The furor has died down for the moment, but Augusta National's males-only policy is still under fire. A few years ago, my local Elks was forced by law to admit women or forfeit its liquor license. My local Kiwanis Club, under pressure from the national chapter, has admitted women.

Some of it bothers me and some of it doesn't. The Kiwanis Club, for instance, should admit women. I don't see any reason for keeping them out of a service club where the most manly activity is singing non-gender-inclusive songs.

But the Elks is another matter. At the Elks, guys cuss, and tend to obsess about football, and sometimes get very drunk and make inappropriate comments. Guys and gals don't go together well in such surroundings.

It reminds me of a story about the British writer G.K. Chesterton, who was asked by a female acquaintance why he didn’t believe in comradeship between the sexes. Chesterton wrote of the encounter: "I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer: Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the house.'"

Guys like to hang out with other guys, from Athens' young men hanging out at the Agora listening to Socrates, to men chalking up sticks at a pool hall, to men standing around an open car hood, playing poker, or fishing. It's a guy thing.

It's not a social conditioning thing. Anyone who believes that hasn't been around little boys, those small members of our society who intuitively gravitate towards each other when it comes to “boy games.” Men are, to use a popular term these days, "hard wired" for male bonding.

Since men are made that way, it ought to be acknowledged as a fact of life, a natural thing, and therefore a good thing. As a good thing, it ought to be accepted and, indeed, encouraged.

Unless, of course, it interferes with another good thing.

We don't, after all, sit back and blithely defer to something merely because it's a fact of life. It's a fact of life that some people will fall into such abject poverty that they'd sell themselves and their children into slavery, but we don't let that happen. Likewise, the instinct for self-preservation is natural, but at times we subjugate it to the exigencies of national defense.

And that's where the natural guy thing runs into problems. In politics, guy things allegedly interfere with the effort to establish equality between the sexes (the "Female Thing").

The Female Thing has been rolling along for over one hundred years. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote. State and federal civil rights laws give women equal employment opportunities. Title IX requires schools to treat male and female sports equally. The Female Thing has been highly successful in opening all areas of public life to women.

And now the Female Thing is attacking the private spheres, or what might be called "semi-private" spheres - clubs and groups that exclude the public but admit a large number of men.

In the past, equality of the sexes aimed to stop the oppression of women. That was the greater good against which the guy thing took a back seat.

But I look around me today, and I don’t' see much oppression. I don't see powerful institutions—like units of government or universities—discriminating. I see women in every area of the economy. I see female sports blossoming.

I'm glad women can vote and have the opportunity to work (the economical and social pressure to work, that’s another matter). I'm glad girls have sports programs.

But here's the problem: The Female Thing marches on. It's been successful, but it's not stopping, and it's taking aim at the semi-private spheres. At some point, as a culture, we need to stand up and say, "Wait a minute. Let's not forget that there is such a thing as a guy thing. It's a natural and good thing, and at some level it needs to be recognized."

In other words, there needs to be a balance.

In the area of bankruptcy, we don't let debt-laden people get sold into slavery, but we don't completely let them off the hook, either. We insist they give the bulk of their assets to creditors before starting over. The bankruptcy laws attempt to strike a balance between a fact of life and the greater good of protecting a segment of society against destroying their lives.

I'm not seeing much of a balancing act in the assault on semi-private clubs. If the Female Thing succeeds in its current campaign, guy things are going to end up restricted to gatherings in private basements, like Christian prayer services in China. That would be a shame.

"It's a guy thing" is a good thing. It's not a subversive thing. It's not a violent thing. It's not even a mean thing. It's just the way it is, and we ought not repress it.