Men my age sometimes have the effrontery to behave like sexual beings. What's more, some of them are not even married, and do it with younger women. In doing so they have made such a bad name for themselves that it is hard to believe. I will not go into stories I've heard from my own group of acquaintances, as public examples are legion. Mia Farrow's smear campaign against Woody Allen and Soon Yi Previn, and the responses it evoked in feminist circles are the hardest variants I can remember in recent times. Here in Germany, the widespread gut reactions and sexual envy aroused by the Chancellor's numerous marriages and the Foreign Minister's numerous girlfriends no longer give critical media watchers the slightest pause for thought.

The many media campaigns against sex tourism, ordering Thai women by catalogue and sexual aggression over the Internet have resulted in an almost obligatory typecasting of the aggressor as an overweight, unattractive, un-showered, crassly dressed man of around 50. Shutting our eyes for a moment, we can picture the beer belly sagging over his garish Bermuda shorts as clearly as his flip-flops (in my imagination they are light blue), callused feet and bags under his eyes.

The film "Monster" starring an uglified Charlize Theron positively drips with man-hatred, social kitsch, banal violence and fifth class feminist propaganda. A review in the newspaper Tagesspiegel describes her clients (old men who can only get what we all think about many times a day on the street, and then pay for it with their lives) as in a way subhuman. The paper describes Theron's film johns as "slimy fathers, uptight squares, brutes, scum," and goes on to say: "Even if you probably won't see this film, you family fathers, fat slobs and child molesters out there in your cars, think of this: there are more Eileens on the street than you think." The mind boggles. Even if all the serial killer prostitutes out there, all the defigured Charlize Therons of this world, do not read Tagesspiegel on a regular basis, this is still a bit of an exaggeration, no?

When an elderly, not entirely sexually retired bachelor reads something like this, he inadvertently cringes and wonders what he's done to deserve it. Why sex should be "slimier" when family fathers do it than when other people do it, I, a now elderly child of Marx, Freud and Coca Cola, do not know. Didn't Madonna, incontestably an authority on such matters, recently state ex cathedra that sex is only dirty if you haven't taken a shower? The good old sexual desire only seems to be "slimy" when it is a) done by men, who b) are older than 45, and c) when they do it with younger women. Now, I don't want to start pointing the finger, but one can't help wondering just how 'feminist' it is to stylise women that are at least old enough to exercise their active and passive voting rights as bambi-eyed victims of a slimy old codger's salaciousness, just because they happen to have an older husband or lover.

More to the point would be to state that the entire history of literature and art (and let's not forget, we only know the history of eroticism through art and literature), has for millennia portrayed, celebrated, lamented and heroised the lusty, tragic, and for all I know occasionally slimy relationship of older men to younger women without batting an eyelid. The history of eros as a passion goes back to Plato and Sappho, and the elderly desire for adorable young creatures. Closer to our time, isn't literary modernism practically unthinkable without the old man and the girl? Leaving aside the great Italo Svevo (no one knows him, and if they did they would write him off as a neurotic), is not Eduard in Goethe's "Elective Affinities" old enough to be Ottilie's father? Is not Charles Swann in Proust's empirical study of erotic madness at least 15 years older than his Odette? Not to mention Marianne von Willemer, 35 years younger than Goethe, and her place on the "West-East Divan".

Be that as it may. The point is, I fail to see why a heterosexual disposition, which was after all the social norm in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries, is now treated with self-righteous condescension simply because it has a place for the unsettled desires of older men. Male sexuality is now so restrained by the phalanx of naive public suspicion (penetration! exploitation! rape! only one thing on their minds! sliminess!), that it can only show its face in the form of youthful Leonardo DiCaprioid cuteness-cum-innocence, to which the only appropriate reaction could be: "cuuuuute"! But on the far side of 35, unmarried men have to be gay, or even better impotent, if they want to escape the unrelenting discrimination of mainstream feminism, which is now part of our political folklore and a sort of theoretical elevator music.

A lot of thoughtlessness and cruelty is at work here, and a lot of envy too, as I have said. For the popular feminist mainstream, the older man is either a husband or a loser. He must choose between two roles: the sandal-clad, lonely, bedraggled sourpuss, or the morose, alienated victim of his own blunders, fighting to win back his wife on debasing television shows. Well, I have news for the popular feminist mainstream. First of all, a quick look around will convince anyone that very many young women (and not the dumbest, least emancipated or most self-sacrificing among them) manifestly not only find older men desirable, but also positively bloom at their sides, evolving and developing both personally and professionally. But more importantly, we attractive old farts will no longer meekly put up with the popular feminist discrimination and naive malice hurled at us on a regular basis. The time has come for the liberation of the elderly bachelor. I have noted with satisfaction recently that many heterosexual men fail to see why, as bearers of a male sex organ, they should walk around as if they were personifying aria number 6 of Bach's St. Matthew Passion: "Guilt and Pain, Break the sinful heart in twain".

Another encouraging note was struck by a recent ballsy article in the Spiegel, telling of the plundering, abasement, humiliation and social decortication many separated men endure at the hands of their ex-wives. It is a light at the end of the tunnel for us "bachelors with attitude" that intelligent young men, family fathers, house owners, and marriage fans are coming to see how much misanthropy, sexual enmity, general suspicion and unreflecting pseudo-feminist resentment is so undeservedly hurled at them in the German press, cinema, television and commentaries. I hope that with this this small polemical contribution I will be able to make a few waves, and set myself up as "Grand Old Bastard" of a prospective bachelor pride movement.

At first, such a movement should perhaps simply follow the example set by early feminism, and "sensitise" itself to public discrimination against the eroticism of elderly men. And this article could be a start. For the time being, we see no need for self-help centres, cuddle-corners, bumper stickers ("Dirty Old Men Need Love Too"), and male menopause support groups. It would already be something of a personal Stonewall if the next time someone dropped a doltish comment about our new girlfriends, we simply demanded the same sexually and politically correct reserve every self-respecting lesbian activist has come to expect in today's world. One of the merits of feminism is that it has created and popularised the means for resisting its own thoughtless variants.

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The article was originally published in Die Welt on 2 February, 2005.

Stephan Wackwitz was born in Stuttgart in 1953. His latest novel "Ein unsichtbares Land" (An Invisible Country) was recently published by S. Fischer publishing house. In autumn, his "Neue Menschen. Bildungsroman" (New Men: an Educational Novel) will also be published by S. Fischer. Wackwitz has been director of the Goethe-Institut in Cracov since 1999.

Translation: jab.