What is with women these days? I used to think they were nice people that I couldn't understand, but agreeable and mostly friendly and smiled a lot, and you could dance with them. Lots of them were bright and funny. Most were pretty which, given that men are dog-butt ugly, made the world a pleasanter place. A guy could talk to women in those days, and it was kind of fun to be nice to them. All in all, I thought they were a splendid idea.

What happened?

Now when I talk to beings of the lady variety, they can't go five minutes without saying something hostile. They can't control it. A man doesn't have to provoke it. If a gal mentions her daughters, she has to let you know that she is raising them "not to need men," and her voice sounds like she had just found an earthworm in her mouth. Gee, thanks for sharing. Then she works in the story of her girlfriend who was mistreated by her husband. Next we get that men objectify women, whatever that means, and personally pay them only 56 cents for every dollar a man makes, and victimize them, and only want sex.

Which just isn't true. I also want a restored '57 Chevy with a big-block engine and tuck-and-roll Naugahyde interior. Red.

It verges on hysteria. The other day a high-school girl told me solemnly that five out of seven college girls she met in a dorm room had been raped. Sure. And six of them were space aliens on a package tour from Andromeda.

Dear god and little catfish.

Where does all this loathing for men come from? Yeah, lady, I'm just real terrible. In the morning I get up, throw a few coffee cups against the wall in reflexive rage before killing the neighbor's dog, and then assault a lady accountant from Housing and Urban Development on the subway. The male riders cheer me on: patriarchal bonding. Then we stand around and compare genitals until I get off at the McPherson Square stop. Hey, it's guy stuff.

A lot of this fantasy is just plain nuts. Take the business about men only-wanting-sex. (Incidentally, my stock response is to assume an expression of dispassionate curiosity and say, "Ah. What else have you got?" No, it's not fair. Neither was the original comment. Besides, columnists regard fairness as a sign of weakness.)

Women don't want sex? The second fastest way to lose a woman is to treat her as a sex object. The first fastest is not to. How do you win?

Besides, women look at us as commitment-objects. (Help, I've been objectified.) A guy almost wonders whether he can wait until the second date to get married.

The spooky thing is just how mad most women really seem to be. The dislike is real and profound. And it's one-way. Men don't hate women. They just want to hide.

Best I can tell, women think they're mad because they think they think that men are oppressors and gangsters and thugs. Men think women are blaming everything they don't like in their lives on men. (Actually, men didn't design the world, or anatomy. We came with it.)

The eerie enmity, the apparent belief that everything men do is some technique of oppression to be resisted, seems to pervade everything. You can't see it, but you know it's there, like God and corruption. It begins to have social consequences. Guys ask themselves, "How smart would it be to tie myself to a touchy woman who dislikes my entire species? Why don't I just buy her a house now and skip the intervening agony?"

This sort of thing could almost produce fear of commitment.

I swear it was different in high school and college. Girls were great. Sure, they giggled at some forms of masculine behavior. You know, like bonding with overpowered, under-lubed rustbuckets with glass-pack mufflers and rod knock. The boys wondered why the girls were never on time and didn't want to talk about cam shafts. But there was no venom in it. Now there is.

West Virginia, I tell you. Incurable cholera and all. Radioactive.

And a rabbi.

As a generic white-bread male, I once opposed affirmative action, and said vicious and insensitive things about its remarkable resemblance to a spoils system. I have seen the error of my ways, however, and hereby recant. We should keep affirmative action, I now believe, but democratize it. Everyone should enjoy the honors and emoluments of proven incapacity.

The flaw with affirmative action is not that it rewards the ineffectual, but that it rewards only some of the ineffectual. It doesn't discriminate even-handedly. Right now, relative preference is given to the relatively incompetent, and absolute preference to the hopeless--but only if they are of the correct race or sex.

Suppose that, say, Samoan Americans score twenty points on the SATs below white applicants for an Ivy League school. Some slight enthusiasm will arise for accepting them--but not much. Twenty points is too niggling a deficit. Maybe the students took the tests with a hangover, and the inability is only apparent.

