United Equal Parenting Conference 2006

About Neil Lyndon

Neil Lyndon - who has been a highly successful professional journalist and writer for 35 years - was the first writer in Britain to draw attention to men's disadvantages and inequalities and the first to offer a radical, egalitarian and progressive critique of modern feminism. In a series of major articles for The Times, The Independent and The Sunday Times in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lyndon became the first journalist to point out that our culture promoted a systemic prejudice against men and that its focus on the position of women allowed it to overlook the true position of men, especially in the family. He was the first to draw attention to the absence of legal rights for unmarried fathers, the first to question the absence of any say for men in abortion and the first to point out that prostate cancer was an entirely neglected illness which killed more men than all the cancers of the female reproductive system combined (a finding which was hotly disputed at the time by leading figures in the medical establishment). In 1992, Lyndon synthesised and advanced these views in his book "No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism" in which he argued that the idea of a patriarchy - the essential foundation stone of modern feminism - was bogus and that change for women in the last 200 years had closely followed the development of technologies for contraception and abortion. Contrary to the claims of feminists, Lyndon argued, Western societies had generally welcomed and encouraged change for women and men - far from resisting such change - had plainly wished to embrace change for themselves.
 
These articles and books created an unprecedented storm of opposition and personal abuse. No More Sex War was certainly the most aggressively attacked book of the last 50 years. Neil Lyndon became a pariah in his profession and an outcast in the London media society in which he had, for many years, enjoyed a prominent position. His income disappeared and he was bankrupted.  Having been the first journalist to argue that the courts acted unfairly in their treatment of fathers who had become separated from their children, Lyndon found himself in that very position when his estranged wife abducted their nine year-old son to Scotland and Lyndon was engaged for many years in court battles over custody and access, losing at every single stage. He did not see or speak to his son for four years, until - when he was 15 - the boy ran away from his chronically unfit mother and Lyndon moved to Scotland to give him a home while he finished his schooling.
 
Though he is allowed to write in a variety of national papers on many other topics (he has, for instance, been Motoring Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph since 1994) Neil Lyndon is still unable to get his views on sex, gender and the family published in mainstream British media.
 
Now 59, Lyndon is married again and has two daughters, aged three and 10 months.

Neil Lyndon’s Talk

It's time for men to get political
 

It’s good to be among friends. Something of a first for me.

It’s now more than 35 years since I first became concerned about the position of fathers in families and the issue of equal parenting. It’s over 30 years since I published my first article in a national paper questioning some of the orthodoxies of modern feminism and suggesting that the dominance of that ideology might conceal injustices for fathers and perpetuate an unequal state between parents.

Over those decades, I have written hundreds of articles, made hundreds of broadcasts and written one of the most notorious books of recent years; yet this is the very first time I have ever been invited to speak to an audience which might generally share and approve of my attitudes. For many years, I found myself speaking to audiences composed solely of feminists and their sympathisers - a mission about as promising as trying to convert a body of committed Muslims to Judaism. Anybody here who would like to take over that burden from me is more than welcome to it.

Yet even here today, I gather, my own presence may not be entirely welcome. One of the organisers has told me that more than one person attending this event has asked him why a conference on equal parenting should be addressed by an anti-feminist - a question which truly does make me feel that all my efforts have been absolutely in vain, absolutely worthless, and that they add up to an absolute failure.

My interest in this subject begins and ends with a concern over the position of fathers in the family. It was because I became aware that men were being subjected to an injustice that nobody cared about that I first began to think systematically about the role of feminism in our culture. And if, even here, it is not understood that the reason why we live in a society, a culture and an age which denigrates men and belittles fathers is because our age is dominated by the idea that women are oppressed by men - if it is not understood that the reason why the divorce courts routinely marginalise fathers from the lives of their children is because we live in age which has been taught to regard men as semi-civilised savages - if these most fundamental aspects of my work have not been grasped even by people who might be expected to agree with them - then truly, I have failed completely.

But, as a matter of fact, I am quite accustomed to facing this reality. I have long understood that our age is stonily and implacably impervious to any argument and any evidence which contradicts the faith of feminism and its essential tenets. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article with another researcher proving that domestic violence was a massively exaggerated and misrepresented phenomenon. We proved, conclusively, that one in four women did not suffer from domestic violence - even though that was the figure that was always advanced in all discussion. We proved, with evidence, that violence in the home was not primarily a matter of men hitting women but that, when it happened (and it happens a lot), it was usually a good deal more confused and a good deal more mutual than that account would suggest. We showed that, when it happened, domestic violence was almost always fired by excessive drug and alcohol consumption and that it was as common between homosexual couples - of both sexes - as it was between heterosexual couples.

