It might not be news to you, but it was certainly news to me that UN-sponsored gender mainstreaming is 20-years-old this year.
What japes! Yes, it was a score of years ago, at the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi (well, according to the latest and utterly riveting issue of Administration the journal of the Institute of Public Administration and Snoring), that the concept of gender mainstreaming first appeared.
What is gender mainstreaming? Well, obviously it's sister-stuff, but what else is it? Actually, that's quite hard to say: I've tried to get a handle on it from reading Administration, but I slipped into a coma twice. Maybe I should withhold my final opinion on gender mainstreaming until the film comes out - no doubt with Michelle Pfeiffer as Kofi Annan, Morgan Freeman as President Bush Senior, and Ike & Tina Turner playing Mary Robinson.
That said, however, one line in Administration caught my attention, and more to the point, stayed there, which is quite a feat for anything emanating from feminist ideologists. It is from Sara Clavero's account of the origin of gender mainstreaming: "This call, to incorporate a women's perspective into the mainstream of development policy. . .[ blah de blah de blah]."
Now what's interesting in those few words is the curious conjunction of a singular indefinite article with a plural noun, as in "a women's perspective" The rest of us would say "a woman's perspective" or "women's perspectives". But only feminists would, entirely unselfconsciously, conclude a priori that there is such a singular, discrete and definable thing as "a women's perspective".
And what is the perspective of all womankind? Why, none other than what the feminist finds in her own heart! And if you want to grasp the totality of the feminist ideological victory over the institutions of Irish life, you should read - or try to, anyway - this edition of Administration, before passing out. There are no "ifs", "whys" or "maybes" in its discussion about gender mainstreaming. It is as assumed and central to the entire publication as dialectical materialism was to the central praesidium of the Soviet Union.
As it happens, a pretty interesting example of gender mainstreaming occurred last week in Birmingham, where police carried out a raid on Cuddles "massage parlour", in which, very appropriately and very deliberately, half the raiding officers were female. How splendid. But of course, nothing else about the house of Cuddles was remotely gender-mainstream.
Nineteen young women had been used as sex-slaves there. They had been criminally trafficked into England from a dozen countries, kidnapped on arrival and their passports stolen. They were then violently coerced into having sex by the brothel managers - three men and a woman.
Now what really interests me is not the unfortunate girls, or the disgusting pimps, but the clients. If there were 17 girls working, how many men was each one servicing in a day? Let's call it 10. That's 170 clients a day, nearly 1,200 a week, or 62,000 a year. Can all these men really have believed that the girls were working in the brothels freely and entirely of their own accord? Or were these men - even allowing for repeat customers, this must come to many thousands a year - simply content to buy sex, regardless? I'd guess that they were. And this is where the entire gender mainstreaming mumbo-jumbo comes a cropper, at the very first fence of sexual conduct. For in their pursuit of sexual gratification, men often behave quite abominably, as thousands did towards the unfortunates of Cuddles. No doubt when they'd finished using them, they'd abandon them to their shackles, before contentedly sauntering back to the pub or the wife.
There is and could be no female equivalent to this kind of conduct. It is not even a question of conditioning. You simply cannot socially programme women to behave as badly as this; their nature would not allow it. For the desire of women to use the unwilling, the coerced or the financially-induced for their own sexual pleasure is so rare as to be almost non-existent.
In saying this, I am not arguing for the closure of all brothels, only those where the girls are not providing sexual services entirely of their own accord. For it is a universal fact of life that some men want to pay for sex, and some women want to be paid to provide it. You can lament this all you want, but it is simply how things are, and always have been.
So why do feminists argue for gender mainstreaming between two sexes which have so very little in common, not just sexually, but emotionally, psychologically, and motivationally as well? In our hearts, we all know about these differences. So, sisters, if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi takes you captive, do you want your hostage rescue team to consist of (a) the SAS, (b) some of Willie O'Dea's new, equal-opportunities, gender-blind, I-feel-your-pain, Sexually Tolerant special forces wing, The Strangers, or (c) an all-girl, active service unit of the United Nations High Commission For Women? If you've opted for (b) or (c), this will give you the unique opportunity, as your throat is slowly being cut, to admire the discussion groups which your rescue teams have formed outside. It will also enable you to note that all beheaders, everywhere, are men - which probably suggests that our Islamicist friends are also in need of some UN-inspired gender mainstreaming. But, given its hallucinogenic, ideological and feminist view of the world, the UN probably still thinks al-Qaeda is a Verdi opera.