When I read the headline “Bono named as one of Glamour’s women of the year” I wondered if it was a joke. Women often wonder about jokes as we rarely understand them. Laughing at anything is also illegal if you are a feminist (but tittering isn’t, so I had a titter). Bono is apparently Glamour’s first male woman of the year. In these days of gender fluidity, this is the smallest of details. But guys, really?

The decision to give poor old Bongo an award – ever since I heard Dr John Cooper Clarke call him that, I have been unable to think of him as anything but Bongo – is apparently some sort of stab at equality. Awards ceremonies of all kinds have become increasingly unhinged and self- adulatory. Everyone must have prizes, and hopefully goodie bags. too. Everyone must make forgettable speeches and be papped on the red carpet. No one ever really knows who else won or why. It’s all an absolute nonsense unless you win something yourself, in which case you step inside the madness by saying it’s a judgment of one’s peers.

Bono’s peers have given him all sorts: from a knighthood (honorary knight commander of the British empire) to a Philadelphia liberty medal, but according to the doublethink of Glamour’s editor-in-chief Cindi Leive, giving awards to actual women at the actual women of the year ceremony “might be an outdated way of looking at things. There are so many men who really are doing wonderful things for women these days.”

Finally, men doing things for women! It’s what the struggle has been all about. Give that man a round of applause for “babysitting” his own children. A medal and a paper hat for any man who thinks things should be better for girls! I don’t doubt Bono has done loads of charity work that he does like to talk about: the Poverty is Sexist campaign; the work around girls’ education and HIV, for instance. He is described on his Wikipedia page not only as a rock star but as a philanthropist and venture capitalist. There is, though, controversy both about some of his work in Africa and his band’s tax arrangements. U2 have been criticised for avoiding their full share of tax by channelling some of their income to a finance house in the Netherlands. Since Bono has been vocal about big companies such as ExxonMobil not being transparent about their taxes, with many African economies suffering as a result, this seems a tad hypocritical. But let that go. A lot of people are hypocritical about U2 because they used to like them and now it is not cool to do so.

Bono has basically irritated everyone by hanging out with popes and presidents but maybe his heart is in the right place even if his taxes are not. Maybe he could be offered a daft award and do the right thing: decline to line up with the likes of US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles; or Nadia Murad, the Yazidi woman who got away from Isis; or Emily Doe, the student who was raped by Brock Turner and wrote a shattering letter about her experience. He could have politely declined but carried on his work on HIV, as so many of his colleagues do. He could have said that poverty is a key feminist issue and passed the prize on to one of the many brilliant female campaigners. But no, he said he is very grateful because this is a chance to say: “The battle for gender equality can’t be won unless men lead it along with women.”

Of course! This must be where women have gone so badly wrong. We need more men to show us how to do feminism properly. Bono is not alone in this patronising attitude. Most of the male voices on the left continue to see gender as some kind of afterthought and are not interested in the bodily politics of flesh and blood and women. The new UN ambassador for women is Wonder Woman, a bleedin’ cartoon. Everyone fell over themselves to celebrate Caitlyn Jenner’s womanhood, ignoring her dubious politics. The misogyny around Hillary Clinton is unmissable. The one bit of sexual politics that the “radicals” embrace is often a denial of biological difference. Yet some of the most hard-won campaigns have been around rape, FGM, sexual violence, childbirth and HIV, where women’s experience is absolutely embodied.

Alongside this strange disappearance of womenhood has been the rolling back of tokenism: the assumption that everything is already a level playing field. Where many used to feel a public discussion should involve more than just white men, we are back to a position where it is now permissible to have all-male panels and comedy shows. Formats in which men thrive are too often seen as the only way to do things. This is a very simple and easy thing for men to address. When asked to take part in something, ask who else is involved. Ask who you will sit beside.

Otherwise, we go full circle, into hilarious gong-giving stupidity. Why bother with actual women when you can have a cartoon to represent us, or a man? Because however extraordinary a man Bono may be, he is not a leader I will follow.