From Sex War to Family Union: an interview with Neil Lyndon

Jan 6

In 1991, Neil Lyndon was one of the top journalists in the UK, writing regularly for the leading newspapers and magazines of the day (The Times, Telegraph etc). In 1992, his career fell off a cliff, or rather was pushed off a cliff, after the publication of his book No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism, an intelligent and fair but fearless intellectual critique of modern feminism. (You can find a review of the book here, and the revised publication of the book as part of an anthology, Sexual Impolitics, here). Although his book received praise from some quarters, it was attacked mercilessly by many, with much criticism directed at Lyndon himself. The impact on his career was fatal: he became bankrupt and lost his home. At the same time, his estranged wife abducted their nine year-old son and took him to Scotland where she got an order of custody from the courts without Lyndon even knowing the application was being heard.

It’s now 30 years since the publication of No More Sex War, and a good time to catch up with the author, and find out whether he thinks gender issues today have changed much since 1992.

John Barry (JB): You had a terrible ‘monstering’ in response to No More Sex War. Do you think the book would get a similar response today?

Neil Lyndon (NL): Well I'm not sure that it would actually get published today in an orthodox publishing way. A few years ago and I suggested a similar book to one of the country's leading literary agents - it could have been Epiphanies - and he said, “It would be suicide for me to deal with this, even to be associated with it”. He said publishing is now so completely dominated by feminists that's you would taint yourself irrevocably by being associated with it.

At the moment when No More Sex War was published I was in really pretty good standing as a journalist in national newspapers. In fact The Times had advertised my column all over London on the sides of buses and advertising hoardings all over London in the summer before No More Sex War, and they fired me within three weeks of it being published! My regular gig was cancelled within three weeks which is pretty much a diametric shift. So to think of what would happen today you would have to think of someone in an equivalent position, for example, a columnist on The Times, who would produce a book that is critical of feminist ideology. What would happen to him today? I think it's unimaginable. Firstly, there's no way he would write that book, and secondly nobody would publish it, so there is no prospect of the monstering happening to somebody else.

JB: What advice would you give to an eager young journalist who wanted to write about gender issues today?

NL: Be a woman. I published No More Sex War and one of the leading responses - apart from of course ‘oh you must have a tiny willy’ – was “What business is this of yours? What right do you have to talk about feminism - you are a man.” It's interesting that Ann Widdecombe has now produced this documentary for New Culture Forum, tackling false accusations, or hopelessness of the position of man in family courts - that does have serious clout, and it makes it impossible to dismiss in ways that simply weren't available to me. So Ann Widdecombe does illustrate that for a woman to address these questions it has a different sort of authority and possibility. And to broaden that point, it has been clear to me for a long time, perhaps 20 years, that for change to occur from men and boys it needs to be led by women. The disadvantages of boys at school and the inequalities of young men in further education won't be addressed unless the mothers of those young men and boys actually get up in arms and say ‘this isn't good enough’. If they get together and say ‘no, there has to be change’ they will be listened to in ways that when men complain about those questions will simply be ignored.

JB: Ann Widdecome asked me why men don’t help each other more, and I told her about social identity theory. Simply put, it just means that if you share an identity with someone, like you're an Arsenal fan and they are too, you will favour other Arsenal fans and will be biased against fans of other teams. The only exception to this rule about identity is male identity - men will tend not to help each other just because somebody else is a man. At least this is what research from around 2000 shows us.

NL: Well David Thomas wrote in his book Not Guilty that men who haven’t been through the family courts can't imagine that it could happen to them, men who are in the family court process are unable to think about anything else, and men who have been through the family court system don't want to think about it ever again. So this type of experience isn't going to be one that brings men together for change.

One of the bizarre aspects of my own personal experience was that I had written a number of articles about the family court experience – I wrote about it in No More Sex War - but as soon as I delivered the manuscript of No More Sex War, it then happened to me! My then wife abducted our son to Scotland and took out an order of custody in court, and I had no say in that whatsoever. So this boy who'd spent almost no time in Scotland before was imprisoned there. And then it was amazing that no journalist had seen this wonderful opportunity to tell the story about how a man had written about a situation that happened to other men, but then all of a sudden it was happening to him! I had a lot of friends at the time who would have said ‘oh this is such a killer story’ and go for it and write about it, but nobody did. This was a very dramatic manifestation of the lack of empathy that is felt towards men in these circumstances. They would simply just look the other way

JB: Is your idea for The Family Union something that is designed to help people in families to support each other?

