Guys, stop making a fuss – being a man couldn’t be easier

I just don’t understand what I have to do any more as a man. The other day, I held a door for a woman and she bit my head off, saying I was “patronising” her. Men just can’t win!

Rudolph, by email

Get a grip, Rudolph! Look, I get that it’s unpleasant when someone unexpectedly shouts at you, and perhaps you have written to me in the tremulous heat of shock. But come on, dude. Honestly, I’m a little bit tired of people extrapolating some sort of generalised rule from the behaviour of one cross person. “Oh, a woman shouted at me for holding the door – that means all women shout at you for holding the door! Feminism has gone too far! End times!” It’s a little like, say, when someone announces that they are leaving social media because “remainers” are so aggressive. What they really mean is: “My combatively opinionated stance on Twitter has, amazingly, attracted responses from other combative opinionated people, some of whom, even more amazingly, are awful, which is a real shock on the internet. Ergo, I shall now make a grand statement about ‘hard remainers’ and ‘fanatical centrists’.” Like I say, nobody should be personally abused, but this kind of extrapolation has more than a touch of the self-serving to it, no?

But to make this easy for you, Rudolph, here’s what women in general want: to be treated like people. I know, it’s as if I just solved millennia of gender imbalances with that one sentence. And one angry person who gets angry occasionally is not a good enough reason to write to a newspaper complaining about how nothing makes sense any more.

Having said that, I am jolly glad you did because this gives me an excuse to write about something I’ve been thinking about this week, which is that, if the news is anything to go by, it has literally never been so easy to be a man.

Two weeks ago, a chap by the name of Robbie Tripp caused something of a sensation for making the extraordinary confession that he fancies his wife.

“I love this woman and her curvy body,” Robbie’s Instagram caption began beneath a photo of his wife, Sarah. “As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side, ones who were shorter and curvier, girls that the average (basic) bro might refer to as chubby or even fat.” Truly, there’s nothing women like hearing better than that their husband has always had a fetish, whether it be for blondes, B-cups or “girls on the thicker side”. Robbie says he then “educated [him]self on issues such as feminism” and he learned that declaring he loves his wife is, like, a feminist statement, or something.

“This gorgeous girl I married fills out every inch of her jeans and is still the most beautiful one in the room,” he writes. Is it just me or does it feel like that “still” is doing some heavy lifting there?

“A real woman is not a porn star or a bikini mannequin or a movie character. She’s real. She has beautiful stretch marks on her hips and cute little dimples on her booty,” he concludes. Actually, Robbie, porn stars and mannequin models and even actresses are real women, too, and some of them don’t have stretch marks and some don’t have dimples on their “booty”, and they’re still real. I think you have confused a Dove advert with biology. Maybe go back to feminism class?

Anyway, the internet exploded with joy: a man announcing he fancies his wife! And she doesn’t look like Kate Moss! He must be deified at once for doing the absolute bare minimum! Brace yourself, internet, for my post: “Why women should be nice to their husbands even if they have a bald spot.” You guys will love it.

Barely had the world got over the shock news that a man loves his wife than this headline burst out of the gates: “Peta Applauds Robert Pattinson For Refusing to Masturbate a Dog.” I genuinely lack the strength to get into the details of this story, so let’s just say one thing: it must be freaking amazing to be a man. Never mind not having to deal with menstruation and mansplainers – imagine, ladies, being applauded just because you refuse to give an animal a hand job. Kate Winslet is condemned for having children with different fathers, Pattinson is praised for not masturbating a dog. Now there’s a slogan for next year’s International Women’s Day.

Finally, Jeremy Corbyn, who garnered quite a lot of praise the other week for helping a woman with a buggy up some steps in a train station. “Gentlemanly”, the Mirror declared. Worthy of being “heaped with praise”, was the Evening Standard’s verdict.

Now, as someone who takes a pram on trains quite a lot, I can confirm that many men would rather eat their own misshapen testicles than help a woman in this situation. BUT! That is because they are crap men. That Corbyn did help a woman does not make him saintly, it means he is doing the bare bloody minimum.

So there we are, Rudolph. What do you have to do as a man these days? The absolute bare minimum and as long as you manage to fancy your wife, resist pleasuring domestic pets and at least once don’t leave a woman and baby stranded in a train station you’ll be given the Nobel peace prize. Yay, men!