Acute Angles: A Male Survival Guide

By David Fidelman

This column is written for the men in the audience. Guys, do you realize what we’ve done? We went ahead and made ourselves obsolete.

In primitive societies, we used to go on long hunting trips together, and sometimes even managed to kill and bring home a dead animal for the tribe to eat. When we weren’t doing that, we were fighting men from other tribes and killing one another. Once in a while, we came home to make babies to continue the tribe’s existence. In the meantime, perfectly happy with us not around to bother them, the women stayed at home and invented civilization. They invented agriculture, clothing, shelter, and cooking. They needed us mostly for reproductive purposes.

With civilization and the industrial revolution, the fun hunting trips full of male bonding turned into grimy, sweaty, back-breaking jobs in the fields and factories and mines. As the superior sex, we insisted that these jobs were men’s work. We didn’t get many arguments from our wives, who said, "Okay, I’ll stay home and make sure the house is still here when you get back." We let them make the unimportant decisions like what kind of house to buy, what kind of car to buy, where the children should go to school, how many children to have, while we made the major decisions like what should we do about Red China.

By inventing automation, we eliminated the worst of the hard jobs. Whole factories can be automated and controlled from a single computer console. We’re no longer needed for the miserable, dirty, undesirable jobs.

Now, by cloning a sheep, some nutty professor in Scotland has invented reproduction without sex, when what we really wanted was sex without reproduction. All it takes for reproduction is a bit of tissue and a mother. When the tissue is female, then the child is female. Women’s Lib promotes the idea that women can do everything, can create a self-sufficient completely female society. If human cloning becomes widespread, we men will no longer be important sex objects and will become expensive luxuries. The time may come when, after an argument, your wife will say, "Forget it, I’m going down to the cloning clinic to have a baby."

Human males may become an endangered species whose future existence will depend solely on the good-will of women. How can we handle the situation? We have to look ahead and realize that we will have to use every means we can to protect our existence. We have to keep women from realizing they don’t need us. Make them think they need somebody strong and tender, of the opposite sex, to talk to. They have to want us, not for our muscles or other physical attributes, but because we’re good and kind and sweet and understanding and sensitive. And guys, you have to give up the idea that being good and kind and sweet and understanding and sensitive is being a wimp. It’s a matter of survival.

Every one of us should immediately subscribe to the women’s magazines that tell them how to attract men, and scrupulously follow their advice in reverse. Read all those articles in family magazines entitled "How to Save Your Marriage" and "How to Have the Perfect Relationship."

One factor that favors the continued existence of men is that women are incurable romantics. To understand what I mean, go to the library and take out one of the romance novels that are so popular with women. If you can stand it, read it all the way through. It will give you an idea of what most women want in a man. He should be rich and powerful, explosively handsome, have an air of mystery about him, and be unattainable until the end of the story. But let’s face it, there are too many of us who are the short, fat, bald accountant types instead of handsome swashbucklers who look like Fabio.

So we have to overcome our deficiencies in other ways. A few hints: To the married man: Learn to praise your wife, even if it frightens her at first. To the single guy: Women want a man who is sincere, so you have to learn to be sincere, even if you have to fake it. Unless we men take these steps to insure our survival, there will eventually be only one man left on earth – to take out the garbage.

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