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The women's movement ot the late '60s/early '70s (Steinem, Jong, Hite) spawned the sensitive man of the mid-to-late '70s (Alda, Stivic, Donahue), which was kicked in the teeth by the macho, jingoism of the '80s (Schwarzenegger, Stallone), daring the women of late '80s/early 90s (Alien's Sigourney Weaver, Terminator 2's Linda Hamilton) to do their own ass-kicking.

When the backlash to FOX 's controversial Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire finally died down, and the network's first original series hit, Married... with Children, was not just openly accepted as mainstream, but eagerly invited into millions of homes. The show's lead character, Al Bundy, became the more credible version of the typical American man.

And men were men again--at least on TV--drinking beer, watching sports and trying to find some short cut to do the simplest things and lying to the women they love if only to avoid their jugdment or scrutiny. And women had not only allowed this neo-neanderthal male philosophy, it seems many have preferred it be a naturally occurring predisposition of the Y chromosone.

But to what degree? Many of my female friends have admitted to me that while a man who holds their ourse while they try on chorus line's worth of clothing is attractive, a man who shows visible discomfort while doing so is more attractive. If he tries to squirm his way outo f the whole shopping expedition, he becomes even hotter, as long as he acquiesces!

Oh, and he must acquiesce. There are few things as fulfilling of the need for power as getting someone to do something you know they don't want to do.

The often too beautiful and too intelligent wives on most family- or couples-oriented sitcoms--from The Honeymooners to All in the Family to The Cosby Show to Everybody Love Raymond to Curb Your Enthusiasm--stay with their seemingly lesser halves, it seems, because of their husbands' incessant ability to pitifully defer to their wives' better judgments by episode's end.

These women find solace in the fictionally-perceived tenet that a woman's savvy will always trump a man's stubbornness, assuming these qualities are gender-exclusive.

Where, the, do men find their solace? In things woman, by generalization, can't or won't do. They find it in meat, physicality, and urinating in the snow. Which translates into meat-lover's pizaas, ESPN, ...and urinating in the snow. So men feel that as they've become more civilized, their inate primal virility has been comprimised. Aggressive physicality towards another? a profitable career with a manager and contract, a jailable offense without. Before, men took sex from women, often for procreation; now, women let us have sex with them, often for recreation.

A college professor once shared a joke that men are born with 2 [testicles] so that women could eventually lead him around by one of them (and the girls in the class laughed far more than the boys did!) So maybe these "Man Law" and "Manthem" commercials are meant for men to profess the power and/or pride of the one testicle they still control.

They can't beat up their asshole boss or drag an attractive girl home by her hair, so any inate, albeit centuries-outdated, desire to do so presents frustrations now only sated by washing down a Burger King Texas Double Whopper with an ice-cold bottle of Miller (LITE!!!), which will eventually produce more testosterone and, consequentially, more frustrations, which call for more therapeutic pizza and beer.

And the circle of strife continues...!