Stop Press! Girls Not Necessarily Free Of Slugs, Snails Ands Puppy Dog Tails…

…at least, according to dear old Yaz:

If there was real gender parity, I said last week, women would be able to be brilliant and total failures – great and not so great, heroes and anti-heroes, just like men. It was at a lively debate on women in politics at the House of Commons.

Too blasé, methinks now, simplistic, an ethically dubious position when one considers recent examples of atrocious female behaviour.

Oh, it’s the recent examples that have swayed you?

The Human Trafficking Foundation has just revealed that it is mainly women who are entrapping and forcing young, trusting lasses from abroad into the most bestial forms of prostitution in the UK.

Fancy! That’s never happened before, Yaz?

In India, Pakistan, Japan, China and elsewhere there have always been women who prostituted their own daughters, or connived to capture innocent girls and groom them.

So, it has. So why did you say it was a revelation?

In the past five years, we have been forced to open our eyes here, as women, often in trusted positions, have been convicted of grotesque acts on babies, infants and teenagers.

Yes, in the fine old traditions of Myra Hindley, Mary Bell, etc. All of them a lot longer ago than five years….

I have been writing about female genital mutilation for more than two decades. In all that time I have not met a single man who matched the pitiless fervour of the mothers, aunts and grandmothers, all of whom held on to the conviction that the slashing, maiming and closing off of a young girl's sexual parts was not only necessary, but noble.

So you’ve been writing about it for twenty years, yet it’s a sudden conversion?

Yaz, you’re all over the place, aren’t you?

We feminists, with our neat critiques of male dominance, are pathologically unable to deal with the fact that females are, sometimes, more sadistic than men and can and do viciously hurt their own sex. Who dares within the sisterhood to revise the assumptions on which so much of that belief system rests?

‘We’..? You’ve swallowed it as well, in the past. Don’t go sniping at others.

If we say that women must not be judged as harshly as men when they destroy those who are vulnerable, or that a woman must have the right to be as evil as a man, what kind of world is that?

The kind I thought you wanted to make?

Perhaps I am coming round to the view that no, women shouldn't behave as badly as bad men, and when they do, they should be judged more harshly. Equality is essential, but morality is more fundamental; it has to be, surely.

Judging them more harshly is equality..?

Good grief! Even by Yaz’s normal dismal standards, this is a dreadful column.