What fragile wilting flowers we women have become, with our jazz hands and trigger warnings, our “fainting couch feminism”.

We are under attack from the patriarchy, hostage to a rape culture, all at risk of domestic violence, held down by the glass ceiling, and not paid as much as men for equal work.

Pity none of this is true, and in fact women in Australia have more freedoms and equality than at any time in our history.

So when a brute alpha male like Mark Latham, the maverick former Labor leader, stomps through the cosy media consensus to slay these lies, the entire apparatus of victim feminism rises up against him.

He gives back twice as good as he gets, and so the professional offenderati who gathered at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on Saturday to hear him talk got the vapours when he peppered his home truths with foul-mouthed aggression.

His Radio National interlocutor Jonathan Green, was an “ABC wanker”. Max Gillies sanctimoniously lecturing him from the audience was free to “piss off” if he was so offended. “It’s a democracy, you’re not araldited to the seat, are you?”

Uber luvvie Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, later told the ABC: “I felt abused.”

media_camera Mark Latham sees himself as the representative of all working class suburban men. (Pic: Ian Currie)

In the guise of compassion, she implied Latham was mentally unwell, the age-old code for disparaging someone’s ideas.

Then there was Mamamia.com writer and social researcher Rebecca Huntley, who recounted her “terrifying” encounter with Latham the morning after his star turn in Melbourne. There she was, just a mild-mannered mother who went downstairs at her hotel to “get a coffee and hot chocolates for my daughter and goddaughter”, when Latham accosted her.

By her own admission Huntley had once written that Latham, who takes care of his three children while his wife works, was a “stay at home psycho”. Why did she think that she could write something so malicious and unfounded and suffer no consequences?

“He confronted me about the comment ... He stood very close to me and said, “How would you like it if I called you a deranged slut?”

“Mark is a big guy. He was standing close, and while I didn’t feel like he would put his hands on me, I did feel intimidated.”

She called him a “psycho” and he called her a “disgrace”.

Even by her recounting, it seemed an even verbal stoush. But Latham is the monster because he is a man, is bigger than her, and dared to bring up her vicious insult of long ago.

“Afterwards I was shaken,” Huntley wrote. “How do I get my kids out of the hotel without encountering him again? I was genuinely concerned he might have more nasty things to say.”

Maybe she should have thought of that before she called him a “stay at home psycho”.

Anyway, the threat she felt was pure imagination, like most trumped up charges of grievance feminism.

The attacks on Latham, and the role he was given at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, are the equivalent of bear-baiting. He can’t resist the challenge, with sometimes vicious overreach. He sees himself as the representative of all working class suburban men, defending them against claims they are all racist, rednecked, violent bigots.

The left feminist establishment views him as an affront. Men just have to cop being labelled misogynists, killers, rapists, perpetrators of domestic violence, without complaint.

If they retaliate they are insane and violent, and the vitriolic warrior women who have been baiting them suddenly become cowering victims of oppression, meek and fragile mothers trying to buy hot chocolates for their children.

Destroying Mark Latham is the symbolic triumph of grievance feminism over common sense and basic fairness. The double standards and hypocrisy are absurd.

And yet, says Christina Hoff Sommers, the visiting American philosopher, and author of “the War on Boys”, this is the new normal for feminism.

“Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they’re short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy?” says Sommers, who spoke this week at the Centre For Independent Studies. “It’s defeatist and demoralising.”

She sees young women in prestigious universities who are “chronically in a state of panic”. They are the daughters of helicopter parents, the products of entitlement and self-absorption and dishonest gender propaganda.

Where once young women would come to her lectures to “spar and debate ... Now they say I give them post traumatic stress disorder and they create safe rooms on their campuses … It’s a hypersensitivity bordering on madness.

“Apparently, dissident ideas now count as a psychological attack from which they demand protection. It’s a perversion of feminism. It’s turning feminism into I call it fainting couch feminism.”

At its heart this perverted feminism involves demonising men.

You can reduce it to a slogan: “women are from Venus, men are from hell”.

Boys grow up in this constant environment of disapproval. By the time they become men, if they haven’t committed suicide, most men have retreated into their shells, preferring to keep their own counsel, rather than fight the culture.

Mark Latham’s problem is that he won’t shut up, but you can bet there’s a silent army of men cheering him on.