Ho Hum. Another day like any other on the TV news. Last night’s TV3 late edition high-lighted two stories, one on the Basley report, the other on a growing difference between men and women’s incomes 5 years after graduation. Of all the stories that can be presented, of all the wrongs that can be righted, yet again it is men behaving badly and women coming off the worse. I can’t think of a single news story in the past 30 years that chastised behaviour that only women were guilty of, or featured women seriously acknowledging any of the many ways in which they obtain advantage over men.

We know they are more likely to abuse children and more likely to abduct them with no serious consequence to themselves. We know they’re not going to be harmed or killed doing the very worst of jobs that need to be done, and that they will live longer by at least 5 years. They get the hog’s share of government funding, be it health, education, welfare or? superannuation. Drive through any affluent neighbourhood and a significant number of the houses will be occupied by older women on their own. On the other hand, take a look at all the homeless people, and they are mainly men. As earners, wives, widows and beneficiaries of trusts, women control a significant majority of the country’s wealth. I can’t put an exact figure on how much they collectively control, because that information is not really available. Unlike the figure for salary differences between men and women 5 years after graduation.

Consider the method being used to fashion an increasingly women-oriented world. One by one the stories are trotted out, one after the other. Each is relatively innocuous, common-sense almost. How could anyone defend the actions of police in the many cases in Basley’s report? What isn’t innocuous is the filter. When will there be a Basley report on the number of times police have arrested the male victim of a female abuser? Or a report on the extent to which women use false sexual accusation for personal advantage, and the attendant social cost? On the whole issue of sexual exploitation, ask any bouncer who guards rock stars who they get the most trouble from. Ask any young man conned into being a parent to a child he didn’t sire. Ask Paul McCartney.

Interesting also is the personal interest taken by the mother of our nation in this latest affair. She doesn’t often step in to matters that are usually handled by the judiciary. I don’t recall her taking any public interest in David Dougherty’s plight, locked up as a child rapist when DNA evidence proved conclusively that he was innocent. She may well have sympathised, but how many votes are in that? And votes are what she’s all about this time. For the first time as PM, she’s facing a real threat in John Key. Without a block female vote at the next election, she’s toast.

We men are not all virtue, and women not all villain. But we are at the raw end of a society that exists emphatically for the benefit and protection of women and children only. Society may want our labour, but we are on our own.