“All of the world's problems are products of the male ego,” said a swaggering bulldagger she-cop in Law and Order the other night. Average gringa. Actually, only some of the world's problems, as for example wars, are products of the male ego.

Of course, a curmudgeonly male—though I don't know any of these—might respond, “Woman, everything that keeps you and your sisters from squatting in caves and crushing lice is a product of the male brain.”

Which is true.

It is curious: Women seem to have no idea how profoundly they depend on men, and not just to fix thingy-whiches that make cars go. The pattern is that men invent and women use. Men invented cars, and women learned to drive them, usually without having the foggiest idea of how they work. Men also invented refrigerators, television, aircraft, hair-dryers, and tampons. Since women with few exceptions do not think technically unless they have to, they are unaware of the inordinate amount of inspired brainwork that led over millenia to computational fluid dynamics, band theory, the double helix, and TCP/IP.

We hear much triumphalism from women these days about the “male malaise,” the poor performance of boys in class, their depression and inattention in school, their declining presence in the universities. Why are these thing happening?

It is not that girls are doing better. They have always been dutiful, have pasted pictures neatly into projects, and have done their homework on time. Rather the boys have gone downhill. Why?

Much of it I think results from the relentless imposition of female values on all of society. Once, boys were boys and girls were girls. Now all must be girls, or nearly so.

This matters. Males value freedom over security; women, security over freedom. Men love venturing into the wild, whether in Silicon Valley or unexplored jungles, if any; women do not. Men are fiercely competitive; women, concerned with order and comity. Men are physical, enjoying, even needing, rough sports; women are not. To a man of my generation the country today is unbearably controlled, restricted, safe, and feminized.

This ought to be worrisome, even to women. When men are free, they prosper. Time and again, bright males drop out of college and found Google, Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo, FaceBook, Intel. They go at it with single-minded determination and not a whole lot of humility. This balls-to-the-wall ethos, wing it and see what happens, screw the PhD, eighteen-hour days of frantic programming on Jolt Cola and Cheetos, we'll slit the competition’s throat with this new app—this is guy stuff. Men like these have made life comfortable enough that feminists have time to complain. Constantly.

The qualities that make life bearable for males have been squeezed out of society by angry women. In the schools, dodgeball is violence, and must be replaced by a cooperative game led by a caring adult. If a third-grader draws a soldier, he is led out of school in hand-cuffs. If he is bored to suicide by some witless gal from a “teacher's college,” he is drugged. This compulsory niceness is sheer female passive-aggression against males. It works.

The anger of women is real, easily noticed in the frequent snotty remarks and the portrayal on television of men as boobs and louts. Yes, there are among women exceptions and degrees. The anger remains. Why?

I suspect that that the reason is the abrogation of the implicit no-compete clause that once existed between the sexes. In the past, boys were certain things and did certain things; girls were other things and did other things. The girls didn't drag race against the boys, or think of challenging them at basketball. A girl would try to be valedictorian, but she saw herself as competing against other contenders, not the male sex.

Then came femlib. Women now explicitly saw themselves going head-to-head against men as a sex. It wasn't a wise fight to pick. Women of ability went into all manner of fields and performed well, as doctors, dentists, editors, reporters, and so on. But it wasn't enough. Since they were competing not as individuals but as a sex, it was crucial to them that women equal men arithmetically in everything. They couldn't.

In sports it ws hopeless. If there is an Olympic sport other than perhaps nymphette gymnastics or synchronized swimming in which women best men, I am unaware of it. NASCAR would dearly love to have female drivers to encourage women to buy tickets,but it can't find any who amount to anything; Formula One is worse.

Intellectually things were not so stark. Bright women abounded, and it was easy—thank god, think bright guys—to find women who were smarter than almost all men. Yet it remained that males outperformed females by a large margin on the SAT math section and by a lesser margin, but still a margin, on the verbal. The imbalance occurred on GREs, National Merit, and tests of IQ. Worse, at higher and higher ranges of intelligence, the men outnumbered the women by larger and larger amounts. This is settled science among psychometricians. It is also the glass ceiling. It was, further, the impetus behind affirmative action.

Affirmative action theoretically was intended to give the under-performing classes initial entry, after which they were expected, or said to be expected, to catch up. In fact it quickly became the equivalent of a golf handicap on the able.

Since affirmative action is patronage exchanged for votes, and unrelated to ability, we began to see female ambulance crew who, though perfectly good medically, could not carry stretchers. There were—are—female fire-persons who can neither carry the unconscious nor handle hoses.

Women had found that they could get by political means what they could not on their merits. While many women could compete at most levels on their ability, not enough could do it to produce the desired arithmetic equality. Ah, but women are the backbone of a consumerist society, the buyers, the shoppers. Thus television began pitching ads to women, and telling women what they seem to want to hear, namely that men are dull-witted slugs. Cop shows became populated by unsmiliing pistol-toting robo-dyke detectives who confused chronic PMS with manhood. While surveys show that women know less about politics than do men, they vote in larger numbers, and thus could demand special preference. Here we are.

It isn't going to stop. The country daily becomes more authoritarian, watched, feminized, regulated, and pervaded by disguised hostility that seeks to avenge itself on others. Advancement today depends on race, creed, color, sex, and national origin instead of an ability and drive. In the schools boys will continue to be drugged, repressed, and made into puerile eunuchs.

The question becomes: Where is this leading? What does feminization accomplish? What can we expect of a nation run by and for women?

Fewer wars, just possibly. Declining international competitiveness as schools focus on therapy instead of integration of hyperbolic functions. Miserable little boys gagging down totalitarian niceness and Ritalin. Young men who see no point in going to fifth-rate universities rigged against them. And boredom. Oh god, the boredom.