Women participate in what I call toxic bonding rituals. We call them girls night out, girl time, socials. But in nearly all the situations where women gather socially, there is an unofficial competition for who’s husband is the most useless.

Being a girl and all, you would know this better than I, but I have seen enough indications of this sort of ritualized man-bashing to take you at your word.

By contrast, and speaking strictly from my own experiences (as considered sources go, I still consider what I can observe for myself to be the best one), there seems to be an unwritten law among men, that one never, ever, ever makes critical comments about one’s wife or girlfriend to another man, and even more inviolate is the sacred principle that to criticize some other man’s significant-other is among the worst imaginable breaches of male-to-male protocols.

I have all kinds of theories about why this is.

On the former point, I have concluded that men don’t want to hear other men whining about their womenfolk, because it is simply too hazardous a topic for male self-preservation. I am in my mid-fifties, and can assure you that the training about misogyny and denying women their equality runs as deep or deeper among my generation of men (having been educated by the Woodstock-attending baby boom and all) than it does among younger men. I have never seen any man take up the topic of another man’s grievances about the woman in his life, not even once, not even in a manly and responsible way of trying to offer balanced and mature counsel to a man in need of it. Never. Ever. As a man, one is trained since childhood in our society that to critique a woman’s behavior on any grounds or in the pursuit of any outcome, is beyond taboo: it is suicidal.

So we don’t go seeking counsel from other men on how to coexist with one woman. Ever. We don’t dare.

On the latter point, the same rules apply: I lost count long ago of how many all-male conversations were diverted away from one man’s offerings about his Woman Troubles. Not only doesn’t one as a man let on that his Woman is less than perfect, but no other man dares encourage him in the pursuit if such a man does try and make his wife or girlfriend a topic. Even if the one man is so indiscreet as to indicate that things at home aren’t so groovy, other men know better in a world run by and for women than to take up the subject at all, and certainly never to indicate that their own dealings with a woman are not so great either.

I just have to laugh at this notion of some conspiratorial “patriarchy” or “ole boys’ club.” Give me a god-damn break. Not being men themselves, women have no way of knowing just how deep the divisions between individual men really are. Between homophobia (the fear of being perceived as gay by others when one is not gay), and the fear of backlash from a woman that every man who loves one has as the primary guideline for his everyday conduct, men do not dare risk seeking common cause among one another as men.

To be a husband or boyfriend to a woman in modern life, is to agree to be all alone in the world if things go wrong with her. Even the slightest mention of a grievance toward a woman, is auto-translated into anything from “everyday sexism” to the most extreme and absurd allegations of abuse and harm. Any man who ever left the house more than like three times, knows this: ask another man for help in dealing with a woman, and simply expect as a given, that you will be met either with a locker-room-trained anti-faggot rejection (anyone who ever took PE knows that for a man to have feelings means he is a queer, I mean, come on…), or at best that other man will change the subject because of the slightest potential that his own wife/GF will hear about him taking a man’s side in this rigged game of man vs woman where the women are allowed to win pretty much every damn time.

No one supports or tacitly endorses the toxicity and destructiveness of everyday, absent-minded, habitual, ritualized feminist codes of conduct or definitions of manhood itself, better than men themselves.

Feminism would never have graduated from the marginal project in pseudo-intellectual silliness it should have been taken as all along, were it not for the men who have refused for generations to act like men because of how much we fear women and think we need to fear our own maleness.

I have been saying for years, that feminism is primarily a male achievement and an institutionalizing of male behavior, self-enforced by men, on men, and it is as true now as it was forty-five years ago when our junior high teachers were indoctrinating us to think of All Things Male, as silly, destructive, and secondary.

The role and conduct of women in the environment left them by the vacuous abandonment of men by men, is no favor done them by us. Our capitulation to a second-class status in all our dealings with women, only serves to confirm female suspicion of male uselessness, and the longer it goes on, the worse our standing among women becomes.

Believe me, ditching the addictive need for female approval, and abandoning the idea that my conduct needs to pass female muster in order for me to believe in myself, is the most costly decision I ever made in my entire life. It has cost me everything but the one thing I could never afford not to have, and didn’t even realize I needed or deserved before then:

My self-respect. A man with none, really is as useless as the women over their red wine so gleefully say he is. Or worse.