There are any number of men out there who think that real men beat women down. The correct response is that real men love their daughters, their wives, their mothers, their grandmothers and their sisters and refuse to see them treated in this way. It takes absolutely nothing for a man to beat up on a woman, and any scoundrel can do that. It takes a lot more for a man to love a woman. The people whom these men are hurting the most are not the feminists but their daughters. They are leaving them prey to whatever scumbag would want to knock them around. And that is not the behavior of a real man.

On Internet forum called alt.support.depression, two men have told me that I am a failure because my wife has left me. My response to these men: You are assholes, and you make the world a worse place. If a man is considered a failure because his wife has left him, then he will do everything in his power to keep her from leaving. This will include all sorts of corrupt, abusive and tyrannical behaviors. And – surprise surprise – what do I find in any number of men who have such beliefs.

I have encountered, both in Russia and in Australia, an attitude that a woman would not respect you unless you control her. That may be the case with women who have no decency, such as Russian gold-diggers who marry mafia bosses for their money or horrible women who marry quiet kind-hearted men whom they know they can dominate, then turn their children and the community against these men. If you are with a woman who has no decency, the correct solution is to leave her. But I have seen this behavior used all the time against all sorts of women who do have decency; and they do not deserve this kind of treatment.

These attitudes – and any number of related attitudes - are absolute poison. A man may genuinely love a woman, only to have his bar buddies or his family poison him against her. In most cases the perpetrators of this Iago act are male. They convince the man either that women are bad or that his partner is bad personally. They convince the man that he is being used, manipulated, exploited, betrayed, whatever, when he is in fact being genuinely loved. This can destroy even the most beautiful relationships. In some cases the Iagos are female. My sister had married a man whose mother then poisoned him against her. Luckily she had correct guidance from her brilliant and knowledgeable mother and was able to leave him before he did anything truly ugly to her.

I am not exactly the macho type, but I can hold my own. I can do 200 fingertip pushups and have taken classes in martial arts. When some Muslim thugs kept intimidating my boss at a Lebanese food place because he was helping a Muslim woman to get a divorce from an Algerian wife-beater, I picked up a huge set of boxes bigger in size than my body and walked by them looking at them like I was going to kill them. More importantly I helped that woman to see through the manipulations that these people were using to keep her down. It takes much more courage to do that than it does to break the skull of one's wife, make constant death threats against her, or post slanders against people and litigate falsely against them.

The men claiming the leadership of the male gender are the worst men to be found. They teach other men to be brutal and corrupt, and that influences even the better-natured men to act like jerks. Their main claim – that they owe it to the male gender to keep women down – is a pack of lies. Nothing is owed to a gender. Nothing was ever owed to a gender. Things are owed to people of both genders who have contributed in all sorts of ways, from business to science to raising children. And this is the case both with women and with men.

Why on earth would any sane man consent to being represented by the worst men to be found? Why on earth would any sane man allow brutal scumbags to tell him what it means to be a man? Man must have courage to tell these people, How dare you claim to speak for me. How dare you tell me that I should be nasty to women I care about. How dare you try to turn me against someone I love.

To the men caught in this whole hideous mess called the gender war: Think of your daughters. They are not Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon. They are your own flesh and blood. By all means go after the perpetrators of the monstrosity known as political correctness, but do not make the world worse for your own progeny. Your daughters deserve better than getting knocked around by some cretin. And that means, among other things, leading by example and refusing to do the same thing to your girlfriend or your wife.