These findings were prominently published in one of this country’s most popular and influential quality Sunday newspapers. And what difference did they make to the discussion of domestic violence? Barely a jot. Hardly an atom. It is still routinely claimed, in all British media and in official government bodies, that one in four women suffers from violence in the home with the man she lives with. In recent years, I have even read - in the supposedly scholarly journal of the Howard League for Penal Reform - the allegation that one in three women suffers such violence, which, if it were true, would mean, by extension that every woman must be at risk of violence from the man she lives with. That is what these figures are intended to suggest and it is a lie. It is an absolute, it is an outrageous and it is a detestable fiction. It is a calumny against all decent men, all loving husbands and fathers. Yet it is what our society chooses to believe. And, as a consequence, our society chooses not to believe - nor even to hear - any argument or evidence to the contrary.

And that brings me to Fathers 4 Justice - which I am going say, has largely failed and for the same reasons that my own work has failed to make much difference. And the same is true of Families need Fathers and the UK Mens Movement and Mankind and the Equal Parenting Alliance - all failures, in the sense that they have made very little difference to the laws, the courts, the conventions and the culture of our time - despite the fact that they are all advancing a case which is so overwhelming in its moral power, so obviously just, so manifestly desirable that we can only scratch our heads at the opposition or the indifference or the outright hostility with which it is met and ask “What is it, exactly, that those people have got against equality?”

It is undeniable that some small change has occurred and is occurring. Shared parenting orders are becoming more common; Theresa May’s Early Day Motion has been signed by over 300 MPs and is an immensely heartening sign that our legislators are beginning to take notice. But, as everybody in this hall understands, it continues to be the case that the courts in the family division construe the child’s interests as being synonymous with the interests of the mother.

Which means, as a matter of bare and undeniable fact, that fathers organisations are getting nowhere.

Why? Because nobody wants to hear what they have got to say. Let me give you an example.

I didn’t know about the interruption to the National Lottery by Fathers 4 Justice until the morning after it happened. At 8 o’clock on that Sunday morning, therefore, I put on Sky news and witnessed a classic scene - one that speaks volumes for the way in which the issue of equal parenting and position of estranged fathers and their children is viewed in this country. I think it tells us why Fathers 4 Justice, Families Need Fathers, Mankind and others have failed to make significant progress and to failed to bring about profound change in this country.

On that Sunday morning, a spokesman for F4J was being questioned by two news presenters. They asked him if it wasn’t damaging to the cause he represented to stage demonstrations that inconvenience the general public or put people’s backs up. The spokesman acknowledged that the group does have to deal with this dilemma but, he answered, F4J regards the treatment of parents and grandparents and children by the family courts as being such a serious and major injustice that it dwarfs a little spot of inconvenience for the public (by the way, I should say that I am unconvinced by that argument and troubled by the moral superiority that it presumes because I think that an extension of that approach can lead to flying planes into skyscrapers and setting off bombs on buses when you think you possess greater wisdom, understanding or goodness than other people) .

Anyway, back to the studio on that Sunday morning. Five times, the presenters put that same question to him - with very slight variations - and five times, he gave more or less the same answer. In the few minutes that were allowed for this item, the presenters never once asked why fathers should feel the need to stage demonstrations like this, what it is exactly that they are complaining about or what they want to change.

So why were those questions not put? Why was the man from F4J not invited to explain the case of the organisation he represented?

The answer I believe - and I imagine that all your experience must confirm this and all my experience confirms this - is because our society, our age, our culture simply and profoundly does not want to know, does not want to hear what parents, especially fathers, who have been unjustly treated by the courts and by our legal system have got to say.

This has been true of all of F4J’s stunts - now matter how brilliant, hilarious and inspired they may have been and even when they inconvenienced nobody but the security services. Both the sortie to Buckingham Palace and the shower of purple powder over the government front bench in the House of Commons were treated as security issues by the media and the Establishment. Almost no discussion of the position of fathers and their children resulted from those events and, certainly, I think we can all agree that no change resulted in the conduct of the courts or the position of non-custodial parents.

And the same is true for Families Need Fathers. I remember once being told about a deputation some years to the Home Office led by some FNF members who met a Home Office Minister. According to the report I heard, the Minister curtly and angrily dismissed the submissions of FNF on behalf of fathers, saying “I don’t want to hear a word about any disadvantages for fathers until every inequality for women has been eradicated.”

