The dilemma My partner is an educated professional woman and quite successful. She clings to the rock of feminism as a justification of having to be in her terms a “strong woman” in today’s world. The reality is that she is emotionally detached, always angry, frigid, mostly frustrated and often dysfunctional. What pleasures her most is flirting with younger men, leering perversely over images of men in the media, and finding in every conversation an angle to deride or belittle men in general. Ironically I put it to you that I am a man trapped in a marriage with a “female chauvinist pig” making my life miserable day by day. How do I escape?

Mariella replies Is that you Jason? This could be my husband’s belated idea of an April Fools’ joke. If not, this creature is surely the fearful modern man’s worst nightmare. She certainly doesn’t represent a positive outcome to the drawn-out struggle for equality we remain engaged in. Rather your partner sounds like a throwback to the 1970s and those bra-burning feminists bent on proving they could beat men at their own game.

Can women simply evolve into male stereotypes? The reverse is what men seem to be intent on if the huge increase in sales of men’s grooming products is anything to go by. I’d really hoped that having both sexes involved in advancing our world would create better balance and evolutionary potential for us all. Instead, if your letter is evidence of what’s happening with women, we’re all in big trouble.

Your dilemma would have seemed less credible had I not just read a horror story disguised as an article about young female bankers in ES magazine. Entirely committed to the pursuit of cash, designer-clad, waking at 5am to do power workouts before a blowdry and a board meeting, these Barbie bankers seemed high on testosterone and low on mitigating human virtues. Most chilling was their definition of a perfect date: a Tinder rendezvous at least seven stops from Liverpool Street (in order to avoid colleagues).

Either your wife is a walking, talking cliché, or you’re having a laugh

Well that’s the feminist initiative gone badly wrong if such disciples of bodily perfection, total control and the “zipless fuck” expand beyond a self-obsessed minority. As with these misguided girls and their soul-destroying aping of redundant male stereotypes, the description you paint of your wife is so at odds with the majority of women I encounter that it leaves me with an uneasy sense of incredulity. It’s certainly a first to have a letter bemoaning a female partner for flirting with younger guys and drooling over men in magazines. Being loud and proud about possessing a libido is one thing – turning into the female embodiment of Benny Hill is quite another. If she really is this ranting, raving, cold-hearted fury, why are you still there?

The advice I’d offer you is no different to that I’d give to any woman in a relationship where their partner humiliates them, leers over their gender while belittling them and fails to live up to any reasonable behavioural expectations. I appreciate your pain, but if you despise your partner to the extent you appear to, then escape is the inevitable choice. So could there be another agenda for caricaturing your wife so effectively? Either she is a walking, talking cliché embodying every quality we’d hoped to smooth away from the male of the species, or you’re having a laugh!

There are contradictions in your letter, including your description of this sexually predatory female who’s also frigid. Is it you she isn’t interested in sex with, or all of mankind? Certainly if I felt as you do about the person I was sharing my life with, I’d hope to have the courage to step away from that relationship without qualms. You should probably be Googling alternative accommodation instead of penning letters to me.

If, on the other hand, you want me to condemn your wife for your fantastically constructed cliché of a feminist dragon, then I’m afraid you should have added some nuance to your character assassination. You may well be living with the worst kind of woman a man can imagine, or you may have blown life into her with a plethora of hot air. You say “ironically I put it to you” which does raise the spectre of the whole of your letter being an attempt to raise the dormant crazy bitch in me to do battle on behalf of the sisterhood. You seem to have wound up with the feminine equivalent of a Costa Brava beer lout, all unreformed emotions and sexist bluster. The bottom line is she sounds horrendous, like Glenn Close’s bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction and every other female ogre dreamt up by men; I can’t help wondering if she’s equally fictional.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1