SOMEONE must have been telling about the average adult male because, without having done anything wrong, he awoke one morning to find that he had been forgiven. Was he to accept the forgiveness with gratitude and relief that at least he was now going to be banished from human society?
Would he risk reopening the wound by restating his innocence and demanding a fair trial? It was quite a dilemma. Most of his compadres, overcome by the consensus against them, had given up the fight. Some had even started to curry favour by giving evidence against their own gender.
The chances of unconditional acquittal were remote because any attempt to defend himself would be regarded as adding to the sins of past. Much better to plead diminished responsibility and invite some mercy by not wasting the court's time.
After four decades of onslaught, the western male is a beaten docket. The fallacy that men still dominate is given common credence by an outdated rhetoric of female liberation but the underlying reality is of a rapidly disintegrating male psyche.
While feminists talk on about the glass ceiling, men have slipped quietly into their shells. While the battle raged, a massive change was happening to the nature of power, which was moving out of the hands of human beings and into the less tangible command of impersonal forces.
Women who climbed the greasy pole found that it wasn't what they wanted but by then it was too late. Because the battle had taken place in the terms of that which was being obliterated, nobody knew what to do next.
Moreover, because what was laughingly described as a dialogue had become one of opposites rather than a genuine effort to achieve harmony, the final collapse of patriarchy's tottering edifice looked set to leave behind a Pyrrhic victory for women and a heap of rubble where the male dominated society used to be.
But it was all right. The male could begin to feel good because, after all, he had been forgiven. The less strident of the victors were extending the hand of friendship, acknowledging that not all men were brutes, wife batterers, paedophiles or sadists. A few, it appeared, were not so bad if you kept a close eye on them.
SISTER Stanislaus Kennedy wrote in this newspaper recently that women should embrace those men who are trying to be better". Isn't that nice? Now that man has been conquered, it is time to accept his surrender, though under certain conditions, including the condition that every man take personal responsibility for every rape, abuse and act of violence committed by every human being happening to be of the same gender as himself.
By and large, the sins of men are the sins of power and its abuse, of absolute power corrupting absolutely. But if the truth be told, they are the sins of mankind rather than the sins of men, the wrongs of those with power, strength and responsibility in a frail and sinful world.
But such speculation is not admissible as evidence. Neither is the self evident truth that the majority of men are decent, law abiding and loving human beings. Strangely, or perhaps not, even though the spirit of the age is to deny collective culpability for some of the most heinous atrocities in the history of the world, the adult male finds himself shouldering the blame, guilt and shame for the transgressions of a few with whom he shares a single characteristic: maleness.
The circumstantial evidence was thought to be overwhelming, as was the power of the supposition that everything might be different if only women were in charge. Only a very brave man would suggest the possibility that what would result from a reversal of roles would be a simple interchange of culprits.
Since this is a minefield of political incorrectness, men had better button their lips except to whisper agreement with those among their fellows who apologise on behalf of the whole gender. We had better put out of our minds any thought of self defence, never mind counter accusation.
There is no word in everyday use for the female equivalent of a misogynist and to attempt to introduce one would itself be an indictable offence of misogyny.
And so to the question of punishment. It is already in hand. At first, men thought that their punishment was to be a little unsettling confusion. Conditioned to behave in a certain way by a society comprising both men and women, they were now being blamed and accused for doing as they had been taught. They were told they were powerful when they felt no such thing.
They were accused of being rapists and abusers but bad no memory of such crimes. They apologised anyway, just in case, for how could they explain the torrent of accusation?
BUT this confusion was but a preliminary stage. Man's real punishment was to be banishment after all, in particular from the everyday company of his children. Because the war between the sexes had occurred against the backdrop of other modernising phenomena, both victors and vanquished awoke on the morning after to an utterly altered reality. The traditional family was dividing at the seam between mother and father.
And because the whole thing was occurring in a culture of recrimination, it was deemed appropriate that the consequences should reflect the appropriate levels of culturally agreed blame. The society's laws and mores rapidly internalised the idea that it was correct that men take the rap.
The average male, meanwhile, found his economic power shrinking, even while that of women increased. He found that his entire being was. diminished accordingly, for his sense of self had comprised almost nothing besides. And there was no compensatory increase in his rights in other areas, such as in those where women had traditionally been dominant.
And so it was ordained that the man, male, father, be banished to a place of solitude, a bedsit perhaps on the edge of town, a place where, traditionally, so to speak, the refuse of the society had been deposited.
From here he had conditional permission to venture forth, at the whim of a male judge who, in all probability, had metaphorically abandoned his own children, on perhaps the second and fourth Saturdays of every month, to honk the horn of his ageing car outside the house he was working to maintain, so as to alert his children to his presence and invite them to spend the afternoon in McDonald's.
From time to time, it was remarked that children, too, were suffering but this was regarded as an unavoidable element of collateral damage. In mitigation it was pointed out that half of such children would become adult males so it was appropriate that they too be punished.
As for the little girls well, they, presumably, would grow to understand that their virtual exile from the love of their fathers had happened in the cause of equality and liberation.