A similar attitude is evident in Australia where recently several women have come forward complaining about what they see as the Commonwealth Parliament’s toxic and misogynist culture. The campaign to call out male offenders is being led by “Australian of the Year” Grace Tame, who suffered sexual assault as a school pupil.

The feminist argument that all men are guilty and society is riven with structural sexism is exemplified by Jamila Rizvi’s opinion piece in two of Australia’s mainstream papers, The Sunday Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Discussing Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s apparent inability to empathise with the women recently going public about alleged cases of rape and sexual harassment, Rizvi argues the reason is that, as a man, he is incapable of “empathy, kindness and taking time to listen”.

PUSSY

Rizvi goes on: “Australian society still conditions boys and expects men to be bulletproof and rash. To laugh at the chauvinist joke and call anyone who doesn’t a pussy. To brag about women as conquests, and to treat them as objects to be possessed then disposed of”.

Rizvi further vilifies men by arguing that they invariably protect their mates “instead of doing the moral thing” and they always “do what they want, take what they want, and never apologise or ruminate on possible error”.

Additional evidence of the fatwa against masculinity comes from Victoria’s Brauer College where at a school assembly last week all the boys were made to stand and apologise to the female students for the unforgivable sin of being male.

One mother describes her 12-year-old son returning home confused and upset: “He now has this misconception that everybody looks at him and males as predators or somebody wishing to do harm to someone in a sexualised manner – seriously, he’s 12”.

Such is the campaign to demonise men that the neo-Marxist inspired Safe Schools program in Australia tells students there is nothing beneficial or worthwhile about masculinity and the Respectful Relationships programme wrongly characterises domestic violence as solely perpetrated by men against women.

Ignored is a report by the United Nations surveying 71 nations which concludes on the basis of factors including “intimate partner violence” that Australia is a world leader in terms of treating women fairly and achieving gender equality.

That radical feminists present a misleading, superficial and jaundiced portrayal of boys and men should not surprise. Such is the prevalence of “cancel culture” that any male who disagrees is vilified as sexist and condemned as complicit in women being abused and assaulted.

RESPONSIBILITY

Witness the attacks on the head of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, for recently telling female cadets they should better take responsibility of their own safety by not overindulging in alcohol, not being out too late, not being alone and not presenting themselves as overly attractive. If poorly expressed, such advice is common sense.

It is not only men who defend men. The American libertarian feminist Camille Paglia in her book Free Women, Free Men argues that for too long “feminist theory has been grotesquely unfair to men”.

Opposing the generalisation that all men are sexual predators, Paglia writes: “The atrocious exceptions have been used by feminist theorists to blame all men, when over the whole of human history men have given heroically of their energy and labour and indeed their lives to benefit and protect women and children”.