Whenever you point out that men rather than women are the disadvantaged and those on the receiving end of prejudice, the first thing you get back – after the blunt denial – is: ‘what about women in Islamic countries?’ Everyone assumes that female face and body coverings are ‘oppressive’ to women and at the behest of men. Yet both of these assumptions are false.

Female Islamic dress codes are cultural practices similar to foot-binding in China and female circumcision (genital mutilation) in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions, in that they are all cultural codification of female intra-sexual competition to secure high mate-value pair-bonded sexual partners.

As with all fashions, they are not imposed but readily adopted as women wish to join the more advantageous in-group and to dissociate themselves from the relative under-dog out-group.

Yes, of course, men will at the behest of women reinforce such behavior. This is not in any respect ‘oppression’ by men. If anything it is a imposition on them by women to which they feel duty bound to accede.

Now, when I’m allowed to get as far as putting across this explanation, the next retort is that even if it is women themselves ‘oppressing’ each other, it is still women being ‘oppressed’, and that therefore we still need to focus on women and not on men as being disadvantaged.

So there you have it. A default assumption that what in fact women do to themselves is instead done to them by men. We see this all the time in the persistent ridiculous ‘size zero’ controversy. Women don’t really want to be super slim, we are told; they would prefer to be size 14. It’s just the all-powerful male fashion industry that is forcing them. Yet the fashion industry is female-controlled, of course.

We live in an era of unprecedented political stupidity where the notion of a particular highly implausible social ‘oppressor’-‘oppressed’ dynamic is unfalsifiable. No amount of evidence, however internally consistent and externally validated, can shift PC-fascist conviction. Not until, that is, the whole edifice collapses under its own stupendous dead weight. And that is starting to happen. We live in times set to be rather interesting.