Author fights against man bashing

Article here. Excerpt:

'We can be rampantly promiscuous without being called ‘slags’ and we rarely have to worry about being groped on a packed bus. Nor, on the whole, are we expected to choose between raising children and pursuing a career.

But for all the advantages of being male, thunders Peter Lloyd in this angry, funny, provocative book, we are these days considered the ‘overrated, unfashionable gender’. Man-bashing, of which we are largely innocent victims, has become so lucrative that ‘people build entire careers on it’.

By ‘people’, it’s safe to assume he means the other gender. But Lloyd protects himself from charges of misogyny, using interviews with some clever, high-achieving women to construct a persuasive case, on the back of his opening three-word premise that ‘men are brilliant’, to suggest that our brilliance goes not merely unrewarded, but downright punished.

Men, he argues, suffer from sexism too, both casual and institutionalised. He cites the British Child Support Agency, so hopelessly skewed in favour of mothers that some men are forced to subsidise children that aren’t actually theirs, without any redress against so-called paternity fraud.

Nor are the famous exempt from the iniquities of the law. Bob Geldof tells Lloyd that he was very nearly bankrupted by the fight for access to his three daughters by Paula Yates.

‘The whole system is disgusting,’ says Geldof. ‘I remember a court clerk at my trial telling me: “Whatever you do, don’t say you love your children.” Family courts consider men who articulate this as extreme.” It was madness.’'