God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate bonds’ with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their ‘issues’. They can’t open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don’t want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead. Yet women are becoming so fed up with being therapists with benefits that they’re leaving the dating pool, thereby exacerbating the fertility crisis. Soon, thanks to men’s emotional constipation, the human race will die out.

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly. We’ll have to wait for Ferrara’s forthcoming book – Men Without Men – to find out what she thinks in more detail. But it’s clear from a talk she gave at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research that she has a pretty low opinion of us. ‘In the........

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