A good part of the "War of the Sexes" panel focused on an issue that has enough resonance in England to make Susan Faludi a happy woman: the plight of men. Curiously, the strongest plea for the newly beleaguered gender was offered by Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips, author of a controversial new book, "The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male." She painted a bleak picture indeed: Men are demonized in feminist rhetoric, made increasingly redundant in family life, subjected to discrimination in divorce courts and virtually presumed to be violent and abusive toward women.

"Women have to stand up and say, 'What has been done in our name is wrong,'" declared Phillips. "No one should reach emancipation on the backs of somebody else's enslavement." There was some discussion about whether men as a group should themselves stand up to feminist excesses, and why they had not done so. "We're all vulnerable to the suggestion that we've been prejudiced or beastly to someone," ventured Phillips, explaining that men are "very intimidated" by charges of being sexist.

A few men did speak up during the question and answer period, though one of them actually voiced his dismay at the idea of a men's movement, saying that he had already seen "angry men on television complaining about feminist bitches." (Now there's a cultural difference: We don't hear such complaints on TV.)

One panelist, writer Daniel Britten, said that men, held in check by the fear of being politically incorrect, nevertheless need to articulate their side of gender issues. Male resentment against feminism, he noted, is partly due to feeling "excluded from the public debate about gender" -- illustrated by the fact that only six of the 26 speakers at "Sex Wars" were men. He added, though, that it should be a "controlled response," lest a nasty "cycle of retribution" be unleashed by male reaction to feminist rhetoric.

The main focus, however, was not men but governmental and therapeutic intervention in relationships, exemplified by the widening reach of sexual harassment policies and proposals that would subject nonviolent spousal conflict to official scrutiny under the guise of combating domestic violence.

Jenny Bristow, a freelance writer in her 20s who focuses on issues affecting young women, stressed that it isn't always a matter of clear-cut injustices to men: "The man accused of harassment is rarely a totally nice guy. The real problem is that once you start regulating with things like looks, comments or jokes, you get into a gray area where it's very hard to tell who's right and who's wrong. I think the only possible answer is that these interactions should never be regulated." Sara Hinchcliffe, a professor at the University of Sussex, argued that harassment rules dealing with such ambiguities "encourage people to impute the worst possible interpretation to human behavior."

Furedi deplored the tendency to portray male-female relations as dangerous and in need of policing -- for instance, Valentine's Day warnings that a man's suave charm could be part of a batterer's power game -- but he didn't blame this entirely or even primarily on feminism. Rather, he argued that the demand for formal rules and restraints stems from society's lack of "moral and cultural equipment" to deal with change or with interpersonal relationships. This sounded rather like the argument advanced by many American social conservatives -- except that Furedi was calling not for a return to traditional morality but for a revival of the '60s ideal of creative and liberated relationships.

Indeed, I got the distinct impression that in England, criticism of "sexual correctness" is far more likely to come from the left than in the United States. Even Phillips, under fire for her defense of the traditional family, stubbornly identifies herself as a liberal and a progressive.

During the question period in the second session, "Regulating Passion," a self-described abortion-rights campaigner angrily said that just as she opposed state intrusion into women's reproductive lives, she was appalled by proposed laws that would allow intervention to protect women from "psychological abuse" in intimate relationships. Another woman said that as a veteran of leftism and radical politics, she found it very disconcerting to find sexual harassment codes depicted as progressive: "What sort of empowerment is it to say, 'You are harassing me?' -- especially since you usually end up saying to the employer, 'You must take my word over somebody else's.'"

Not everyone joined the consensus. On the "Regulating Passion" panel, feminist psychologist and author Lynn Segal -- herself once a critic of authoritarian tendencies in feminism -- got quite vexed by what she saw as an anti-feminist agenda and a "defense of straight men." Her ire seemed directed in particular at co-panelist Daphne Patai, who had assailed the expansion of sexual harassment policies as an effort to root out sexuality at work and in school, stemming from the anti-male and anti-heterosexual bias of a small but inordinately influential group of feminists. All the hype about men running scared and sexuality being under attack, an animated Segal asserted, was just a reaction to a new situation, one in which there was "more recognition both of women's right to sexual pleasure and of the need to defend women from sexual violence."

This corrective to the sexual libertarianism of "Sex Wars" may have been useful, but Segal's defense of feminism often seemed more vigorous than coherent. She was upset because a recent TV show about the clitoris used humorous graphics of "quivering walls" to illustrate the female orgasm, whereas a comparison program on the penis showed "rockets shooting off 50-foot fireworks," which somehow added up to cultural barriers to "asserting an active female sexuality."

Worse, Segal seemed to ally herself with the sex regulators. "We need to ask why pornography is still with us," she said, suggesting that however silly porn may seem, it sometimes leads to "attacks on women." Alarm bells also went off when she talked about creating an environment in which young women could have "safe, caring, responsible sex." This prompted someone in the audience to inquire how such a notion was compatible with spontaneous passion, a question Segal never got around to answering.

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