I awoke yesterday in Ira Levin's brain. Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to make synthetic sperm. My first thought is - does it come in pink? But the possibility grows (and I'm wilfully hopping and skipping and bouncing over the science bit here) that we will at some vague point in the future be able to breed without men.

And so a misanthropic fantasy is conjured: what would a world without men be like? Would it be a gently slumbering paradise, full of women eating pot noodles and watching Dallas? Would there be more gilded, stripy cushions, but less armed robbery? Or would it be like being trapped in an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, or at an all girls' school - for ever?

Let us examine our history and see how men - the master race for all of our recorded history in almost every corner of every human civilisation - have fared so far. Applying all the fairness and equilibrium of my sex, naturally. And then I must ask myself: could women do better?



War

Girls dress dolls. Boys stab them. From Action Man to adolescent stabbings to creaking armchair generals shouting at Fox News while eating cheese straws, men have always enjoyed - or been willing - to maim. Not all men are drooling warlike psychopaths, but most drooling warlike psychopaths happen to be male.

Complain if you must, but surely this doesn't happen by accident? Freud said nothing happens by accident, not even an overboiled egg. Where did that sea of blood come from?

Obviously war has, at times, been an agent for useful social change: smashing the Nazis, plucking women out of the kitchen and into the workplace, and so forth. But generally speaking, I think most humane humans would agree that wars are a bad thing. And on the whole, women don't do war. Defensively, maybe, but not for fun, and not to compete with other women, because we know that there are worse things you can do to another person than merely kill them.

Nah, I can't be bothered to invade Russia. Enders is on, then Holby City. Arms race? To buy bracelets, possibly.

Leadership

It would be mean to list only the maniacs but I can't resist; there are so many flowers in this garden. Edward I flayed his enemies and nailed their skin to the chapel of Pyx. Then he invaded Scotland, because it was there. Would he have done this if he had been a woman? I doubt it - no woman would use skin as a wall motif.

Ivan the Terrible threw cats - why cats? - off the walls of the Kremlin and thumped people with red-hot pokers, because they were there. Joseph Stalin watched musicals while his peasants starved.

Female rulers, I am certain, can and have already done better. Not always - Indira Gandhi suppressed women's rights and Elizabeth Bathory murdered random virgins and no, I haven't forgotten Margaret Thatcher - but Elizabeth I practised religious tolerance in England while it was still fashionable to eat Protestants in France. Iceland's prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurardóttir, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Helen Clark - who has just finished four terms as PM in New Zealand - are all seemingly sane. They stand for fewer insane policies and less mass murder due to feelings of inadequacy. Which I'm in favour of.

Religion

If you believe, as I do, that religion is more dangerous than an elephant on cocaine wearing high heels in Legoland, the invention of religion is a very black mark against the creatures that love football. In the dock we have Abraham of Ur Kasdim representing Judaism, "St" Paul of Tarsus and Joshua of Nazareth in the Catholic - later Protestant and Catholic - corner and Muhammad bringing up the rear for Islam, holding the hand of the nine-year-old child he married.

We also have L Ron Hubbard (Scientology), the cravat-wearing author of Buckskin Brigades, and our current Pope, who thinks men who kiss men are devilish. He expounds this idea while dressed as Father Christmas. Spirituality, you say? Congratulations, boys, on the greatest bullshit ever told.

What of women in religion? We are followers, not leaders; we are the gilding on this mad lily. Everyone knows that nuns do what they are told, and that they are terrible drivers. I believe most women go to church/mosque/synagogue for something to do.

(And for the nibbles: "It's not the body of Christ. It's a biscuit"). Without men, attendance at religious services would dramatically decline. We would of course have nothing to pray for.

The environment

This is a tricky one, because women use hairdryers and hairdryers use electricity and I want to be fair. I'm using a hairdryer now, as I type my spleen. But it's been scientifically proven that cars and aeroplanes contribute more to global warming than hairdryers and curling tongs.

And who buys the magazines Car and Automobile and Car and Driver and Aircraft and Combat Aircraft and Hot Rod? You know who. It's m**. What's that strange noise? It's the imminent destruction of our shared habitat, and we have no escape pods. Foxtons doesn't have a branch on Pluto. I'd laugh except I'm on fire. I think this has to go down as another serious black mark for men.

Psychiatry



Thank you, Dr Freud and Dr Jung - good work, but I for one am still crying. Women also practise psychiatry. It's called empathy. This is a good moment to posit the idea that, in a man-free world, makeup and beauty-product sales would decline, because we would have no one to preen for. The fashion industry would die like an insect in autumn.

It is also possible that all women would be fat.

Music

It is a very true truism that men are good at music because they prefer it to speech. But I have to say thank you for the teenage-shagging Elvis, and the wife-beating Frank, because in a world without men, I believe the music would be rubbish. It would probably be like a Suzanne Vega concert. Love songs would disappear. We'd sing songs about crop rotation and vomiting babies, and we'd sit down at rock concerts.

Literature

Written by the losers in life, and, therefore, superb. Can women write as well as men? Well, there is George Eliot, although she was not really called George. She was really called Mary Ann.

Cinema

It would disappear. We would talk instead. Ditto video games.

And that is my female planet. I can feel you raving now. I can smell your hate. Women are complicit in the madness, you will say. We fly in the planes and we eat the mouldy fruit salad. We applaud the decapitations, and read Vogue too. But men are the rulers of our planet, the ambassadors of humanity; you cannot dispute this, and be truthful. We women have never had the opportunity to fully express our own evil, or our own goodness.

And so, for absolute enlightenment, to really make up my mind, I turn to The Bonobo Thesis.

The bonobo is a type of ape. It lives only in the Congo and it's one of our closest living relatives. It lives in a matriarchal society - there are blokes, but the birds are in charge - and it is more peaceful than the chimpanzee world. They don't kill each other, like chimps do. They like French kissing and oral sex and they sleep in a nest. So, if we use The Bonobo Thesis, it seems likely that a female-only planet would be more peaceful and more lecherous than our masculine-led one.

But, as I fantasise about this sweet new world, the question pops up: who would I have sex with? I like women but I couldn't eat a whole one. Seriously, though? The paradise is cracking and crumbling and sundering around my unwashed ears. In truth, I would miss men. I would miss their smell, and their fragile sweetness, and the way they look at Match of the Day 2 in that lopsided manner, like a lion ogling a chicken.

And I am certain, that, should the men all leave, something terrible - something even worse than all the terrible things they have already done - would happen. Stay, men, stay.