NL: Well, at the root of the idea of The Family Union is one of the central propositions at the root of No More Sex War which is that, contrary to the claims of feminism, the interests of men and women are usually identical in terms of social interests. To the very small extent that they differ – as, for example, in childbirth itself - they are complementary to each other, entirely harmonious. In order to circumvent the power of feminism over our social lives - and after all it now controls and influences everything in our social life, education, medicine, justice… all the major institutions are affected by feminist ideology - so in order to circumvent it, I wanted to see the development of a body that took the interests of men and women to be harmonious, and advance them together. To my mind, the family is the cornerstone of that proposition. To take the interests of the family as the focus of political organisation and make it a buttress against the demands of the state and the demands of capital, that's the fundamental proposition of The Family Union. So The Family Union would, for example, attack discrimination against men in the courts because it's bad for women. If men are excluded as parents it puts an intolerable burden on women as parents if they are also expected to work all the time. The only way to deal with the breakdown of marriage and of joint parenthood is to make parents equal, and that's plainly best for the kids too. So that would be a natural point of focus for The Family Union, viewing the interests of everyone involved having equal importance.

JB: It sounds like The Family Union creates the family as a superordinate goal, that all concerned can work towards?

NL: Yes and it originates really from that perception. A superordinate is what is required to dissolve this entirely artificial conflict. The motto is no more sex war!

JB: Let’s finish on a difficult question. Around 75% of suicides are male: what do you think can be done to reduce the male suicide rate?

NL: There is no nice easy solution. The numbers of suicides attributable to specific experiences that are more common for men are high. The numbers who kill themselves in prison, after suffering the loss of their children through family law procedures, because of gambling debts, these are all much more common in men. We need to address the circumstances that drive them to suicide. Substance abuse and alcohol of course come into it. If you want to reduce male suicide: (a) educate boys properly (b) give them a meaningful job, (c) give them a place of respect in the family and protect the role of the father in the family. I suggested in a book, What’s Next For Men, years ago that the single most significant measure to improve the lot of men would be to do away with the notion of patriarchy. It is a misrepresentation, a misapprehension, a fiction. If we could do away with the notion of patriarchy we would release an understanding of the true position of man, and sympathy might flow towards especially young men, which would enable reform to be introduced. As long as we live under this grotesque misapprehension that men are in charge and they operate the system to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of women, it will always remain impossible to see how these poor young men are in a position that demands change and attention more than any other demographic in society.

JB: It could be that the idea of patriarchy not only alienates women from men alienates men from themselves. They misunderstand themselves, and don’t realise their potential. If you sufficiently confuse people, they might do all sorts of stupid things that they might not be able to fully come back from. Do you think we can get people to have more empathy for men?

NL: Well, this seems to me to be practically impossible through existing media. To give a limited example, William Collins’ recently showed in his Illustrated Empathy Gap website that, contrary to claims by some domestic violence agencies, there was no tsunami of domestic violence during the first covid-19 lockdown, even though that claim had been supported by UK governments to the tune of about £150 million of extra money given to domestic violence agencies.

William Collins did something that I also had actually done: we both separately made Freedom of Information applications to the police forces in the UK, analysed the data, and found that there was no such tsunami of incidents of domestic violence. It didn't happen. The claim was fraudulent.

This is a very important line of inquiry and it should have generated headlines all over the national media, instead of which it got no coverage at all. I found it impossible to place those findings in national media. I got no reply at all from newspapers like The Mail, The Telegraph, or from Unheard or Spiked. They simply did not even reply.

So the only way that I can see of improving the general understanding of the true position of men is by some kind of circumvention, some way of stimulating the interests of men and women in harmony, like The Family Union. But the problem with that idea is that I can't get anybody to support it. I need help, I need partners, people who believe in the idea to work with me.

JB: Maybe some readers of this article will want to help with the Family Union.

NL: Yes. Some help would be very welcome. [You can contact Neil Lyndon via the magazine on enquiries@centreformalepsychology.com ].

JB: One other question: has the feminist movement impacted the mental health of men and boys? If yes, in what way?

NL: Yes, the feminist movement has done inestimable damage to the mental health of boys and men. Making boys second class at school, teaching them that males are bad by nature and that women have suffered at the hands of men inevitably leads to boys feeling unhappy about themselves and adopting the unruly, delinquent behaviour which is expected of them.

The dominance of feminist presumptions in the judiciary and the family law processes then directly damages the mental health of men by stripping them of their role as fathers and relegating them to a marginal position. Could any official bias be more destructive?

Concluding comments from JB

Although men are told that we need to talk more about their feelings, what happened to Neil Lyndon demonstrates that when men say how they honestly feel, they are not necessarily going to be listened to.

Biography
Journalist and author Neil Lyndon is best known for his groundbreaking book, No More Sex War, which was the first-ever intellectual critique of the ideology of modern feminism. He is the founder of the Family Union, which aims to ensure that families should be the focus for political and social organisation.

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