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If you wanted proof that men are now marginalized, look no further than a question tabled for discussion at next year’s annual U.K. conference of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Would the fellowship consider the creation of a video which is aimed at encouraging Men into AA? This would complement the suite of videos already available for Women, Armed Forces, People of Colour, Bluelight Services and LGBTQIA+.”

When a friend emailed me that, I had to do a double take. How we encourage more men into AA should be a bit like asking how we encourage more men to take an interest in porn, or cars.

Are men now so unmanly they’ve given up on drinking themselves to death, or are a lot of men, while perfectly hard-drinking, now unable to go to AA because AA is so feminine, so woke, and so LGBT-hoo-ha-plus they can’t face it? Or, even worse, are they getting thrown out for upsetting women? Because I certainly have recent experience of witnessing that happening.

It’s interesting that they are capping up the word “Men,” a daring move in itself. I don’t even know if many men with a capital M exist anymore. I think there are a few, but they have to be very careful, as we know, not to go around triggering women by being too Men-like by insinuating they might fancy women or by making a comment to a woman such as “Good morning” or “I like your handbag, my wife has one the same,” as in the case of a recent harassment case in the British fire brigade.

This is not to mention any of the big male music stars in the States right now who are fighting off properly lurid allegations. These A-listers are accused of all sorts of dramatic alleged crimes, whereas in Britain men are now so tame the sexual harassment cases require forensic reading to work out what they might have done to even vaguely upset a woman.

In Britain, it’s gotten to the stage whereby any one-night stand between two randoms, never mind one random and one D-list celebrity, is liable to one day become a front-page harassment case causing shock and awe on social media.

So first off, I’m amazed AA GB has the gall to speak about Men using a capital M, even though it describes women with a capital W and People of Colour all capped up, because that is what you would expect. Women deserve a big W and People of Colour deserve a big P and a big C. Obviously. But do men deserve a big M? I can’t see why, given the alleged horrors they are routinely accused of.

Men, one would assume, ought to be lowercase in order not to upset any female victims (that should probably be Victims) who happen to be reading the question, and who might faint or need a personal injury lawyer if they see the word “Men” written out blatantly proud of itself, just like that, with no regard for all the wonderful brave Survivors out there who can tell a story or two about what Men have done to them. And so on.

But anyway, here we are with this question tabled for discussion at the next AA conference, where there will also be plentiful discussion, I’m assured by my friends in the fellowship, about such things as safeguarding and making everyone feel included and equal, and all that.

Of course, the tabler of the question might be being sarcastic, to make a point. But I’m assured by someone who ought to know that the question is serious and is being taken seriously by the conference organizers.

Men are now so marginalized in our society that it no longer goes without saying that men might be in the majority, numbers-wise, in a self-help group for drunks and dropouts.

Men are now so underrepresented everywhere that they have to be encouraged to come forward to talk about guzzling booze and being a fuck-up.

They now need special measures to make them feel welcome in a grimy old back room of a church serving stewed coffee and stale biscuits where they can go to share about spending all their money on gambling, prostitutes, and whiskey, and the fact their wife has left them.

And I suspect that they need reassurance they are still welcome in these grimy old rooms for good reason.

I first noticed AA was rather full of women of a certain kind about ten years ago when I moved from London to Surrey and came across a genteel sort of AA meeting where the ladies who lunch were more than well represented.

You had to mind your p’s and q’s at those meetings—a memo went out asking people not to use bad language—and it was not long before I noticed that they really didn’t like men. They especially disliked rough, working-class men, and those who had been criminals, which was unfortunate because AA traditionally helped quite a lot of those, and indeed it goes into prisons to encourage inmates to go to meetings when they are released.

I wrote a lot of articles about the AA ladies who lunch banning one convicted felon they took a particular dislike to, even though I witnessed him doing not much in meetings he was excluded from, along with much hysteria about what a man of his type might do if left unchallenged. It was all very Minority Report, crossed with that armchair social media sleuth spirit that pervades our society now whereby a load of busybodies with nothing better to do decide to investigate, try, and convict someone they don’t like the look of—usually a man—instead of calling the police to report their barking mad suspicions.

I felt at the time, as I do now, that the feminization of recovery was not going to be a good thing for low-bottom drunks for whom AA meetings are arguably the last-chance saloon. The men who need help most, it seems to me, might not be welcome there for much longer if many more ladies come to talk about having one too many glasses of sparkling wine and, usually, their daddy issues.

This situation is very unfair, because these ladies don’t really need AA. A book club would do as well. They need somewhere to have a chin-wag and a good old gossip, is all.

They can probably survive if they don’t go to AA meetings because they’re not drinking themselves to death anytime soon.

The low-bottom male drunks (together with a more desperate class of female drunk who is not picky about whom she sits next to) really are going to drink themselves to death without intervention.

And added to that, they’re probably at some risk of harming someone, not least a woman, if they don’t stay sober.

So the stakes are much higher if you throw those men out, than if you risk losing a few female wine guzzlers who want to talk about how their father never really loved them, or how their mother annoys them, or how their kids aren’t doing so well at school, or how their husband keeps leaving the loo seat up, and so on.

Let them walk out if they don’t like sitting next to a convicted felon, I say, because they’re not the ones who really need this. And they’re not the ones who are going to harm society if they don’t get with the program.

But this isn’t the view of the AA top brass, and whenever I write to complain about the issue of banning male former criminals they always emphasize their commitment to safeguarding women, even at the expense of being unfair to desperately unwell men.

Naturally they take this view. Every area of our society has become more and more feminized, from schools to the jobs market to sports, with the impact on men and boys well-documented.

But what happens when women even invade the spaces where desperate men go once they’ve hit bottom, ironically to get help with the very issues this new feminine society of ours is demanding they stop having?

When even AA meetings become places where men can’t swear, where they can’t speak openly about crime or drug use, or about the very behavior they want to address by getting sober, lest they upset women by describing it, then we are at risk of depriving men of the one last place they can vocalize what’s eating them and where they can attempt to become the better version of themselves that our intolerant society demands.

I’ve seen men criticized in AA rooms for rude and risqué jokes. I’ve seen them admonished for triggering women by talking openly about their anger issues.

At one meeting in South London, I heard a guy share, figuratively speaking, about feeling like he wanted to kill his brother’s wife because she had ruined him, but he quickly concluded that he would not harm her, of course, because he was now on the straight and narrow, and he said he was glad to be sober so he didn’t hurt people anymore.

This used to be a fairly standard sort of AA share. But a young girl with a punk hairdo shared after him that she now felt triggered by listening to a man voicing violent intent toward women. And she asked the secretary to do something about it.

Thankfully on that occasion the secretary decided to ignore the woman’s complaint. But this is not the trend.

The trend goes relentlessly all the way down the same route it always goes: Men get hounded for being men. Men get hounded for even vocalizing what it sometimes means to be a man, and to try to be a better man.

And so there are more and more examples coming to light of men being banned from AA groups in Britain.

This AA conference can ask the question about male representation all it wants, and it can approve the production of a special video aimed at encouraging men to go to meetings. Or even Men.

But what will the video show, exactly? Perhaps a man sitting mute and compliant, neutered as a dog in his seat, listening patiently and nodding sympathetically while the women share about their daddy issues and how much they hate men, before standing up and saying, “My name’s Steve and I’m an alcoholic, and I’m also a man, for which I unreservedly apologize.”