In those words I believe, you come to the heart of the resistance to change for non-custodial parents and grandparents. That Minister was declaring the reason why this astounding injustice - by which tens of thousands of children are routinely deprived every year of the love of one of their parents and one set of their grandparents - is perpetuated. It is because this injustice applies mainly to men and mainly to fathers - though every one of us knows of individual cases where it has happened also to a mother, usually through the conduct of a foreign court - that it cannot be admitted for what it is. It’s obvious that nobody in this country lies awake at night, tossing and turning with worry over the position of fathers who have been separated from their children by the our own - our very own - courts. It may be - it is - the single most outrageous and indefensible injustice and inequality in our own time and our own society. But it doesn’t, on the whole, happen to women. So, self-evidently, it doesn’t count.

Imagine what it would be like if tens of thousands of mothers were separated every year from their own children by force of law. The prospect hardly bears thinking about but try if you can…

The Guardian would publish special editions. Geri Halliwell might be appointed UN Ambassador on the question. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt would come jetting in for earnest conferences with Clare Short and Emma Thompson. Sting would feel called upon by a higher power to put out a record. Bono would be marching up Downing Street to beard the Chancellor. Cherie Blair would donate her legal services free of charge. No, now I’m going too far into the realms of ridiculous fantasy….

But there‘s no question, is there, that the picture would look entirely different if this injustice applied to women rather than to men.

In part, it has to be admitted that one reason why father’s and grandparents’ organisations have not made much difference is because they have failed to cut the mustard politically, organisationally and intellectually. They have failed to persuade the wider society of the obvious, overwhelming and undeniable justice of their cause partly because they have, themselves, been unconvincing, unpersuasive, unattractive, unappealing. They haven’t made it cool. They haven’t made it fashionable. Where are the charming and charismatic, persuasive and compelling leaders of this movement? Where is the great writing? If you look at internet websites, chatrooms and blogs on this subject - you get an inescapable sense of self-pitying, self-obsessed, humourless, slightly (or sometimes extremely) bonkers people - which is, after all, not at all surprising seeing as most of them have endured experiences which might drive anybody round the bend and would strip even the laughing policeman of his sense of joie de vivre.

So one possible answer to the question “where should equal parenting organisations go from here” is to say: it’s time to grow up and get real; it’s time to get serious and smart; it’s time to start winning arguments and it’s time to get political.

I hope that groups like Fathers4Justice will continue to devise their invaluable new forms of theatre to dramatise their protest (concentrating on stunts that don't harm or inconvenience innocent people) because every movement needs its AgitProp arm (though you had better watch out, chaps, if you are going to make a habit of making monkeys our of the security services because they will go out of their way to make sure they get their revenge - as they proved last year in their noble and heroic partnership with The Sun); but the truth is that simple protest, books and articles like my own, demonstrations, petitions, marches, symbolic acts, simple and sweet reason - these, alone, are bound to fail.

If fathers are to achieve equal parenting in their own time, therefore, they will need to draw upon the experiences of successful campaigns to remedy injustice in the past (from Civil Rights in the USA and anti-apartheid in S. Africa to the Movement for the Ordination of Women in the CoE). They will need to make strategic alliances with groups that share their interests - such as those representing single parents, grandparents and families. Perhaps, like the Militant group of the 1980s, they will have to embark on a campaign of infiltration into political parties which might achieve government. Like the feminists of the last century, they will have to undertake a long march through the institutions of the modern state, embedding sympathisers in positions of influence and in the media.

One way to advance the cause and the principle of equal parenting might be through the creation of a Family Union - a genuinely popular fighting arm to represent the interests of fathers and mothers, children and grandparents.

This could be the twenty-first century version of the trade union but it could be just as relevant to the interests of, say, a BBC head of department as it would be to the office cleaner. It could be just as fitting to the needs of an advertising copywriter as it would be to the family concerns of bus driver. Every one of us who has children and also has to work is subjected to an excruciating conflict between the demands of work and the needs of family and, at present, no body - I mean no organisation but it is almost equally true of any individual - no body stands on our side against the interests of capital and the demands of government.

A Family Union could be a nationwide organisation in every workplace, with membership ultimately in millions. This would also be an organisation that acted on the understanding that the interests of men and women in the family are almost entirely identical and that, on the few points where they differ, they are harmonious. This would be the organisation which sees that the needs of young parents in employment can be matched with the needs of older and younger people who want work. A Family Union, moreover, would have the power to control politicians, to determine political policy and to subvert and to circumvent the feminist orthodoxy which stands in the way of equality for parents. That old order could be cut off and left to wither away.

