At last, it’s fatted calf time. Let’s dance. The arrival of Kathleen Parker’s book marks one of those sensational moments of seismic cultural shift that seem unthinkable, unimaginable.

It is wonderful, miraculous, to see a woman arguing such an incendiary case against the hidebound feminist orthodoxy of our age and to read reviews that praise her book as “fierce, fearless and courageous”. But I must admit that it is slightly trying when some commentators (women, of course) have said “only a woman could make such a plea for men”. My experience shows that only a woman could write such a book and collect honours, fame and royalties: a man would be ruined. As I was.

Exactly 20 years ago, I began to write a series of newspaper and magazine articles – culminating in my 1992 book No More Sex War – which made most of the points in Parker’s book and also advanced a far more radical prospectus. Like her, I argued that change for women in the past 200 years had been initiated, encouraged and supported by men. The idea that women had been required to fight a war of liberation to claim equality is obviously a pernicious fiction. Ask yourself, for instance, how many women MPs were sitting in the Commons in 1918 when parliament voted to extend the franchise to women? Why – if patriarchal men feared and opposed the liberation of women – did those MPs vote in favour? She says: “Incrementally, government fills the void once occupied by parents.” I said: “The state makes a poor mother and a mean father.” She says – as I did – that boys need men as models whom they can admire if they are to become responsible, balanced, women-loving men, fathers and husbands. I would now say that the fatherless hoodie gang-banger with the 6in blade in his waistband is Germaine Greer’s bastard offspring.

The response to my work was a torrent of abuse. I lost all my work and income and was bankrupted. The derision was even echoed in the Scottish courts where I was contesting the custody of my young son.

After this surreal sojourn in hell, I realised that only a woman could succeed in criticising feminism; and that only women now have the power to establish equality between the sexes. It is now incumbent upon women to rise up from their privileged position and repair the inequalities of men. With few honourable exceptions, men are too cowed, too meek, too pussy-whipped to raise their own voices on their own behalf.