The tale of "The Princess at the Window," which Donna Laframboise places at the opening of her book of the same name, is cautionary but optimistic. Author Laframboise hopes her book will do for Canadian feminists what the princess' parents did for her - namely, show them that their "window" on the world actually distorts it. After the analysis of Canadian feminism, however, only Pollyanna herself could believe that the radical feminists who control the women's movement - such as Sunera Thobani (president of the National Action Committee for the Status of Women), Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Susan Faludi - would be able to recognize a different "window" if a breeze blew them through one. Anyhow, since receiving a federal imprimatur in the Report of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women, which declared that the only way to examine this topic is through a "[radical]feminist lens," why should they seek new perspectives?

The author begins by contrasting what a clutch of radical feminists say about women and men, with what people who write Ann Landers say. The women who tour the largely government-supported conference and lecture circuit believe all women are victims, since all men (simply because they are men) oppress all women at all times. According to Catharine MacKinnon, "Men want...women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed." In 1991 the federally supported Women's Legal Education and Action Fund paid this woman to come to Canada, to convince then-justice minister Kim Campbell she should incorporate such views into the law defining sexual assault, and to similarly persuade the Supreme Court in the Butler decision.

Miss Laframboise neatly turns the MacKinnon ravings (such as "Compare victim's reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They are a lot alike") upside down by comparing them with "flesh and blood" reports in the Landers column. The latter run the behavioral gamut. Some men behave badly; some are criminal abusers; others behave honourably. Still others write to praise their mothers, wives and daughters, and are praised by them. Since Miss Dworkin has stated that any woman who enjoys sexual relations with a man is a "collaborator," and Miss Faludi believes that any man who wants to be a "good provider for his family" really intends only to oppress his wife, it's doubtful they will accept such testimony.

The book takes aim at the studies NACSOW and other government agencies use to "prove" that Canadian men are engaged in a "war against women." To back the claim that 29% of women have been assaulted by spouses, Statistics Canada included those who have been "grabbed" during an argument (a deplorable action but hardly a vicious one). The Panel on Violence went StatsCan several steps better by discovering that 98% of women have been assaulted. "Since obscene phone calls qualified as 'violence'," Miss Laframboise comments, "it's surprising that the total wasn't 100 percent."

The results have been skewed, she charges, by such techniques as surveying unrepresentative populations (residents of battered women's shelters), and extrapolating to the general population. Moreover, for the data to mean anything, women's experiences had to be set beside men's. Therefore StatsCan conducted a two-part study, but then refused to publish the figures on male victims of female violence. A shocking 17.8% of men "admitted to behaving in a 'violent' manner toward their spouses." But so did 23.3% of women, and 6.2% acknowledged actually "beating up their partner" - compared to 2.5% for men.

The point is not that spousal abuse doesn't occur, the author emphasized in an interview, but that it occurs in a minority of relationships, and also that government programs should focus on both male and female abusers. By suppressing information on male victimization, StatsCan has aligned itself with those who believe figures that could generate either sympathy or admiration for men must be ignored. Actually, in 1993 "men accounted for 67% of the nation's homicide rate...and were robbed twice as often." Contrary to the notion that schools favour boys, girls in fact do better in school, and make up 54% of first-year university enrollment. Ninety-six per cent of workers killed on the job are men, and they constitute 95% to 100% of workers in the "worst jobs" (e.g. millwright, lumberjack, boilmaker).

Miss Laframboise ends by reminding us of a bit of history radical feminists prefer to forget: who it was that listened to the demands of the suffragettes and the women who followed them. The simple fact is that, as important as women's own protests were, in the end it was men - "honourable" - men who had "a strong sense of what is right" - who established women's rights and opened the workforce to them.

Women were enfranchised by legislatures made up solely of men elected solely by men. Legislatures numerically dominated by men established social assistance programs for the needy, passed laws against child abuse and established human rights codes. Some men are misogynists and some are criminal abusers. But for at least a century, Canadian men have voted for men who voted with women's welfare in mind, because doing so was right, just and honourable.