NEIL LYNDON: 22 years on, I’m republishing my controversial book on the failings of feminism.

No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism was the world’s first radical critique of feminism from an egalitarian, progressive, non-sexist point of view. It forensically took apart that secular faith in its own terms, showing it to be informed by totalitarian dogma originally drawn from Marx and Engels. The book unearthed the contradictions within the ideology of feminism, exposed its myths and falsehoods and revealed it to embody a reactionary intolerance – one which has restrained and inhibited change and equality between the sexes, rather than promoting a joyful liberation, as the sisters like to boast.

The twin intellectual achievements of the book were, with evidence, to demolish the notion that we live in a patriarchal society (the presiding presumption of all forms of feminism); and to show that change for women had taken place over the last 200 years primarily as a result of advances in contraceptive and abortion technologies. Mass-produced condoms, Dutch caps and contraceptive pills were the sine qua non of female emancipation, I argued, rather than the Pankhursts. Men as a whole, I demonstrated at length, had not opposed those advances. On the contrary, egalitarian progress for women had frequently been initiated, encouraged and promoted by men.