by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

A few years ago a guy had to be on guard when randomly chatting with a woman in this town. Conversations frequently erupted into gender-political disputes without warning. You'd be treated to a whole report on the ways in which you were to blame for oppressing women, through pornography and lipstick and breast implants and stuff.

It seems to happen less often now. Some say the world has dumbed down, but if we've traded shrill ideology for dumbness, I'll take that deal.

Being an anglo Quebecer, whitey, male and a Westmounter, I fell into all the bad categories.

I was oppressor without the enjoyment of doing much actual oppressing. Mind you, it's also empowering to be assumed to be part of a group dictating the fate of the world. That sort of aura can boost your confidence.

The only gang that left me uneasy were feminists.

You're sitting there one minute chatting about nothing, wondering if you have a chance, and then suddenly out of nowhere you're ambushed with politics.

Once, at a party, a bunch of girls on a sofa 20 feet away were giggling at a friend and me. We hadn't met. They were laughing because one proposed our castration. The girl now works at the CBC.

I rang up Jeffrey Asher to ask whatever happened to the golden era of the gender war. Asher was at the front lines of the battle for years. When Dawson College opened in 1970, Asher taught a pro-feminist course called Prejudice. But he changed his views after reading feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon arguing that consensual sex was a form of rape.

"In the early '80s, feminism changed from a human rights movement to a single sex movement where the lunatic fringe took over the centre," he says. "Those who claimed to be acting on behalf of women were representative of a radical agenda meant to alienate women from men and to terrorize them."

So he proposed a course called Men's Lives. "They tried to block it but I threatened to appeal to the Minister of Education and I pointed out at the time there were 58 courses at Dawson with feminist titles," he says.

He says it remains the case. In 2002, he counted 1,200 feminist courses in Canadian universities, only three dealing with men's issues.

Asher taught that only some of us guys are abusers, murderers and rapists. In fact, most people murdered, assaulted, killed on the job and who've committed suicide are men.

"Increasingly, the sisterhood found the students in the class were disagreeing with them," he says. "They'd say, ‘You got that from Jeffrey Asher.'"

Eventually, feminist teachers were caught on video covering up literature Asher had tacked to a bulletin board. The academic authorities shrugged off the incident. Soon Asher was forced to teach other, non-gender issue subjects. He retired three years back and moved to Ottawa. "There's no point in living in bitterness," he says, after my attempts to get him to dish out on his former colleagues.

"I read a great deal about people who challenge prevailing politics, especially when those politics are monolithic. You have to expect to pay a price for it," he says.

So where are the fiery-eyed feminists? The ideology that once looked blue-chip tanked like Nortel. Asher says the steam has gone out of the movement because their demands have been enshrined into laws and legal customs that favour women - particularly middle-class women - ranging from hiring quotas, to funding, to preferable custody for mothers in divorce. He busily lobbies against all that.

Asher's struggle seems logical. But as a man it's hard to begrudge a group I'm biologically programmed to like. Besides, who cares what they teach at university? And most guys can survive chances of some random occasional guilt trip as the price for female company.

If all of those quarrels and arguments were about allowing women the equal privilege of pushing paper in cubicles, I really have no objections to that.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca