Whenever I come up against the more radical end of feminism, I always end up wondering what it must be like for any bloke living with these people. I have a female friend who says she detests feminism, but she bullies her husband to such an extent it makes me almost ill to watch it. She is a feminist, she just doesn’t know it. Feminism comes in all the sizes and all the colours, and the egalitarian version is fine by me so long as the owner doesn’t start changing the history of anthropology in order to make the case. Mainly, it bores me stupid. But it could be worse: I could be a male Chinese mantis.

Feminism among Homo sapiens is – worst case scenario – ‘life’s a bitch and then you die’. Among the rabidly matriarchal Elephant population, however, for a bull it’s ‘life’s a f**k and then you get banished’. Once the cow is up the duff, she and the other bib-and-brace wearing Wimmin chuck the poor old bull out of the herd. He is then doomed to a solitary life of pulling up entire trees just to get one tasty-looking leaf at the top.

They call these poor unfortunates Rogue Elephants. I’m damned if I know why. But for a male crocodile, the entire process of having it off is fraught with much greater risk. If Ms Croc is up for some rumpy-pumpy, you’re alright. But get the approach wrong – just one false move in the foreplay – and she’ll decide you’re dinner. It’s a case of ‘life’s a f**k and it may be the death of you’.

Life isn’t easy for crocodiles of either sex, come to think of it. A newly-hatched croc has a one in fourteen million chance of making it to adulthood. Lots of crocs are cannibals for one thing, and for another pretty much every carnivore in the river is fond of a croque monsieur of prepubertal Crocodylinae.

Your croc gets a bad press, but on the whole if you stay out of his river he’ll leave you alone. There was a story in the media earlier this week of how one crocodile had taken to eating cows nowhere near the river, but usually this happens because Homo sapiens interferes with the river food chain, Mr & Mrs Crocodylinae get hungry, and thus wander off-piste to see what’s available on the land. This happened near Daintree in Australia some years back, and the crocs there moseyed into town to start eating people. Can you blame them?

But the extremes of feminism elsewhere are nothing compared to the deadly female Chinese mantis. There are no ifs or buts about it for the mantis sisters – the deal is always the same: ‘life’s a f**k, and then you die’. The female gets deflowered, and the male gets devoured. It’s no good whingeing that you weren’t ready or the other side told a pack of lies: the feminist’s decision is final, inevitable and irreversible: she’s pregnant, you’re dead.

Black widow spiders are the same – hence the name. I do find it a bit steep some crazed female claiming a widow’s pension having eaten the poor man’s head (they do it to stimulate ejaculation, which is a tad extreme) but there you go: life is a never-ending cavalcade of injustice. Personally, I blame the parents. Or in these latter cases, the parent.