In an appearance at the Edinburgh book festival, novelist Doris Lessing (best known for her books, “The Grass is Singing” and “The Golden Notebook”) lashed out at what she described as an “unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is no so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.”
Apparently what set Lessing off was a visit to a classroom of young boys and girls where the teacher offered a simple stereotype for why wars happen. Lessing said,
I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the boys sat there crumpled, apologizing for their existence, thinking this was going to be a pattern of their lives.
…
This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticize because they you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.
Lessing said that the energy the feminist movement had created had “been lost in hot air and fine words when we should have been concentrating on changing laws.”
Source:
Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists. Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian (UK), August 14, 2001.