Not him, too

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly.

Like me?!?

Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him.

Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today, in western society, they are oppressors. I’ve never experienced them as such. I come from a family of women who endlessly smashed their way through the glass ceiling. My mother was completely self-sufficient — a professor — as were my not-over–privileged great-aunts, one a surgeon in Delhi in the early 1900s, with her sisters variously a doctor, a headmistress and a mathematician.