I AM NOT a football fanatic, but I have a passing interest in the fortunes of my local Suffolk professionals, Ipswich Town. The interest stems from the club having four or five East Anglians in its team (whereas most top teams are unusual if they have more than two "locals"); their record of picking up fewer bookings than any other Premiership team; and the fact that the whole squad cost the wily manager less than £10m, which is about the going price per-head in all the really big teams. On a recent Saturday I turned on ITV's evening news and sports programme to check the Town's progress. The news reader was female, as were two of the three reporters. Nothing unusual here; BBC news programmes have much the same gender balance. Then up came the sports report, fronted by a vivacious blonde lady, Gabby Yorath, who breezily delivered all the appropriate football jargon - from the auto-cue. The programme terminated with the weather report read, of course, by another attractive female, whose bosom totally obscured the Bay of Biscay on the accompanying weather map. How could Michael Fish or John Ketley compete with that!

Before any soccer cognoscenti write in to expose my ignorance, I am aware that Miss Yorath's father played football for Wales. However, the point is that soccer, like rugby and cricket, is predominantly a male sport and exclusively so professionally. Go to any sports ground, town or country, at the week-end and here you will see male testosterone in action. It is a biological fact that women could not compete with the pace, nor the dominant mental desire to win! Nor do they seem to work as a team as efficiently as men - part of the primordial hunter instinct.

Teenage boys at Britain's comprehensive schools are now used to being told that compared to girls they are thick. It's the girls who show better concentration, better clerical skills, and produce more consistent termwork that gain them higher GCSE results. The boys, who, where some discipline still exists, often produce better exam results, have in the main accepted this lower status. They are more concerned with impressing their male peers with their "street cred" and trying to "pull" the girls. For many, their last male refuge is sport - and particularly football. Now, political correctness is trying to spread sexual egalitarianism into this final male bastion.

Is it any wonder that many boys have been conditioned into believing they have no role in society and have opted out? From a BBC Blue Peter programme I was watching recently with one of my visiting grand-daughters, it would appear that even boys' long-held career aspiration of being a train driver is out of bounds. A girl standing on a steam engine footplate at York Railway Museum talked learnedly of the mechanical requirements of the train of the future. Back in the studio a slightly embarrassed young man of nineteen or so showed us how to make a chocolate cake in the shape of a locomotive engine. Full marks for the programme producer's political correctness!

Where have all the men gone?

Thus it was that my original interest in Ipswich Town FC made me realise how far the feminist agenda had subtly spread over the past few years.

Further evidence came later that evening when I picked up the Telegraph's money supplement to check the state of my paltry PEPS. Most of the financial pundits giving us their learned advice were women, and by their photographs - mainly under thirty. I counted the by-lines. There were 13 women contributors and six men. I found that a similar ratio existed in other papers. How odd, when City finances and banking are still male-dominated! Not that I would deny that there are some very capable women in financial institutions. The point is: where have all the male financial correspondents gone? Writing for the Heckmondwyke Herald or the Haverhill Echo? And have the former male news readers and reporters been sent off to cover any news stories in Uttar Pradesh or Outer Mongolia? No wonder that unemployed men, particularly the young, now outnumber women.

Women and war

Have you also noticed that when the TV and radio news programmes wish to obtain the views of a business sector on some specific issue it is now invariably a woman who is the "spokesperson", whether it is insurance, food and drink, industry, the CBI or whatever? A new development is women officers giving reports on behalf of the armed services.

During the Second World War women played an invaluable and often courageous role in Britain's armed services. They served in their own units: the WRENS, ATS, and WAAF. Apart from their work in administration and support services, which helped to release men for direct combat roles, they took casualties in manning AA guns, flying aircraft from manufacturers to air bases and served as nurses in many theatres of war. Others were killed in air attacks on RAF airfields and - at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham naval bases. As one who was around at the time, I salute their memory.

Today, the WRENS, ATS and WAAF have all been disbanded. Women are now integrated with the men in ever increasing numbers. They go to sea in mixed naval crews, with mounting evidence of a fall-off in discipline. Officers have expressed concern at the outcome of any future conflict where the natural reaction of the male will be to look after the female crew members to the probable detriment of carrying out their own tasks efficiently. Similar concern has been expressed in the Army, as a result of left-liberal egalitarians agitating for women to undertake front-line combat roles - which rule in theory now exists in the US Army and Marines. Imagine such a gender-mixed force, acting as individuals rather than as a team, trying to storm the Normandy beaches in 1944 against the battle-hardened troops of the Wehrmacht! They would hardly have got off their landing crafts and the slaughter would have been unimaginable. Can anyone possibly deny this?

My argument on these matters is certainly not motivated by misogynism. It is simply that the normal mental make-up of a woman is meant for the more caring aspects of life, necessary in bringing up children. A soldier must be prepared to kill: to kill at close quarters with the bayonet as well as at a more comfortable distance from the enemy. It simply is not in women's nature - that of normal women anyway - to carry out the first and most men have to be trained for it. Our Paratroopers had to do this at Tumbledown in the Falklands, and many suffered psychologically for it afterwards. That is the nature of war.