But if a black student scores 250 points lower that whites, he will be judged almost supernaturally qualified, and stuffed bodily into Berkley. A white applicant whose academic prospects were equally bleak would be junked.

No sensible or fair-minded person can object to awarding advancement according to competitive incompetence, but the American way is to reward individual disqualifications, as distinct from group incapacities. White males also are individually incompetent in some fields, sometimes disastrously so. Should they not be give preference for those specific jobs they can't handle?

Professional basketball, for example. An unbiased judge would have to conclude that I am preternaturally unsuited to replace Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls. I am too short, too slow, too old, too weak. My jump shot, though a thing of beauty, is too independent -minded to go where I tell it. It is true that I am not actually confined to a wheel chair, but I am otherwise a dream candidate for affirmative action.

I want to play center.

Further, I have the collateral credentials, being a victim: The NBA obviously discriminates against white players, or would if it had any. Alas, poor me. How I have suffered.

Further still, I have been a victim for generations. (I'm not sure what that means, but I don't think it matters.) Blacks invariably point to slavery as justification for preference, the mistreatment of a great-grandfather being undeniable qualification for admission to a doctoral program in laser physics. Ah, but white males can make the similar claims.

I too can demonstrate that some of my ancestors were discriminated against, somewhere else, a long time ago, by people now dead, who had no connection tot he NBA. (I think a few were burned at the stake ore something on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. Good riddance, too. Ever meet a Calvinist?)

But I don't stop at claiming the mantle of Jordan. In accordance with the accepted principle of statistical inference of injustice, I want to be a rabbi. Notice that no white Protestant male has ever been a rabbi. Not to criticize the Jews, but…hey, come on, guys: Four thousand years of history, tens of thousands of rabbis, and not one has been a Presbyterian. I'm expected to believe it's a coincidence?

(Incidentally, there has never been a Jewish pope. Clearly an EEOC case. Can the 14th Amendment be broadened to include Italy? Has it been?)

All right, all right. Honesty compels the recognition that those hostile to competent white males do have a case. Feminists for example point out that white males, being sexually insecure and therefore bedeviled by a compensatory obsession with achievement, have selfishly dominated history for ages. A close reading of history supports them: Such males have invented algebr4a, geometry, calculus, refrigeration, transistors, television, philosophy, architecture, computers, chemistry, automobiles, vaccines, airplanes, symphonies, washing machines, and the Simpsons (Bart and d Lisa, not O.J.)

This egocentric masculine flowering has to be stopped, argue feminists compellingly, and affirmative action is the way to stop it.

Fine. I'm sorry. I apologize. We pale males did do all those things. It was awful of us. We didn't mean it. All I urge is that, now, white male incompetence be equally enriched with everyone else's. Certainly something can be found which each of us guys is unsuited to do.

Me and the NBA, for example. I'll start at four million a year, plus signing bonus.

In conclusion, while there may be minor disadvantages to the universal promotion of inability through a more fair-minded affirmative action, the loss in technical mastery will be more than balanced by the gain in…in…hmmmm. And if you are wheeled into the operating room one day, and see your neurosurgeon standing there with a puzzled look and an ice-cream scoop, well, just have a remedial tag on your toe. ("Open other end.") Think, while you can, of the social benefit.

Were I to offer thoughts on marriage to young American men today, in these the declining years of a once-great civilization, my advice would be as follows: Don't do it. Or, if you do, do it in another country. In America marriage is a grievous error.

And why so? Because of The Chip. The Attitude. The bandsaw whine of anger, anger, anger that makes American women an international horror. It's there. It's real.

You, a young man, may not recognize the Chip if you have never seen normal, warm, happy women. If you are twenty-something and haven't been out of the US, you haven't seen them. They exist by the billion--in Latin America, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaya, China and, last I looked, France and Holland. And of course not every woman in America carries the Chip. None of them think they do. Yet it is the default, the usual, what comes out of the box.

