Garth George: Men have only themselves to blame for feminism

It constantly amuses me to watch scientists set out to prove things that have been obvious to most of us since about the dawn of mankind.

They invariably call it research, but these days it is rarely that. Rather it is a series of investigations and tests intended to prove preconceived notions.

Among the most common of these in recent decades has been the "research" intended to prove that boys and girls and men and women are so much the same - in all ways except in shape - that they are as good as interchangeable.

The latest of these to cause me great mirth was reported in this newspaper last week under the heading, "Science admits: Girls and boys think differently".

It makes this astonishing statement: "That boys and girls and men and women are programmed by evolution to behave differently from one another is now [by science] widely accepted."

Well, fancy that. Once again it seems that millions of dollars and thousands of expensive academic man- and woman-hours have been spent on coming to a conclusion that has been obvious to any 5-year-old, male or female, since time immemorial.

But the statement is fatally flawed because it was not evolution that programmed male and female to behave differently - it was God, who "created man in his own image ... male and female he created them".

And when Adam and Eve were disobedient and made their Maker inordinately grumpy, the trouble started. His punishment upon Eve he proclaimed thus: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

Those italics are mine because it seems to me that men took advantage of that statement for millenniums - until the second half of the last century in fact - by using it as evidence that men were superior to women, and that women were simply their chattels.

This arrogant patronisation of women, which permeated Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and still does today among the unenlightened - must have caused the Creator deep and constant grief, for that was never what he intended.

He created male and female to be equal, although very different, and when he came to Earth as Jesus Christ he acknowledged that: women played vital roles in his birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection. He amazed his followers, and angered his detractors, by treating women the same way he treated men.

In the early churches that sprang up round the known world under the tutelage of St Paul and others, women were often cast in leading roles.

Yet no sooner were the apostles cold in their graves than the unenlightened fastened on certain statements of Paul's to dominate and subjugate women once again.

In all of this, the blokes missed the point. When God lumbered Adam and Eve he wasn't lumbering man and woman, he was talking about husband and wife, for it was and still is God's intention that men and women should, as a matter of course, marry and "be fruitful and multiply".

When Paul laid down strictures of the behaviour of men and women in the Church, he wasn't talking to men and women, he was talking to husbands and wives.

What they were saying is this: When a man marries a woman he becomes responsible for her and their children. If anything he does or doesn't do causes them strife, then in God's sight it is his head that's on the block.

When Paul spoke to unmarried men and appeared to be recommending bachelorhood and chastity for some, what he was telling them was that it they weren't prepared to take full responsibility for the lifelong welfare of a wife and a family, then they'd better stay single.

But back to the "science" of male-female differences. Says the article: "The success of neo-Darwinism has provided an intellectual underpinning for discussion about why some differences between the sexes might be innate."

Well bless my soul. I've never heard of neo-Darwinism, so I don't know if it's been a success, but I do know that since male and female were created for separate yet complementary roles in this world, their differences are innate, there's no might be about it.

In all seriousness the article tells us: "Within a year of birth boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns; girls prefer dolls and tea sets. The theory put forward is that the toys young females prefer give opportunities for nurturing behaviour, something useful to them later in life ... " That's a theory? How can that be since it has always been accepted as a fact by men and women that girls who become women are programmed to be nurturers and boys who become men are programmed to be protectors and providers?

It is, of course, a theory only to scientists who refuse point blank to accept that men and women are two halves of a whole, and that the whole is revealed only in the completely unified nature of God himself.

But let me say this: the feminist revolution which began last century, and continues to this day, was absolutely necessary for women to break free of the shackles in which male-dominated society had bound them and to begin redress the balance. If we let it get out of hand at times, we've only ourselves to blame.

My great regret is that it didn't start in the Church.