I am very enthusiastic about that idea but, obviously, the creation of a Family Union would take many years - as would the kind of political change from the bottom up that I was describing. A quicker, wittier and possibly more appealing way to bring about change in a hurry would be to make equal parenting a feminist issue.

I am only half joking about this. One of the reasons why the fathers’ movements have got nowhere is because they have failed to enlist the support of powerful and influential women. How many of them are here today? How many of them are going to be speaking here today? How many of them will be writing in tomorrow’s papers, insisting that the present system of unequal justice in the family courts is a disgrace to our age which cannot be allowed to continue for another day? Where are they?

Think about this. In the past, every single movement for social and political change on behalf of groups who lack privilege has succeeded only when it has been taken up by those who are the beneficiaries of privilege. Think about the Suffragette movement. From the moment of its inception - in the writings and the works of John Stuart Mill - to the moment when Lloyd George introduced the 1918 Representation of the People Bill, the Suffragettes depended on powerful men. Theirs was the most fashionable cause of their time, both for men and women. Every self-respecting man of a progressive and philanthropic turn of mind automatically signed up to the Suffragette cause - from Bertrand Russell to Keynes, from Shaw to H.G. Wells. The renowned mountaineer George Mallory was the organiser of a society for the promotion of women’s suffrage at Cambridge University and he was absolutely typical of men of his age, his class and his cast of mind. Naturally, the contribution of these men - and of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage does not figure prominently in the official histories of the Suffragette movement.

And, by the same token, if you read the orthodox histories of the Civil Rights movement in America in the 1950s and 1960s, you won’t find much discussion of the vital role played in the success of that movement by middle-class, liberal-minded white people. The black peoples of the southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi did not achieve equal rights through their own efforts alone but were immensely aided by white people - without whom the change probably wouldn‘t have happened at all. It was young liberals in Americans for Democratic Action and Students for a Democratic Society, it was Democrats from the Adlai Stevenson wing of the party, it was prosperous New York liberals - intellectuals, writers, teachers and lawyers - who brought about that colossal transformation in a relatively short period from 1960-1965. In that time, many privileged young white people were so committed to that cause that they were willing to endanger their own lives - and some actually did lose their lives. How likely is it that members of the general public - that is men and women whose own personal lives have not been affected by a custody crisis - would take a similar stand on behalf of fathers in divorce today? Not very likely, I think we can agree.

Or, again, think about the anti-apartheid movement that eventually transformed South Africa. The credit, of course, goes rightly to Mandela and his comrades for their unswerving commitment and resistance; but they alone did not - and could not have - forced the apartheid regime to accommodate change. It was the pressure exerted by rich countries and peoples in the outer world - the beneficiaries of the social order which Mandela sought to emulate - who compelled change in South Africa. The same is true for the Movement for the Ordination of Women which was supported extensively, actively and vocally by members of that very establishment in the church which was resisting that movement‘s wholly legitimate and justified claims.

So where, today, is our female John Stuart Mill or our George Bernard Shaw? Where is our Adlai Stevenson or our Eleanor Roosevelt? Where is the woman of standing and influence in our own time who will declare that, in the name of justice and equality, all women should support the demands of the fathers’ movement? Doris Lessing has gone some distance in this direction. Fay Weldon and Erin Pizzey have half-heartedly and unconvincingly stammered out some pleadings of this kind. And, with those three, the not entirely distinguished list ends.

The quandary, of course, for well-meaning, enlightened women who might be concerned about this abominable injustice is that they can’t be seen to express sympathy with fathers (members of the dreaded men species) without appearing to rat on the cause of women. Such is the grotesque stranglehold of feminist orthodoxies on all discussion of the family and the positions of men and women that anybody who ventures an opinion in this intellectual territory is required, as a first act, to make obeisance to the feminist creed and to declare allegiance to the faith. It’s a bit like the position of Americans who harbour some doubts or disquiets about the Presidency or US foreign policy but who are required, before they voice a word of criticism, to say “I love this country but…”

But you simply cannot acknowledge the injustice and the inequality of the position of fathers in divorce and in the family so long as you believe - as feminism insists - that we live in a society organised by men for the benefit of men, one that endures only at the expense and through the oppression of women. The one proposal does not marry with the other. There cannot possibly be men in a position of disadvantage if they are running society for their benefit.