The Israelis have learnt this lesson. In the early sixties the media had a field day with glamour photos of Israeli women soldiers ready to fight alongside the men. This was quietly dropped after the '67 Yom Kippur War. The Israeli soldiers and police you see today suppressing the Palestinians are all men.

Much media attention was given a couple of years back to women being trained as RAF fighter pilots. If one had made the grade and flown over Kosovo, let alone Iraq, surely we would have heard all about it by now. The American Air Force has some women pilots two of whom were the centre of much media attention following a recent mission over Iraq. I cannot better Kevin Myers comment on this in a recent issue of the Sunday Telegraph:-

‘I don't know how many women fighter and bomber pilots there are in the Gulf, but I would wager not many: yet two of them both named are the subject of what we may term a propaganda photograph. But clearly the purpose of this propaganda is not the war in the Gulf but that other gulf war, between the sexes back home. The picture has a job to do, and that is to tell the sisters in the US that all is well: the feminist agenda proceeds through US life even in bombing far-away places with strange-sounding names. How jolly comforting; how politically sound; and how utterly meaningless.

‘For the squadron the two women officers belong to is known as "The Raging Bulls" not "The Raging Cows" or "The Raging Heifers". There is an obvious reason for that, and that is testosterone. Testosterone is what makes the herbivorous bull so very dangerous and it is its absence that makes his mate such a sweetie.’

How it all came about

Contrary to the impression the feminists try to give the bemused public of today, in the forties, fifties and early sixties, if girls had the necessary talent and enthusiasm they could virtually enter whatever profession they liked. Admittedly very few were to be found in engineering, but this was mainly due to their lack of interest in the subject. In science, women have always been well represented. From personal experience, in 1944 to early 1945 I worked as a junior chemist at an ICl factory in Cornwall. Whilst the chief chemist in our lab was male the place was really run by his two deputies, two young ladies. (If I add that as a 17-year-old spotty youth I was so smitten by their feminine attractiveness that initially it affected my concentration I suppose this would invite the charge that I was a sexist male chauvinist!)

How did this conflict between the sexes that has played its part in the disintegration of society come about? It stems from the work of a tiny minority of crypto-Marxist women aided by males of the same political persuasion. The fall of the Soviet Empire may have removed these people's principal flag-bearer, but the campaign to destroy the old structure of the nation states of the West continues.

Veronique Shugg, writing in issue 23 of Right Now! magazine says:-

‘And just who were these feminists, these beings with an apparently self-conferred sort of divine right to sit in judgment on the lives of all women en masse and declare them wanting. They were women who, embittered by their own inadequacies, blamed the whole world in general and men in particular for their own shortcomings.’

You can hardly find anyone with more with more shortcomings than Andrea Dworkin, one of the American pioneers of "Women's Liberation". A grotesque 300-pounder (22 stone in imperial weight) she seems obsessed with how bad sex is for women. She ought to try it (I'm not volunteering!). It might cure her but it is unlikely to cure her Marxist views. Another American founder was Betty Friedan who also stigmatised the whole world as being a conspiracy by men against women, and in the process attacked most of the things that real women find worthwhile.

Another feminist pioneer, and certainly an extreme-left one was Simone de Beauvoir, a disillusioned French intellectual. In her book The Second Sex she set out to destroy everything that made being a woman worthwhile. We must not forget of course, Germaine Greer. It would be unfair to label her a Marxist but this Australian pioneer of Women's Lib can be guaranteed to uphold the liberal-left corner in her numerous appearances on BBC and Channel 4 discussion programmes. Her only saving grace is that she seems to regret having been a little over the top in her accusations of man's perfidy given in her book The Female Eunuch, although she can't quite get round to saying so.

Men and women are complementary

The work of this minority of ultra-feminists, aided by male co-operators playing the same Marxist game, has been to destroy unity under the false pretext of campaigning for equality. It is so obvious as not really to need stating that men and women are complementary and it is ridiculous to think in terms of one replacing the other.

Let the final summing up go to Veronique Shugg in her above mentioned article. One, because I cannot better it and two because she puts the true woman's view on the matter:-

‘The feminists spent years promoting the sexual evolution and telling women that they must be like men in their pursuit of "sex for the sake of it," with the result that the natural respect that men used to have for women has been extinguished and that any and every woman is now considered fair game by men who listen to what the feminists have been saying for so long. Now, having achieved their goal of equality of outcome for all, some of the feminists have decided that they do not like the result - suddenly they want a return to the better days of the past when men were men and women were cherished and cared for by society. Their answer, however is yet more rules and regulations to stop "the enemy" from indulging in the kind of behaviour they have themselves encouraged all these years. And the changes they now want made to the changes they have already forced on society will only continue to make their Brave New World even more of a mess than it is already. In that process of destruction, they have spawned the worst evil of all: political correctness, a modern form of thought control that makes any reasoned argument useless for the simple reason that reason itself is replaced by unthinking dogma and mindless rhetoric.’