Down with Skool !

MARK FLETCHER examines the roots of the present unwritten law in our courts that there is 'one law for men and another for women'

BOYS couldn't do a thing right whe I was a kid at school; girls couldn't do a thing wrong. Boys were caned for the most trivial of offences; girls were let off with no more than a talking-to.

Was the class noisy? Keep the boys in at play-time. Is the class restless? Make the boys stand up and remain standing for the entire lesson. The dice were loaded on small things as much as on large.

The teacher taking the class for singing lessons would announce brightly that the girls would sing first - always the girls first - and then the boys, and we'll see who sings better. We boys would exchange cynical glances. Fat bloody chance she'll declare the boys to be the winners, we thought, and we were always right.

I remember a schools' broadcast when we listened to a boy and a girl disagreeing with each other as to the species of a bird they were watching. There was a short pause in their argument, during which time our class was supposed to discuss the matter and decide who was right. I put my hand up at once and gave the answer. The teacher then asked the reason for my answer and I said it was because that's the answer the girl had given, and on schools' broadcasts girls were always right and boys were always wrong.

The rest of the class laughed and the teacher told me not to be so clever. But he had a broad grin on his face as he knew I was telling the truth. A minute or two later, the music stopped and they gave the correct answer. I was correct.

That little episode effectively spoilt the rest of that schools' broadcast nature series because in each subsequent episode, the entire class would back the girl's decision, knowing that girls weren't allowed to be wrong.

And I don't think that it was just coincidental; not when I think about the dancing lessons at primary school: country dancing, of course, which meant the pairing off of boys and girls.

Simple, I hear you say: boys in one line, girls in the other, face inwards and let the first two pair up, then the second and so on. But that is precisely what the teachers didn't do. Instead the boys had to stand in one long line whilst the girls walked slowly along it selecting their partners.

All the women I've told this story to think it's screamingly funny. 'Now you know what it feels like having to stand there until someone asks you to dance,' they all say. To which I always reply, 'Why not give the boy the option of refusing the girl, then the girls could find out what that felt like?'

What I remember most, though, were the teachers all convulsed with laughter at the sight of a sullen, glowering line of small boys, each one seething at having to stand there waiting for a girl to pick him out as a partner. Oh, it was funny; the boys were being humiliated. It was a joke.

But do you want to really split your sides? The cardinal sin at school was for boys to hit girls. (You'd think it was wrong for anybody to hit anybody, wouldn't you? But there I go again, being logical. This will never do.)

A family friend told me a few years ago that her daughter, who was six feet tall at the age of twelve, had recently had words in the school playground with a boy half her size. She'd drawn back her fist and knocked him down. (Women, hearing this part of the story think that part screamingly funny. Naturally!)

The boy had picked himself up off the ground, stood on tip toe, and hit her back. He was promptly punished for it by a teacher who'd seen the whole thing, because a boy mustn't strike a girl under any circumstances. Naturally, the teacher had done nothing when the girl had hit the boy.

The same philosophy applies to major incidents. A couple of years ago a gang of school-boys stripped a girl and indecently assaulted her in an empty class-room. Criminal charges were laid and the case made headlines in the Daily Femail. But I read the article with a certain weary cynicism because, six months earlier, a gang of girls in my part of the world carried out an identical attack on a boy in their class. Their punishment has been to receive (and I quote) a 'good telling-off'. And that case wouldn't even have got as far as the local rag if the teachers at the school hadn't protested at the leniency of the 'punishment'.

Small boys love to play football, they sometimes play Cowboys and Indians, and in the right season they still play conkers. But have you ever known a group of boys play School? And have you ever known a group of girls who didn't?

What do you learn from that, little grasshopper? Ask any man about school and he'll shrug indifferently and say something like he was good at history, but didn't like maths and was really proud of playing for the First XI.

Ask any woman and she'll look nostalgic and say that Mr Smith was nice, but Miss Jones was a bit too strict and she never really got on with Mrs Brown. Spot the difference?

I sometimes marvel that my generation didn't grow up solidly misogynist; God knows we had enough reason.

I have a theory - it's all nonsense, of course - that what happens to us as children in some way conditions our behaviour and our expectations when we become adults. But it couldn't possibly be true could it?

I mean, think what the world would be like if society were to treat women with the same can't-do-anything-wrong leniency that they experienced as school-girls. Why, if that were to happen, grown women would be encouraged to sneak on all those naughty men who wouldn't let them join in their clubs and games or who used 'bad' words like 'fireman' or 'station-master'. And they'd get a pat on the head when they reported it and lots and lots of lollipops, I mean money, because that's what they call 'harassment' which is even worse than smoking in the toilets and it's jolly well going to be stamped out.

At work, women would spend half their time gossipping in the Ladies, just like at school. And they'd say really mature things to each other like 'That's not fair', and they'd make sure there were tribunals and divorce courts and child support agencies who would listen to women and then punish all the bad men ever so hard.

The newspapers would woo them with Women's Pages, and print articles with headlines that said things like 'Women are Wonderful' or 'Men Are Rubbish', and nobody would see anything strange about it. Why, they'd even publish screamingly funny interviews with women who'd done jolly clever things like cutting up their ex-husband's suits or vandalising their cars. Well done, the Upper Fifth!

And there would be laplantist* fantasies on television about women taking charge of police squads or football teams or Army units and always making a brilliant success of it, just like Her First Term at the Chalet School.

And if a man hit his wife, the thick blue line* would come and arrest him and make him do a detention in prison because that would be domestic violence, whereas when a woman stabbed her sleeping husband to death she wouldn't even have to do a hundred lines as long as she said the magic words, 'he-beat-me-he-raped-me-he-abused-the-children.'

In fact, a woman would even become a heroine in the media if she waited until her husband was asleep and then took a can of petrol . . .

Why we might even have an organisation called 'Justice for women'.

No, this is nonsense. It doesn't describe the real world at all does it? What a ridiculous fantasy!. No sane person could possibly invent a scenario like that. Just goes to show how wrong my theory must be. Silly me!

* laplantist - reference to the writings of the feminist Lynda La Plante who wrote fantasy stories about marvellous women beating men at just about everything.

* thick blue line - reference to not-very-intelligent police officers who are prejudiced against men and who think that if a woman says something then it must be true.