This is for men only. NO WOMEN ALLOWED.

        Are they gone? OK, guys, close the door and shove a greasy engine block in front of it, because we are under attack.

        Many of you are battle-scarred veterans of the war between the sexes. We have fought on the beaches, on the playgrounds, in cars, at parties, even on the way home from church. We've been through the trenches of hand-to-hand rhetorical combat with the unfairer sex. We know all too well the twilight struggle of the long cold war over forgotten anniversaries and accidental intrusions into her closet air space.

        But now we face a new threat: A terrorist attack by radical fundamentalists who are determined to cripple our way of life with a kind of mental anthrax that spreads paralyzing fear and confusion among innocent men.

        It may seem as harmless as a piece of cultural junk mail, but a play being shown in Cincinnati is releasing deadly spores that can turn men's brains to casserole.

        Maybe some of you have seen the billboards as big as a beer truck. It may sound like a travelogue about Virginia, but it has no fishing, hunting, camping or places you'd like to take your family. Take my word for it.

        Believe it or not, it's more than an hour of women sitting around talking about what they are sitting around on.

        Sigmund Freud would be poleaxed. Not even he could have guessed that what women want is to go out on the town — and talk about their private parts.

        Any man who tried this would be beaten with spiked heels, lynched with pantyhose, burned on a pyre of Redbooks and buried in an unmarked grave salted with potpourri.

        A guy who even speaks the title of this play could wind up like Jerold Mackenzie, a manager at Miller Brewing(!) who was sued for sexual harassment in 1993 and lost his job for telling a joke from Seinfeld, about a word that rhymes with Regina. True.

        ABC had to warn viewers about a show that included the same word.

        But now it's OK to put it on billboards all over town to advertise a play that uses crude and vulgar synonyms to create “stark realism”?

        If men did that, the stark realism is that they would be accused of coarsening our culture and encouraging perverts in raincoats.

        Guys who watch the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show are branded “sickos” — by the same women who try to drag their husbands and boyfriends to a cozy theater where women talk like letters to Hustler.

        Go figure.

        No, don't try, you will only get a brain seizure that will debilitate your reasoning so severely you might even think stuff like that is “art.”

        As Mark Twain said, “There is nothing more sophisticated than the pretentious swindles known as contemporary art.” At least, he would have said that if he lived to be 167. But I digress.

        Don't run off to join Johnnie Walker yet, men. There is good news.

        Most women are not fundamentalist fanatics on a jihad against men. Many are peaceful.

        And men are not as nuts as we thought we were when we tried to noodle out how women could defend a cheatin' heart in the White House that they would drive a stake through in their own house.

        Consider this: Not even a mental contortionist can imagine any group of men sitting around discussing their privates. That's a good thing.

        And most men would rather wear underwire intimate apparel to a poker game than go to the play that's showing at the Aronoff.

        Finally, most men are not so paranoid they can't recognize the difference between scary censorship and harmless satirical criticism.

        OK, men, now duck — and watch your backsides.

        But only your own.

       Contact Enquirer Associate Editor Peter Bronson at 768-8301; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Bronson.
       

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