INDULGE me for a moment, if you will, and consider this hypothetical situation: Let’s say you are a guy. (Actually, this situation applies only to those for which this part is not hypothetical.)

Okay, so you’re a guy and you are out with friends at a bar watching a football match. Your girlfriend calls you and insists you had promised to go shopping with her. You ditch the game to meet her (like I said, hypothetical) because:

1. You have genuine care and concern for this very important person in your life and you would gladly go out of your way to do your duty as a boyfriend just to make her happy. After all, you did promise, and it’s just a football game. You can catch the highlights later, or

2. She scares the bejewels out of you.

If you picked the first option, you are possibly the best boyfriend in the world. Either that or you are lying through your teeth. If you picked the second option, then it is quite probable that you – like bits of corn scattered in a chicken coop – are hen-pecked.

When I asked my friends this question, they invented a third option: “Who the heck picks shopping over football? Please come up with a more reasonable hypothetical situation.” Sometimes, they can be real wet blankets.

Anyway, back to the hen-pecked men. The term seems to have gone out of style, probably due to the scarcity of live chickens in urban areas. A term more commonly used by younger folk now is “whipped”.

They mean the same thing, but whipped has a few add-ons. In general usage, the word is always accompanied by doing a whipping motion and making a whipping sound, which for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to spell. But it is a sound everybody knows.

I did a quick poll around the office and was offered the following alternatives: “Pa shhh”, “Puh woosh”, “Peh wssh” and even “Piak”. For simplicity, I am going with my own suggestion: “Puh chhh!”

Sample usage: “Yeah man, that Shawn is totally whipped. Puh-chhh! (makes whipping motion with hand).”

For men, the notion of being a whipped man is no laughing matter. You can tell how serious it is simply by seeing how hard men try to pretend it’s not serious. That’s the male coping mechanism. Just look at how many jokes there are about prostates.

So yes, men will rib their friends who are whipped and tell jokes like: Marriage is a process where a man loses his bachelor’s and gains a master.

Heck, the whole whipped action plus sound thing is designed to make fun of people. It is a thick layer of denial, covering what is some major pain. As you are no doubt aware, society – women in particular – is to blame.

Society has placed these expectations of machismo on a man. For example, they must not be afraid of spiders. And it’s tough to reconcile being a manly spider-killer with having to ask for permission to go bowling. And really it’s kind of confusing as well.

I mean, here you are pandering to every need, whim and fancy of your girlfriend, but other women are not exactly going: “My goodness, how nice he is to her. That is sooooo sexy.”

No, what they are thinking is: “What a wimp. Give me a real man.”

As if that wasn’t enough, it also has the potential to make us insecure. The prevailing theory that men believe is – for any two people not equally invested in a relationship – the one who has less to lose gets to wear the pants. An imbalance of power, therefore, only fuels the persistent fear that you are not her first choice and will be ditched if the first choice comes along.

But Jeremy, I hear you say, isn’t it just so typical of irresponsible, narrow-minded chauvinists like you to focus on the handful of whipped men while ignoring the hoards and hoards of women who have absolutely no power in their relationships? You don’t hear them whining.

Of course, you are right. But maybe, just maybe, by highlighting the plight of men in this situation, I am helping to lift society to a greater level of awareness on whipped-ness, and maybe there will come a day when men and women will realise the folly of their ways and foster a greater sense of justice and equality for whipped men and women everywhere.

A lofty ambition, I know, but as the saying goes: If you are not part of the solution, then you are writing a newspaper column.

I was planning to spend a little more time thinking of a solution, but I promised a friend I’d go shopping.