*Warning: a few justifiable curse words below.

“To sin by silence when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men.
The few who dare must speak and speak again,
To right the wrongs of many.”
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Single women seem to be finding it increasingly difficult to find a good man, and more difficult still to find a good man and keep him.

The deluge of digital dating sites are matched only by the rash of rehashed articles offering snappy lists of outdated dating advice.

The mystery of noncommital men remains for one simple reason: women rarely bother to ask men why they run away from commitment rather than toward it.

Instead, there are the usual glossed over articles in the usual glossy magazines, written by the usual strong and independent women telling other strong and independent women that men are intimidated by feminine strength and independence.

It’s airtight circular reasoning. So airtight in fact that many single women are slowly asphyxiating.

There seems to be no dialogue with men, no healthy debate, and no shared solutions offered—only the usual dour demands by dour dames for men to “show up” or “man up.”

What the tribe of strong and independent women fails to realise is these tired tropes are nowhere near enough to persuade a modern man to commit to a modern relationship, and, worryingly, they betray a lamentable lack of understanding of the male psyche.

Long before half of married men fall at the final hurdle into the dirty ditch of divorce many of their friends have fallen much earlier in the handicapped relationship stakes. But why?

When I speak with my male friends about this or when I receive messages from many men choking in the claustrophobic climate of modern relationships they all tell me the same thing: they don’t commit because they can’t find a kind partner.

In our current culture, genuine kindness between women and men appears to be a rare commodity. When the average guy meets the walking talking cliché that is the strong and independent woman, her primary concern seems to be to demonstrate to him at every opportunity just how strong and independent she actually is.

Too often the interpretation of the superficial slogan of “strength and independence” is simply a meanness of spirit.

It seems to be a strange mutated form of feminine machismo that equates kindness with weakness.

A couple of years ago I was dating a successful, beautiful executive business woman. We had just made love on a deserted beach, and I drove us to a cafe for breakfast. This romantic moment, she assumed, was the perfect time to present me with what conscious men call a shit test.

While we waited for our food and watched the rising sun, she took out her mobile phone and read from it a riddle that she wanted me to solve:

A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital, but just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Explain.

Well I couldn’t explain it, at least not to her satisfaction, so I was labelled a sexist, a misogynist, ignorant of my male bias and the oppression of women by the patriarchy.

She had no doubt expected me, her first black lover, to cower and submit just like her previous emasculated white whipping boys, and apologise for the tyranny of my gender.

The problem is your average black guy has a portion of pride even bigger than his penis. I can assure you we have been whipped enough. We do not conform to political correctness or compelled speech, we do not tolerate man shaming or blaming, and we do not allow ourselves under any circumstance to be emasculated.

So, right there in the cafe, we had a huge fight about her need to control me through a sense of guilt for the subjugation of women, about her labelling an entire gender as part of an oppressive patriarchy, and by that term lumping all men into the same barrel, right along with the rotten apples that have been so publicly picked out peeled and pureed by the “Me Too” cold press. 

I was so tired of being tested by her in this way time and again, I ended the relationship right there and then and walked away.

Something quite sinister has happened to feminism in recent years. I have never been accused of having protection under an oppressive patriarchy by a woman of any ethnic minority. Yet I am regularly told by a certain section of chronically angry white women, the second most privileged class of human being on the planet, of my supposed male privilege.

To demonstrate the point, the Women’s March in California was recently cancelled by its organisers, fearing it would be “overwhelmingly white.”

Walk for a week in my shoes as a black man in Western society before telling me of my male privilege and the patriarchy.

The occupational victimhood and persistent cry of wolf by this breed of bilious feminist not only betrays a bewildering ignorance of history but also a shameless cultural arrogance and sense of entitlement. 

These women clearly have never learned that when suffragettes were protesting for the right of women to vote in 1919, 42 percent of British soldiers returning from the  battlefields of the First World War also had no right to vote.

Neither do they seem to be aware that black soldiers returning home from the Second World War, having helped defeat the Nazis, were beaten and killed in their own American towns simply for attempting to exercise their right to vote.

These facts have been conveniently deleted from postmodern feminist history because they don’t fit the narrow-minded narrative of patriarchal oppression. As the truism goes, the victors write the history books.

It is time to forgive the sins of our fathers, white and black alike. It is time for the said section of angry Western women to cease blaming their every disadvantage and disappointment, their every failing, sadness, and loneliness on the patriarchal boogeyman.

