PETER HITCHENS: These fantasy-land feminists don't even care about women

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Margaret Atwood is an accomplished author and her 1985 book The Handmaid's Tale was a fantasy about a world in which women's liberation went into reverse

The position of women in this country has changed beyond recognition in my lifetime, mostly for the better, and mostly in ways I very much approve of. 

In education, the workplace, politics, the law, the church and the media, in advertising and in their portrayal in films and on TV, the transformation has been gigantic. 

In our school and university system, girls are now better off than boys, with most forms of selection tilted in their favour.

The question of equal pay for equal work has also been solved as far as humanly possible, as Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs has shown and will patiently explain to anyone who doubts it. 

But those who doubt it do so because they want to doubt it, so they are uninterested in facts. I'll come to that.

So why are we being subjected to a great flood of media pigswill about how the oppression of women is a great and growing problem? 

Well, partly it is thanks to the frantic, overblown promotion of a tiresome and rather embarrassing book by Margaret Atwood, The Testaments.

Enter any bookshop and it is piled upon the front table. 

The BBC is giving it the free promotion it reserves for those books it deeply approves of. 

Women garbed in red dressing gowns and white lampshades are roaming London to publicise it.

Ms Atwood is actually an accomplished author, and her 1985 book The Handmaid's Tale was a clever fantasy about a world in which women's liberation went into reverse. 

Well, actually it wasn't much of a fantasy.

It was clearly based on the 1979 revolution in Iran, which (as well as being murderously repressive) imposed a stifling version of Islam on men and women alike.

The Iranian Ayatollahs forced that country's women to huddle and cringe in black veils and robes, after many years in which they had been free to dress as they liked.

It might also have referred to Saudi Arabia, but in that country the status of women has always been pretty strictly controlled. 

In more recent years it might more justly have described the growing pressure on formerly free women in such countries as Egypt and Iraq to adopt the hijab and niqab and accept second-class citizenship. 

Or even the appearance on the streets of Western cities of women in black veils.

People discovered the plot through a nasty, explicitly anti-Christian sensationalised TV series rather than through the duller, more tempered book

By setting it in America, she made it all the more shocking. But it was also a nonsense. 

Did anyone really believe, in 1985, that the USA was going to start forcing women to go about in shrouds? Of course not. Nor do they now. 

I know of no significant Christian sect or church that even believes in any such thing.

But they pretend to.

Here, from the esteemed columnist in the London Times, Alice Thomson, is a possible explanation. 

Ms Thomson declared last week: 'Since I read The Handmaid's Tale as a student 33 years ago, women's rights have progressed, only to regress.' 

She added: 'It was the #MeToo movement that made women realise just how little had changed and introduced my daughter as well as three sons to feminism. 

'But it also created a backlash.

'We pretend that women's rights are still progressing, with more jobs for the girls and in some areas more equal pay, but in many ways Britain feels increasingly like Atwood's theocracy of Gilead.'

This is pure drivel. 

The fictional Gilead, which most people have discovered through a nasty, explicitly anti-Christian sensationalised TV series rather than through the duller, more tempered book, is a totalitarian terror state of torture and arbitrary executions in which women are banned from the professions and power, denied education, subjected to licensed rape and reduced to domestic servitude.

The TV version contains scenes of almost pornographic cruelty involving chains, muzzles and torture, plus a profanity-flecked mockery of the Lord's Prayer. 

The heroine is raped. 

Just in case any of us didn't get the message, the crime takes place to the background of church organ music.

In case any viewers still don't understand the point (Christians are bad!), the rapist reads chunks out of the Bible as he proceeds.

In what way, Alice, does Britain resemble or 'feel like' this? Do tell. 

Can you find me a single significant Christian who advocates such a society? 

How did you escape from your misogynist captors for long enough to write this comical drivel? 

How did you then get it published in a national newspaper? 

Talk about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

There is another important aspect of this, which I have to keep mentioning. There are places where women are indeed oppressed. 

There is a religion which – in some versions – expects women to be veiled and submissive and gives them legal rights inferior to those of men. 

But the liberal intelligentsia, always happy to pelt the Christian faith with slime, is strangely reluctant to mention this.

Odd that the supposed champions of women's freedom fall silent on this subject. Odder still that, having won so much, they still pretend they are oppressed losers.

I'm not even sure that these third-wave feminists care all that much about women. 

Their aim is not the improvement of the lot of women, but a complete overthrow of the Christian society in which we live.  

Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue Service has dropped the TV character Fireman Sam as its mascot thanks to alleged 'negative feedback'

 A 'diverse' fire brigade – full of feeble men

Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue Service (not a brigade any more) has dropped the TV character Fireman Sam as its mascot thanks to alleged 'negative feedback'. 

This 'feedback' says that the character is not 'inclusive' enough and might discourage women from joining. 

Funny that 'negative feedback' from ultra-Leftist fanatics gets listened to, while the rest of us can go whistle if we have any concerns about the emergency services. 

This is just the latest idiocy in a relentless campaign which fails because most women don't want to be firefighters, just as most men don't want to be nannies. 

Some do. Good luck to them. But most don't.

In March 1999, the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, set a target of 15 per cent women in the fire service by 2009, a giant increase on the figure at the time, which was 1.4 per cent. 

By 2017, years of effort had got the figure up to 5.2 per cent of firefighters in England. But to achieve this the requirements for height and strength have had to be greatly watered down.

I suspect that the main result is that we have more weedy men in the fire service than we used to. 

Now try saying sorry for your own mistakes, Archbishop...

I do worry about Archbishop Justin Welby. 

Does he know anything? Does he understand his own religion? 

There he lies flat on his face in the Indian city of Amritsar, regretting a massacre he didn't carry out 100 years ago. 

It was pretty thoroughly condemned at the time, and its culprit was forced to resign.

Archbishop Justin Welby laid flat on his face in the Indian city of Amritsar

Christianity is about recognising your own faults, Archbishop. 

Get some practice. Explicitly and fully apologise for your Church's decision to publicly smear the great, late Bishop George Bell, now shown beyond doubt to be the result of a one-sided, sloppy kangaroo court.

No need to lie on the floor.

Just say sorry for a foolish, unfair mistake, and the vanity that has prevented you from admitting it.

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