The following is a perfectly ordinary, everyday, bulk-lot example, suitable for poisoning a cistern:

"Other than a 29-inch waist and a full head of hair, there isn't much to recommend the twentysomething male…He is living an extended adolescence -- an adult-olescence -- and every immature, irresponsible, self-absorbed thing he does is reinforced by the latest issue of his favorite men's magazine." (Susan Reimer, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. I bet she goes out a lot.)*

Hers is the Attitude--and what they think of you. It is the defining trait of American women. Exceptions exist, and they have my apologies, but they are few and no, sport, your Sally probably isn't one of them. They're coiled to bite. As soon as problems arise in the marriage, they turn into Susan.

Susan Reimer is what is out there, guys: bitter that no one wants her (as who in his right mind could?), sure that no one is good enough for her, never having grasped that those who would be loved must first be lovable. Understand this: Susan is America. Some hide it better, springing it on you after the ceremony, but Susan is the rule.

The Susans do not like men. Sometimes they actually take courses in disliking men ("Women's Studies"). Yet they want to marry one and have babies. For them, the contradiction actually makes a kind of sense, because (and they know this, believe me) they will get the house, the children, and the child support. For you, it makes no sense. You will get raped in the divorce courts. You don't know how bad it is. Don't do it.

A prime effect of marriage is backbreaking financial overhead: the excessive house in the prestigious suburb, the pricey but boring cars, all that. But if you don't fall into the trap, keeping your expenses down means you can live in Alaska or overseas and enjoy existence. There is more to life than debt service. Although these are bad times for marrying, they are extraordinarily good times for being single.

Now, children. This is sticky. You may want them, or think you want them, or think you may want them. She wants them. My advice is to move to almost any country where English isn't spoken and women don't want their husbands to be the mothers of their children. Any country inhabited by the Chinese would do nicely.

Incidentally, remember that it is never now or never. Your prospects improve with time. At thirty-five or fifty you will be perfectly able to find a good woman if you know where to look. See above list.

Remember also that these are not good times for having children in America. It is almost irresponsible. The schools are scholastically poor, drug-ridden, given chiefly to political indoctrination, and hostile to male children. The universities are little better. Divorce is hell on children and their fathers, and nearly universal. The country lunges to police-statedom and isn't, I suspect, as stable as it might be. Worse, worst, there is Susan Reimer. Her name is legion, and she seeps everywhere, like the effluvium of unwashed socks.

Further, there is no social duty to have children. Some argue that the white population is in decline. Tough. If the country chooses to make having kids undesirable, then let it decline. It is not your problem.

Now, you might well wonder, why are American women carrying the Chip? Practically, it doesn't matter: They do carry it, and will continue. Still, it is partly because from birth they are fed the notion that they have been oppressed, battered, cheated, deprived, harassed, used as sex objects, not used as sex objects, on and on. Being rational, you are perhaps inclined to point out that never has a female population been less any of these things, but don't bother. It will have no effect. The Chip is an emotional artifact to which they respond emotionally.

The bedrock of The Attitude is that everything is the man's fault. Wonders Reimer, "What is the answer, especially if the 20- and 30-year-old male is such poor marriage material?" She does not wonder, "If I am such a grindingly awful termagant that men on three continents are crossing their legs and feeling queasy over my mere column, and won't come near me except in a Kevlar bathysphere with a disinfectant system, maybe I'm doing something wrong. Gosh. I wonder what?"

Yet something more is going on, though one does not easily see just what. Note that in recent decades we have seen the invention by women of bulimia and anorexia, which no one had heard of in 1965. Men made them do it. At roughly the same time women began getting breast implants, which men also made them do, and then suing about it. In the same period they began having induced memories of being raped or satanically abused by their fathers. Men again. The psychotherapy racket grew like kudzu, a sure sign of deep unhappiness over something.

All of this is recent. You have to be fifty to remember women who were resilient, sane, psychically strong and, within the limits of an often sorry existence, content. But whatever the answer, guys, the problem isn't yours.

Spend a year overseas, however you have to do it. For smart, classy, just plain glorious women who often speak English, try Singapore. Argentina is splendid. Many places are. You would be amazed. See what's out there before you marry a gringa with her Inner Susan, who will one day burst from her chest like one of those beaked space-aliens in the movies, dripping venom. They're death.