SHE'S SO MODERN:

Battle of the Sexes - The Rematch: The arrival of Bob Geldof as a sober champion may have given the men’s movement a new legitimacy after the the flour bombing and superhero stunts. But beneath the bids for sympathy a bitter extremism refuses to go away. (Jenifer Johnston, 10/17/04, Sunday Herald)

Twenty years ago next month Bob Geldof launched the crusade against famine in Ethiopia, which galvanised a generation. Today Geldof is still an articulate and passionate campaigner, but his cause is very different.

When Geldof shared his views on marriage and children on Channel 4 last week he became the acceptable face of an emerging movement more used to operating on the fringes.

When the former singer with the Boomtown Rats calmly and rationally dissected the flaws in a legal system that separated men from their children after the breakdown of marriages, he did infinitely more for fathers’ rights than the series of highly publicised stunts which have recently grabbed the headlines. Many women liked what he said. Critics liked what he said. Men were grateful for what he said.

While the purple flour bombs and Batman at Buckingham Palace did little to win the public over to the cause espoused by the Fathers 4 Justice group, Geldof’s quiet anger was much harder to dismiss.

His television broadcast may emerge as the moment when the arguments of the men’s rights movement finally struck a note with the public.

It is a movement that is gaining momentum. Fathers 4 Justice now boasts 16,000 members just two years after it was formed. Since the mid-90s there has been a steady rise in the number of support groups for male victims of domestic abuse, helplines for men caught in inescapable family law problems, and, more recently, political activism from men who want their gender to count for something, and not just on issues towards childcare.

Their list of grievances is growing and partly echoes the central planks of the women’s rights battle of previous decades. The four main areas of concern are education for boys, domestic abuse, fairness over divorce and access to children after a separation.

While access to estranged children has so far dominated the news agenda, education is the main bug bear of campaigners. Steven Fitzgerald of the Mankind Initiative, a charity which lobbies the government on male issues, calls the state of male education in the UK “awash with double standards”. He believes the recent success of girls in the system has been at the expense of boys’ education.

If only Britain had a conservative party to ride the PC-backlash.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 17, 2004 11:51 AM