MANILA, Philippines - Even I can see the funny side.

Two New Yorker cartoons: In one, two girlfriends are at a party, looking at the boyfriend of one, carrying two glasses of wine toward them. One says to the other: “I love what you’ve done with him.” In another, a married couple in bed; he says: “Hey, wanna get kinky and read each other’s catalogues?”

A TV ad running here shows a frazzled woman coming home from work, walking to her dimly lit bathroom (which, if misused, is the death chamber of love for cohabiting couples) and sees her foam-covered boyfriend in the bath, reading a fashion magazine, surrounded by lit candles. Upset by the intrusion, he petulantly barks at her: “What?!”

The Jurassic caves of un-reconstituted male chauvinism aside, this is what gender experimentation and extreme feminism have come down to: men who have been feminized, domesticated and cowed to within an inch of their newly meek lives.

I was married to a man 20 years older than me, in 1983 when feminazis were in the boil and New Man was about to be born. Women had already been cast in the roles of the suppressed, victims and martyrs and men as brutes, sexual predators, bullies or bumbling fools. A culture was being fomented that was increasingly hostile toward males who, gradually, were going underground, retreating from a bewildering world into their holdouts.

On those occasions when we vociferously disagreed―over Hillary Clinton, women’s pay being lower than men’s, map-reading in the French countryside―my husband would say with righteous huff: “I’m an old-fashioned man and much as I love you, I’m not about to become a New Man!” By this he meant “nurturing a feminine side,” a woolly mantra that was all but shoved down men’s throats.

Transformation

How did it happen? Did you clock the velocity with which it happened? Overnight, New Man―the female-friendly bloke in touch with his inner self―morphed into Metrosexual Man, a preening ponce.

“Metrosexuals were sophisticated males who took trouble with their appearance, listened to women and suavely followed them to a table in the restaurant. They knew as much about the arts and cuisine as football and beer,” said writer Andrew Billen.

Mark Simpson, a trend-watcher, outed the metrosexual as “a dandy about town who had clearly taken himself as his own love object. Where Sean Connery was a hirsute, beefy playboy, Daniel Craig is a depilated, exfoliated, suck-cheeked GQ model.”

I have hetero-male friends who know more about moisturizers, interior design, cucina Toscana and manipeds than I do! Men who were becoming obsessed with their looks, spending more time in the bathroom, experiencing body dissatisfaction, fearful of commitment and fathering because they have become as confused as the women we used to be; women who, campaigning for a fairer world, probably became too shrill, strident and sexist. Years of feminism have emancipated women, but emasculated our men.

In “Save the Males,” a new book that’s dividing opinion and bringing out Cro-Magnons on both sides of the gender aisles, Kathleen Parker wrote: “For the past 30 years, men have been under siege by a culture that too often embraced the notion that men are to blame for life’s ills; a culture that feminism has helped to craft is a presumption that men are without honor and integrity. As long as men feel marginalized by the women whose approval they seek, as long as they’re alienated from their children, as long as they’re disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.”

Traditional male roles of father, protector, provider, Parker says, have been viewed as regressive manifestations of an outmoded patriarchy. “When we take away a man’s central purpose in life and marginalize him from society’s most important institution―the family―we strip him of his manhood.”

Admirable qualities

Manhood, manliness―words signifying qualities admirable in a man: strength, bravery, honor, valor, chivalry, gallantry. The kind that goes to the moon, travels in space, fights war and injustice, drives F1, puts up shelves, opens doors, gets up in the middle of the night to see what the noise is about, brushes your cheek tenderly, holds you to keep you from breaking. A dangerous world needs men; a girlfriend her boyfriend; the wife her husband; the children a father they can look up to as a role model.

Dave Besley wants to lay metrosexuals to rest for good. In “The Retrosexual Manual,” he writes: “It was my girlfriend’s fault. Not content with the tight drainpipe trousers and Day-Glo tops she’d insisted I wear, the chats about my apparently pent-up feelings and, after a forced viewing of yet another romantic comedy, waiting for me to cry, she decided I wear mascara―to the pub!”

Enough, he says, for men were turning into asexual beings whose self-esteem was being eroded, their needs ignored and desires suppressed.

According to Besley, although women have been told the opposite for years, they “actually need a proper man to stand by them, bring home the bacon.”

A study conducted among 5,000 women by Prof. Steven Nock of the University of Virginia found women were happiest when their husbands were good providers and brought in more of the household income. “I was surprised to find that even egalitarian-minded women are happier when their marriages are organized along more traditional gendered lines,” he said.

With rare moments of concord in between, the sex wars will go on. Women will continue to want to be equal to men, but I think not in the way that makes them virtually the same as men. Big, swinging dicks? I think not. Women are managing just fine in a man’s world; they will occasionally want to be on top, but they must save men and let them be men. I don’t know about you, but I rather miss the whiff of testosterone around here. As Mae West said: “A hard man is good to find.”