This issue has barely been broached by men, at least in public, for one good reason: fear of being branded a sexist, a misogynist, a reverse racist, or any number of other trending names that are mindlessly tossed around these days like confetti.

But I do not fear. I have been called far worse names in my time by far more frightening people than pale-faced feminists.

But many men, particularly white men, do fear. These men cannot conceive of a committed relationship simply because they don’t feel welcome in the hostile womb of third wave feminism that antagonises them and blames them for every damned thing. 

It is an insipid ideology slowly but surely destroying the healthy dynamics of our relationships.

This divisive form of feminism is first taught in our universities in the guise of Gender Studies, and is then carried into wider society, primarily through the media. Many women are unconsciously conditioned to become undergraduates in unkindness, eventually earning themselves a bachelor’s degree in busting balls.

But an ever growing number of conscious women are combating this destructive dogma and are pushing back with a rapidly growing movement: Women Against Feminism.

If men are to help their woke sisters push back they need to understand the primary weapon of this form of fanatical feminism and how to counter its fractious force.

A woman conditioned by corrosive femininity, armed with a sense of moral superiority, habitually throws obstacles in front of a man in an attempt to control him through shame, guilt, and fear.

The shit test is a clumsy yet common attempt to demean a man in order to map his limits and boundaries.

For this reason the test is often provocative, designed to push a man into an unstable emotional response.

By far the favourite form of this test is for a woman to present her man with a puerile pouting face to demonstrate displeasure at any number of his masculine misdemeanours. Most men are then suckered into asking, “What’s wrong, honey?”

A woman in this mode will have one inevitable and sullen response. “Nothing,” she will reply, while pretending that she is not tossing a psychological spanner into the inner workings of a man’s peace of mind.

Judging by her continued morbid manner her lover will be unconvinced by her answer and will push the issue, insisting she tell him the problem so he can fix it with a solution; this is both the nature and nurture of the masculine mind.

She will pretend to be hesitant, reluctant to tell her man what the problem is while continuing to show her obvious displeasure with him.

The problem she has, however, is so common and prescribed that it can be predicted long before she appears to give in and reveals exactly what the issue is:

He has done something to cause her to feel unimportant or unloved. 

He failed to return a string of trivial messages throughout the day in an appropriate time or in an appropriate manner. He didn’t hold her hand in public. He looked for a split second too long at another woman. He left too early the last time they were together. He said something in a tone she didn’t like, or didn’t say something she wanted to hear. He spends too much time working, or with his friends. She doesn’t like his friends. Or she likes his friends a little too much and initiates the Jealousy Game, and on it goes, ad nauseum.

I have been subject to this pattern many times by many women, as have all my male friends. It’s the bog-standard and boring behaviour of many so-called strong and independent women, that in truth is more a measure of their insecurity and need to control.

Now, the way a man reacts to this drama will determine how the rest of the relationship with his drama queen will unfold, and perhaps the rest of his life.

If a man apologises and tries to appease his partner it will set the template in stone, and one problem then another will be conjured out of thin air for him to futilely attempt to fix. This can be the very moment a codependent relationship is born.

Gentleman, don’t go there. When you are presented with a shit test the best counter is not to respond to your lover’s initial sulking face or her response of, “Nothing,” to your concerns.

Do not try to fix her.

If your lover tries to provoke you into defending yourself or your friends tell her you have no intention of defending either.  

Do not back down, and do not say another word. Now is the moment to demonstrate just what strength and independence really mean.

If she is willing to respect your boundaries then you will probably make the internal choice to commit to her, there and then. If she is not willing then walk away, and live to love another day.

Having been made aware of this destructive dynamic, my current girlfriend has finally stopped shit testing me after six months. Liberated from this pathological pattern, her illusion of strength and independence has been shattered and she now has the courage and conviction to be kind and interdependent.

In her new-found emotional intelligence and resulting honesty, she informs me that all her girlfriends routinely shit test their partners pretty much on a weekly basis. Now she sees the pattern she can see why these men fail to properly commit, why they become emotionally unavailable, and why they use their hen-pecked misery as a pathetic excuse to cheat.

The sooner conscious men and women recognise and reject these destructive behaviours—and the postmodern feminist agenda fuelling them—the better.

The sooner we unmask unkindness and meanness of spirit masquerading as strength and independence, the better we will all be for it.

Only then will men start running toward commitment instead of away from it.

Bonus video: