If they don’t talk about their wives, they’re bad. If they do talk about their wives, they’re also bad.

Behind the attack on “wife guys,” I suspect, lurks a hostility to wifehood and marriage in general. Jia Tolentino made that hostility explicit in The New Yorker last month: “The very word is freighted with a history that I would prefer not to join, one in which women have been asked to conceive of their systemic subservience to men as a pleasure and a calling — to make a badge of honor out of a badge of woe.”

There’s no winning for men. We don’t take these kinds of shots at women and the way they conduct themselves in their relationships, but it’s standard and acceptable to take them at men.

It’s OK, “wife guys”: Praise your wives, call them your “heroes,” talk about how great they are. Don’t let the think-piece harridans and mocking labels stop you.