Do men matter any more?

God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them "opposite". But surely after 5,000 years of the sex war it's time for a sexual cease-fire? So, let's call a truce in the sex war - starting with men negotiating their terms of surrender!

Promoting a new BBC drama, If Women Ruled the World, Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield has predicted a future which is female. And about time too.

During the Seventies and Eighties, we feminists believed that the differences between the sexes were down to nurture not nature. But we now know that it's nature - and that women are naturally superior. Why do men like smart women? Because opposites attract.

Before you blokes try to string me up by my nipples, look at the evidence. What do most women want? Love, commitment and happy ever afters. And what do most men want? A "meaningful" one-night stand - preferably with seven bisexual hookers. Sure, there are a few species where the male stays faithful until he dies - mostly as a result of being eaten by his partner after mating. And yet do men afford us the same sexual freedom? No. Going for gold in the Double Standard Olympics, blokes still expect their women to be so virginal. Man: "Darling, am I the first man to make love to you?" To which to woman replies: "Of course! I don't know why you men keep asking the same silly question!"

Men maintain that women can't tell jokes - but could this possibly be because we marry them? Over half of all marriages today end in divorce (and let's face it, more ought to!), and the majority of these divorces are initiated by women. Marriage statistics are lower than Britney Spears's bikini line. And as we now know that marriage suits men much better than it suits women (married men live longer than single men, have fewer heart disease and mental problems, whereas SINGLE women live longer than married women and have less heart disease and mental problems) I suspect that it's women who are getting PMT - Pre-Monogamy Tension.

There are just so many other reasons not to want to live with such an inferior species. Men pee on the porcelain. They'd rather die than ask directions. (Which is why they always include a woman on the space shuttle now, don't you think?) Men think "sex drive" means doing it in the car. (Most probably because of that little sign on the rear vision mirror which states "objects in this mirror may appear larger than they are".)

Men's ailments are another sign of their inferiority. Men just can't leave being well enough alone. It's never a "cold"; with a spouse, it's always the "flu". "Hypochondria" is Greek for "man". And then there's the emotional haemophilia - oh, the hours women have to spend bandaging bleeding egos, "Yes, you're big, no, I didn't mean big, I meant the biggEST!" And yet, men expect their women to be so stoic. In our birthing class the instructress asked, "And who's having a natural childbirth?" All the men put their hands up. This, from men who need a full epidural to have ingrown toenails clipped!

The ultimate proof of male inferiority lies in our very biology. The male is really just a genetically modified woman - the female being the fall-back developmental pathway for any foetus. Biologists have now worked out a way that the egg can be fertilised by the nuclear chromosomes from another egg, so foregoing men's reproductive services altogether. Biologists have also revealed that the male chromosome is in decline. You have only about 120,000 years left, boys - unless you decide that it might be time to flop onto the shore and, like, evolve.

While it is still a man's world - women are doing 90 per cent of the childcare and housework, don't have equal pay (getting only 75p in the pound) and are still getting concussion hitting our heads on the glass ceiling (and we're expected to Windex it while we're up there!) - our achievements in education and the workplace are outpacing our male competitors. While we've been busy fighting for equality in education and work; many men (footballers spring to mind) have been busy disproving the theory of evolution and evolving into apes.

So boys, if you don't want to be taken out along with the garbage, you'd better pull up your psychological socks. You see, the truth is, now that women are economically independent and can impregnate ourselves, if our vibrators could kill spiders in the bathtub, light the barbie, kiss our upper eyelids and tell us we don't look fat in stretch Lycra, would we need blokes at all?

The boys' view...

All this speculation about what might happen if women ran the world is perfect nonsense. They run it already and have done so since time immemorial. The only difference between the old days and now is how much greedier they have become. Time was, they were content with controlling us feeble menfolk through the back door - eg withholding sex from us, like the women in Aristophanes's Lysistrata; stoking our ambition à la Lady Macbeth. Now, they no longer want merely to be the hand that operates the glove puppet. They want to be Mr Punch too.

When my wife hears me spouting this sort of "sexist drivel" she gets quite cross. But then, being a child of the feminist revolution, she would. It's extremely hard to be a woman today - or a man for that matter - and not subscribe unquestioningly to the post-Sixties myth that society is essentially biased against women and that this is a major problem that needs to be addressed.

I've been brainwashed a bit that way myself. When I hear of the stick women bankers get from their City boy colleagues it makes me absolutely livid. When I read of talented professional women being sacked the second they've announced they're pregnant, I think: "Outrageous! Sue the bastards for every penny they've got." But just because we've all been trained by Germaine Greer and co to think like this doesn't necessarily mean it's right.

For example, put yourself in the position of an employer torn between giving a job to two equally talented individuals. One, a man, is going to toil every hour God sends for the rest of his working life. The other, a woman, is going to do exactly the same, until such time as she gets pregnant, collects her six months' maternity leave, comes back distracted by guilt that she's being a bad mother, realises her baby needs a brother or sister, gets pregnant ... Hmm, now I wonder which one it would make most sense to employ?

Yet society asks us to pretend that there's no difference between the sexes. That despite being biologically designed to carry, breastfeed and nurture babies, women are just as suited to traditionally male roles as men. And when it turns out, say, that there are more male MPs and scientists than female ones, we don't shrug our shoulders and go: "Oh well. Guess, they're not girlie kinds of jobs." Rather, we take active steps to correct this supposedly monstrous imbalance.

Yet, as any behavioural scientist could tell you, there are fundamental differences between men and women. The male brain tends mainly towards " systemic" ways of thinking, making it especially suited to careers involving logic, mechanics and engineering. The generally more empathetic female brain better lends itself to caring careers such as teaching and nursing. There are no absolutes here: but the basic fact remains that the main reason that women do girlie jobs and the men do blokeish ones is because those are the ones they like and are best at.

If you believe Oxford professor Baroness Susan Greenfield, the biological imperatives that have created these essential differences could soon become irrelevant. She argues, for example, that scientists' ability to reverse the menopause and freeze eggs will mean women no longer have to choose between career and family. I would counter that it will take a lot more than technology to reverse several millennia of evolutionary biology.

We are the way we are for a reason. Skills such as caring, intuiting other people's emotions, and multitasking make women especially good child-rearers and home-makers. Male attributes such as aggression, competitiveness, logic and spatial awareness are better suited to jobs such as making sure your company is leaner, hungrier and more efficient than your rivals'. Which is why women who want to get on in business don't do so by being extra feminine and caring; they do so by acting more like honorary blokes.

The big mistake we've made over the past 30 years - and one we're going to repeat even more emphatically in the future, if we follow Baroness Greenfield's line - is to view these sexual differences as a problem, where none in fact exists. Sure the world's greatest inventors, artists, composers, musicians, writers, engineers, scientists, warriors, strategists, leaders, philosophers and athletes have usually been male. But then, its greatest mothers have always been women.