So, rather than admit the possibility that the theory might be wrong, feminists and their followers - which effectively means the entire cultural establishment of this country and the West - close their eyes to the injustice that our age inflicts on fathers; or they sneer at it; or they attempt, with hilarious, Lilliputian logic, to make out that men actually enjoy this state of inequality and perpetuate it themselves. The most wonderful example I ever saw of this weird inversion of the truth was when Germaine Greer excoriated men for clinging to the privilege of continuing to work until they are 65 and forcing their less fortunate sisters to take a state pension at 60. As the Duke of Wellington said to the man who believed that he might be Mr Smith: “If you are capable of believing that, you really are capable of believing anything.”

Dismaying as it may be, the truth is that Germaine Greer is a revered pillar of an Establishment which fully endorses her general prejudices. Feminism has become the established and the Establishment faith not just of this country but of the West. As a people, we don’t believe in God, we don’t believe in the Monarchy, we don’t believe in our country, we don’t believe in the revolutionary capacity of the working class but everybody - everybody - believes in feminism. We live, as a matter of fact, in a kind of humanistic theocracy - a state in which adherence to a particular faith and observance of its essential articles is a uniform characteristic of all members of the ruling elite.

n Britain today, there probably isn’t one member of the front bench teams of all three parties who would hesitate to declare full agreement and sympathy with feminism. Every Editor of a national newspaper presumes, automatically, that feminism stands for good - all except, possibly, Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail. I would be astonished if there was a single head of a programme-making department at the BBC, a single vice-chancellor of a university or even a single High Court judge who did not believe that feminism had been an essential force in correcting rank injustices against women in the past.

This is an amazing uniformity of belief and one which hasn’t been true of the Establishment in this country for about 500 years. Even 100 years ago, the Cabinet would have contained free-thinkers, agnostics and atheists as well as those who adhered to one shade or another of Christian belief. Today, there is only one true faith to which every respectable person gives lip-service, even if they don’t fully believe it in their hearts.

Therefore, so long as there is a feminist Establishment in charge of regulating discussion on all topics concerning gender and the family, it follows that organisations that campaign on behalf of fathers will not have a dog’s chance of success. They haven’t got a prayer. Their only chance may be to couch their cause in such terms that feminists can approve of it, can take it up and make it their own. Then, I promise you, we would see some change. And fast.

And, in point of fact, equal parenting is - or should be - a feminist issue. It may, in fact, be the last remaining genuine feminist issue. If equal parenting could be taken up as a feminist cause, it might even breath some last life into that clapped-out, redundant, fag-end of twentieth-century totalitarianisms and give it some real purpose in our own time.

It must be recognised that women simply cannot be fully equal in the workplace and in the wider society if, at the same time as being expected to work on equal terms with men, they are also expected or required to bear an unequal share of child care. The equation simply cannot be made to balance unless men, as fathers, are made equal in the family. If men and women are expected to stand in an entirely different relationship to their work after they become parents - or if the only miserably cruel alternative to satisfying that impossible demand is that they should have their children looked after by other people (by nannies, by nurseries or by child-minders) - then they must always be unequal in their work; and they will achieve unequal levels of responsibility; and they will be paid unequal amounts of money.

If feminists are serious - a premise which, I accept, is of an order of improbability along the lines of saying “If the moon is made of cheese” - about equal pay, equal opportunity and the elimination of the glass ceiling, then they have to make it their business to ensure that fathers are equal in the family - with equal rights, equal responsibilities and equal expectations. That must mean, also, that a presumption of equality must extend to both parents in separation and divorce.

So that’s the way ahead, in my view. There lies the route to victory. We need a new slogan and a new acronym. In future, the letters FNF should stand as much for Fathers Need Feminists as for Families Need Fathers.

I believe that there are going to be some galling aspects to this process. The prospect of being self-righteously lectured by Janet Street-Porter or Jenni Murray on men’s need to accept change in the role of fathers - when this is what fathers have been demanding all along - will be, I grant you, a little hard to stomach. The moment when equal parenting becomes a fixed plank in family law in this country and the foundation stone for the operations of the family courts and is, at that moment, appropriated as a triumph for modern feminism will be, I wholly acknowledge, stomach-turningly hard to take.

But we’ll just have to be magnanimous and noble in our victory, bite our tongues and take quiet satisfaction in having achieved the change that our children and our grandchildren will thank us for.

Thank you.