiefly responsible for child-care.



It has been obvious to me for some 25 years that social and political equality for women (which I wholeheartedly and unreservedly welcome) could not work unless men became equal as parents at home.



Having it all? Women like Madonna and Angelina Jolie are the most privileged, most cosseted and indulged women in the history of humanity

The selfish, conceited, man-despising yet predatory 'have-it-all' feminism of the Cosmopolitans was always a recipe for insupportable burdens for women, for intolerable stress, for a self-rebuking, guilt-laden failure to cope and, in the end, for being downright miserable about it all.



The fact is, lady, if you do succeed in having it all, the effort and the burden will probably break your back.

Before we sympathise with this sad plight, however, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the multitude of unprecedented benefits, blessings and advantages that have been showered upon the modern women who are now whingeing about the poverty of their 'life satisfaction'.

They have become the most privileged, the most cosseted and indulged women in the history of humanity. They are the first to live their whole lives without threat of war or plague. They are the first women ever born who could control and regulate their fertility with complete reliability, and they are the first to have the means and the right to choose an abortion if they slipped up or changed their minds about being pregnant.

The selfish, conceited, man-despising yet predatory 'have-it-all' feminism of the Cosmopolitans was always a recipe for insupportable burdens for women

They are the first to be free of any constraints in dress or manners, and the first for whom no limit exists to the heights to which they can aspire in any pursuit - be it politics, public service, commerce, the professions, the arts and sport.

You would never think it if you listened to feminists, but the truth is that every one of those benefits has been advanced and secured for women by men.

Motivated by conscience and a desire for justice and equality, it was primarily men who revolutionised the position of women. I can see your jaw dropping at this peculiar idea, but if you don't believe it, ask yourself these questions: how many women MPs were sitting on the benches of the House Of Commons when, by a majority of two-to-one, Parliament passed the Bill in 1918 which extended the franchise to women? Answer: not one.

Who was responsible for the Abortion Act of 1967 and the Divorce Reform Act of 1969? Men. Who brought into law the Equal Opportunities Act and the Sex Discrimination Act? Men.



Yet women of our time have lived all their lives with an unquestioning belief that they are members of an oppressed class of victims who have had to struggle heroically for liberation against a society cruelly organised by men for the benefit of men ('Women are the n*****s of the world,' as that irredeemable twit Yoko One once declared).



This is the unpardonable fault of feminism. Of all the disservices to our age fostered by that pernicious and poisonous ideology, none has been more ruinous than this preposterous lie - that men keep women down in order to preserve their own powers.



The manifest truth of the past 200 years is that men wanted change for women as much as they wanted it for themselves.



It is because we all go along with that feminist fiction that we cannot even begin to recognise the inequalities and the disadvantages of men in family life. It simply doesn't register on our barometer of injustice that unmarried men still have no automatic rights in law as parents.

Similarly, because we suppose that all gender injustice and inequality is to be found in the position of women, we don't take any notice of the inequalities of men in divorce.



In survey after survey, men report that they resent the demands of work and that they wish they could have more time with their growing children. Yet the law continues to discriminate against fathers in the provision of time away from work to care for children.



We don't even count it as an intolerable injustice and inequality that men are still required to work five years longer than women before they become eligible for a state pension (it is entirely typical of feminists' capacity to pervert the truth that Germaine Greer once described that inequality as an advantage for men).



Men don't go on about it, but the truth is that things aren't entirely wonderful for us, either. The difference is that we don't suppose we've got a God-given right to blame women for it.