By Bob Rhubart
The human race owes exactly half the credit for its continued existence to husbands. Without husbands the race would have long ago died out, or possibly just evolved, somehow, into a female-only civilization with one of the Gabor sisters as the queen.
The important point here is that the human race, along with all other living things, relies on the natural urge for members of one gender to seek out members of the other to form bonded pairs and to propagate, which is a word derived from a Latin expression that, roughly translated, means, "Put on that Barry White album, baby, its happy hour." Husbands have always been there to do their part.
Any examination of the history of husbands must go back to the very beginnings of life on the planet. According to many scientists, the first life on earth was in the form of tiny bacteria, swimming merrily around in the pools of warm muck that formed on the surface of the planet at that time. These tiny, brainless creatures didn't have a thought in their heads, because they didn't have heads. What they had was the instinct for survival, and that meant always making more germs. There was an actual process they used to achieve this. But the only people who know anything about it are scientists who have spent long hours staring into puddles of muck with powerful microscopes, and no one has any interest in engaging one of them in a conversation. Lets just say that the puddle of germs eventually became something that could take out the garbage.
These early, primitive husbands co-existed with the wild beasts, learning to hunt with the skill of the lion, and to run with the swiftness of the deer (though later they found that two-legged running was faster and a lot more comfortable). The primitive husband was physically very much like the modern husband, except his brain was much smaller and it was protected by a very thick skull. In fact, primitive husbands skulls were so thick that one of their favorite pastimes was an early form of bungie-jumping. Of course, as husbands evolved, their skulls became thinner, and it became necessary to invent the bungie cord. There was much to learn.
The primitive husband learned that even though his primitive wife had no problem with skinning, gutting and cooking whatever creature he had hunted down, she still would wake him from a perfectly good nap by saying, "Get up! I want you to kill this spider!" The primitive husband would then have to spend the next forty-five minutes wildly bludgeoning an angry, 100-pound arachnid.
In time spiders got smaller. This freed up the husbands to build new shelter, since the wives were getting fed up with living in caves and huts. And even when the new home was completed, it seemed that there was always something to fix around the house. Eventually, husbands learned to fashion special tools to make the jobs easier, including the lever, the fulcrum, and the cordless electric screwdriver.
Many husbands became quite adept at fixing all the various broken things around the house, and this led wives to expect increasingly more complex and technical repairs: "The faucet drips, the car doesn't run right, and the dog needs a new kidney." The husband was happy to oblige, because this increased the possibility of propagation.
As you can see, civilization would be a lot different without husbands. Probably much safer, cleaner, and better organized, but different. There sure as hell would be a lot more spiders.