More and more we are seeing articles, and science that debunks and causes problems for feminism, and left wing ideological “truths”. What is clear is that more often, we are seeing a view that maybe the bad old days are better than the good new days will ever be. Follow the link to read the interesting comments from both sides.

Be honest: we all love the sexist alpha male

Many women will tell you that one of the most irritating things about life is that alpha males - great silverbacked gorilla types - strike us, maddeningly, as being rather more attractive than their kinder, gentler, more considerate dwarf-monkey counterparts. We know intellectually that it shouldn’t be so, since the gorillas are often sexist pigs (just to mix the animal metaphors); but when push comes to shove and we’re picking a boyfriend rather than a friend, few of us find beta males especially appealing.

In real life as in Georgette Heyer, the reprehensible, oddly sexy brute fares rather better than the sensitive flower. Now it turns out that the unreconstituted, sexist male chauvinist is not only more attractive to many women, but earns more money and is more professionally successful than the kind man who sympathises when you have period cramps and offers to make you a nice cup of camomile. Not fair, is it?

The Journal of Applied Psychology has just published findings from a University of Florida study based on interviews with more than 12,000 men and women. Between 1979 and 2005, they were questioned regularly about how they viewed male and female roles - whether they believed a woman’s place was in the home, whether employing women led to more juvenile delinquency(!) and whether it was the woman’s job to take care of the home and family.

Sexist men, the scientists found, made an average of $8,500 (£4,600) a year more than men who viewed women as work-place equals. Meanwhile, feminists earned more than their more traditionally minded female colleagues (but not a great deal more - £800 a year, on average). And while there was only a small difference between the pay packets of “egalitarian” men and women, sexist men’s wages outstripped everyone else’s.

Surprised? Me neither. It’s one of those stories that, even without being corroborated by the figures, has the horrible ring of truth about it: we’ve all worked in an office where the sexist monster is (a) very good at his job and (b) gruesomely and guilt-inducingly attractive despite his antediluvian attitudes.

The existence of such men is why sexism persists: it is obviously wrong on every level, as many an industrial tribunal will attest, but the combination of power and, shall we say, lack of political correctness can be a potent one - which is why everyone in Britain fell in love with Gene Hunt, the hulking great throwback in the BBC series Life on Mars, which was set in the 1970s. On paper the character was entirely despicable; in full flow he made his intelligent, evolved, sensitive sidekick look like a ladyboy. Men wanted to be Hunt; women wanted to be with him. This says a great deal about men’s sense of being emasculated at every turn in modern Britain - a complaint that is, I think, pretty much justified and needs to be addressed before it does considerable damage.

It is surely no coincidence that men seem angrier than they have ever been; you notice it especially when it comes to pornography. Wanting to subjugate and violate powerless women used to be a specialist minority interest; it has now become mainstream. Nobody seems to mind much. I find that pretty alarming.

See also the extremes men now go to in order to punish their former wives or girlfriends: horrific news stories about fathers murdering their children and then killing themselves have become, if not quite commonplace, frequent enough to ring loud alarm bells. There was another one just last week. There’s not much point in women saying, “Oh dear, how horrid - but anyway, about my right to breastfeed in public . . . ” These are issues that need to be looked at urgently before the situation gets wholly out of control.

Women aren’t powerless - au contraire. What is interesting about the sexist pay packet is that it doesn’t happen despite women, but rather with their consent and, in many cases, their covert approval. The fact of the matter is that biology will always get in the way of gender politics; you can cogitate and reason all you like, but it isn’t easy simply to eradicate attitudes and desires that have been hard-wired into us for millennia.

Wet men aren’t generally considered desirable or attractive; manly men are. Manly men, knowing they are considered attractive, continue to behave in their retrograde way and are rewarded for it with popularity, success and, if they’re good at their jobs, a heftier pay packet than anyone else’s. And then everyone likes or admires them even more, secretly or otherwise: success, money, esteem - what’s not to like, apart from the little matter of gender politics? And so it goes on.

Meanwhile, confusingly, everything we read and observe and are taught shows us that the object of our admiration is to be condemned and that being a victim of sexism is one of the most terrible things that can befall a helpless woman (in fact, it really isn’t and we’re not helpless: there are many worse things than people making jokes about your bosoms, especially if the jokes are quite funny. If they aren’t, we all have a tongue in our head and, if need be, recourse to the law. Part of the problem with all this is the irritating assumption that women are constantly doomed to victimhood and need protecting from the big, mean boys).

No wonder people get muddled. So this is a little plea for the sexist alpha male – the one we all secretly think isn’t as dreadful as he’s made out to be. Isn’t it time that we gave him a break from the full force of our disapproval? We live in a furtive sort of society where lots of women fancy men they feel they shouldn’t and many men go through life pretending to be a great deal sweeter and more feminine than they actually are, because they’ve been told it’s the only way to be.

It’s unhealthy, really - smoke and mirrors masking the unavoidable fact that, underneath it all, women prefer manly men, even ones who make sexist jokes; and men prefer womanly women, even ones who whinge about being fat. Perhaps that’s a terribly self-hating and sexist thing to say. Or perhaps it’s just the truth.

+ Writing in 1605, Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish nun who was brought to London by the Jesuits and risked her life in pursuit of martyrdom (she was especially good at the gruesome task of collecting relics from the freshly murdered bodies of Catholic martyrs), opined as follows: London is overcrowded, dirty, rowdy, especially on Friday nights; the food’s not up to much, everything’s too expensive and it rains all the time.

“The food looks good,” she wrote in letters home, “but it has no smell and almost no taste.” As for the neighbours: “At times, they grind me down with the noise that comes through the wall where I sleep. All you hear is the sound of meat being roasted and others cooking, eating, playing and drinking.” She is repulsed by the lack of sanitation - one day she sees carrots transported in a cart that had just been used to carry the corpses of plague victims - and is shocked by thieving children “of 10 or 11” being sent to the gallows.

No change there, then, despite the intervening 400 years (you can substitute the vilification of child criminals for the gallows, as though babies were born evil). The nun’s letters have been translated for the first time by Dr Glyn Redworth, a history lecturer at Manchester University. His book, The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal, published last Thursday, is an absolute treat - utterly gripping from start to finish.