Yesterday, as my other half and I took a New Year's Day walk down Dartmouth Park Road in north London and admired the enormous million-pound Victorian townhouses, standing as white and perpendicular as Tom Cruise's teeth, he dropped a bombshell. "I hope you know," he said, with the slow enunciation of a tipsy nursery school teacher, "that I will never, ever be rich."

Of course, being as he is a lowly public sector worker, he's completely right. He will never be rich. Obviously, as a result, I dispensed with him immediately.

You see, the news that Hugh Hefner has finally taken runaway Playboy bunny Crystal Harris up the aisle (or perhaps more appropriately, down a rabbit hole that leads to a sexy, lava-filled underworld of geriatric humping) has got the romance cogs in my little female head a-turning. Being as I am a woman and therefore, like every other woman, a prostitute-in-waiting, there's something rather romantically appealing about Heff and his Disneyfied mansion of sexy time. Perhaps it's because, in the words of Camilla Long, he represents "the Norma Desmond of sex, limp as a battery hen in silk pyjamas and velvet slippers, unable to rise". The latter part of that quote rings particularly true in light of Harris's comments following Hefner's abortive attempt to put a ring on her in 2011. Saying that sex with him lasted "like two seconds. Then I was just over it. I was like 'Ahhh'. I was over it," she went on to reveal that she had never seen him naked. Sounds like a dream marriage of convenience, to be honest, encapsulating as it does all the things that women want in a man. Just to be sure, I have conducted my own internet-based research and found out what women really want. Namely:

1) Money

As Kanye West, a greater poet than myself, once said, a prenup is essential because "It's something that you need to have / 'Cause when she leave yo' ass she gon' leave with half". Yep. You don't need to browse the internet messageboards of men's rights activists to see that all women are essentially gold-digging whores who, despite being "sluts", turn unexpectedly frigid in the presence of aforementioned men's rights activists, mainly because these gents are so crippled by child support payments that they can't afford to stump up for our plastic surgery requirements. Amiright ladies? Never mind looks, intelligence, kindness, sense of humour, etc. If you've got a penis and a pension, Mama wants to hear about it.

2) Power

The Ladder Theory, a hugely popular and very science-based website, demonstrates that women are completely intoxicated by status – to the point where we become cross-eyed gyrating morons charmed to the point of hypnosis by the wiggling of a power snake. Just look at old Silvio Berlusconi, engaged to a 27-year-old with all the optimism of a star-crossed teenage romance junkie, willing to take another stab at love regardless of the recently announced £80,000-a-day divorce deal that follows the break-up of his second marriage. What does she see in him, you ask? Apart from his obvious position as the world's No 1 Latin lover, the fact that Berlusconi is likely to reclaim his crown as Big Boss of Italy amounts to a greater aphrodisiac than a whole barrel of oysters.

3) Bad behaviour

Whether it's bunga bunga fun or the orgies of the Playboy mansion, women just love a bad boy. You don't need to delve too deeply into the swollen, gout-ridden underbelly of Reddit before hearing the classic misogynist's lament: "Why don't women ever go for nice guys like me?" Sites such as "Nice guys" of OKCupid are testament to the fact that these good, honest post-feminist new men are left to fester on the onanistic scrapheap by heartless jezebels while the cynical, overbearing Christian Greys of this world are ball deep in Greek goddesses.

4) The inability to perform sexually without medical assistance

Crystal Harris has played a blinder as far as the transaction with Heff is concerned. She barely even needs to follow through, the wily minx, giving a whole new resonance to the phrase "happy ending". She graduates maxima cum laude from the International School of Gold Digging, an accolade to which those of us languishing in hotel bars wearing bandage dresses, or occupying the recesses of websites such as SugarDaddy.com in the hope of catching the eye of a sickly impotent billionaire, can only aspire.

Of course, there is the slim chance that Harris is pulling a Gloria Steinem and going fully undercover – but it's unlikely, considering that the scope of her ambitions echo those of billions of women the world over.

The moral of the story is that, until women are in positions of wealth and power (we currently control 1% of the former, according to the World Bank), we're going to have to continue filching it off you guys, so stop whining. Such techniques are as old as Chaucer and, let's face it, even if we do get to a place where we hold either political power or loads of money, women will still end up in a position where our physical appearance is constantly commented upon. No wonder we all prefer a bit of ready money to the apocryphal "good sense of humour". The jokes just aren't that funny any more.