IS THERE an element of paedophilia in the new feminism? There does seem to be an awful lot of it about these days. The coffee-table bible which provokes the thought is, of course, Germaine Greer’s 2003 book The Boy, a somewhat iffy collection of pictures of pre-pubescent lovelies from life and art, an illustrated paean of praise for the beauty of the young male presented as a feminist rallying cry for women’s right to ogle under-age male totty.

According to the cover line, the book set out to demolish “one of the last great Western taboos” (not the one that says adults should curb any lascivious feelings they have towards the sexually under-age, but the sub-clause which, according to Greer, represents an oppressive restriction on grown-up women). Greer said she was out to “advance women’s reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure.”

Well, I’ll remember that line if I’m ever caught exposing my long lens from under a dirty mac outside the school gates. Just looking, officer.

The book has been described as “endearingly dotty”. However — packed as it is with the sort of images that, if they were of young girls and discovered on the hard disk of an ageing rock guitarist, would have him in the News of the World and on the sex offenders’ register faster than you could say: “Hope I die before I get old” — “frankly dodgy” might have been a better description.

Ironically, of course, with The Boy, Greer was unwittingly supporting the sexist proposition that a woman’s sexuality is not to be taken seriously; it is too weak to be predatory (not for nothing was “nothing” Elizabethan slang for the vagina) and besides, the Mrs Robinson syndrome is a male fantasy, right? Boys welcome such “seduction” as a rite of passage.

The ghost of the damned phrase “contributory negligence”, idle since it was rightly exorcised from rape-case courtrooms, lurks stage left, and was heard clanking its chains again last week. Now, I know it isn’t done to have a pop at other columnists, but in the case of Minette Marrin in last week’s Sunday Times I am prepared to make an exception. Marrin’s article posed a curious defence (under the headline “A prisoner of sexual double standards”) of a female teacher who had been jailed for seducing a 14-year-old boy with whom she had embarked on a six-month affair. While conceding that what she had done was illegal, Marrin mounted a wondrous apologia for Hannah Grice, the female teacher, and concluded that the law had been a “misogynist prig” in giving her a 15-month prison sentence. The lad, you see, had been “very willing ” and it wasn’t as if his 32-year-old seducer was actually the boy’s teacher, just a teacher at his school. Besides, she didn’t really seduce him — it started because he developed a crush on her. Virtually his fault, then.

Marrin acknowledged: “As an underage person, he could not legally have consented”, but then added: “but it seems that in everyday understanding he did.” Anyway, she wrote, “boys of 14 vary; many of them are sexually mature young men, suffering not from shyness but from sexual longing”.

Well, that’s all right then, case dismissed. Male children, it seems, are not to be given the same level of protection as girls from predatory teachers, so long as the teacher is a woman (despite the fact that the amendment of the Sexual Offences Act in 2003 made it a criminal offence for a teacher to have sex with a pupil under 18, let alone 15). Can you imagine the outcry if I defended some 32-year-old male teacher who’d been convicted for giving some flirty 14-year-old Lolita extra biology practical after class? No matter how much she’d been “asking for it”, Sir would have been in breach of a basic trust.

In June a 25-year-old female teacher was charged with having an affair with a 15-year-old boy. She walked free with a suspended sentence even though the judge said: “If this was a man, prison would be inevitable. You do not send your 15-year-old son to school for him to be seduced by his dancing teacher.”

As the 26-year-old Canadian supply teacher Amy Gehring told a startled Sarah Montague on the Today programme in February 2002, after she was acquitted of indecently assaulting two brothers at a Surrey comprehensive: “I think society probably doesn’t think it’s as bad . . . these boys weren’t stupid. They knew what they were doing.”

Women, the poor, harmless creatures. Even when they’ve transgressed, one can’t blame them.

jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk