Why women have a right to be angry with men

IN the early 1980s, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote about why men fear women — they fear that women may laugh at them — and why women fear men — they fear that men may kill them. And Germaine Greer famously wrote how few women have little idea of the extent many men hate them. Nah, you might think. Surely not.

And then you read, in 2014, of a pregnant young woman being murdered most medievally — by stoning — in a city centre outside a court house. Murdered by her own family. Their reason for murdering her, said her dear old unrepentant dad, was that she married someone they didn’t want her to marry.

Oh well, that’s Over There for you. That would never happen Over Here. Except it does, of course. Constantly. Some 196 women have been murdered by their partners in Ireland since 1996 — that’s around 11 women a year. Every year for the past 18 years.

And then there is Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who last week murdered six people on a Californian university campus because he was fed up with not having a girlfriend. In a video posted on social media, he said: “It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me. But I will punish you all for it.” And he did. What’s more, the lack of girlfriend is being reported as a reason. Not that he was a psychopath, but that he was a virgin. If only a woman had done what he had wanted.

Between 1670 and 2012 — that’s 342 years — 44 people were killed by sharks in US waters. Globally, you are statistically more likely to win the lottery than be attacked by a shark — yet fear of sharks is considered quite normal. Fear of men, if you are a woman, is not considered normal, but according to the WHO, more than one-third of all women worldwide — 35.6% — will experience physical or sexual violence during our lifetime.

If we get angry about any of this, we are called (a) man-haters (b) feminists (c) miserable bitches.

Currently we have everyone’s favourite family entertainer Rolf Harris on trial for multiple sexual assaults, and newspapers reporting how he says his encounters with young girls were consensual, filled with “warmth and affection”.

And we have the boss of the English Premier League, Richard Scudamore, still in his job despite the revelations of email exchanges in which women were referred to as “gash”. What a glorious message for boys and young men everywhere — denigrate half the population, and nothing bad happens. Substitute “gash” with yid, black, Paddy, Paki, or poof, and Mr Scudamore would have been booted on to the dole queue. Not still running the Premiership. But it was only women who were targeted. No harm done.