Has being a woman ever been easier? True, babies and careers don't mix, female worldly success turns to ashes, and loneliness, sterility and breast cancer await those deluded harpies who try to have it all, but at least, thanks to women such as Sylvia Ann Hewlett, we now know exactly where we stand. Her new book, Baby Hunger, reminds anyone who has missed the regular warnings published in the Daily Mail that women who defy their biology are sentenced to years of misery and self-reproach. Even those "high-achieving" types who think they have accepted their childlessness should not kid themselves. Sylvia Ann expects them to suffer renewed agonies of regret: "I think it reappears later in life when you kind of twig that you didn't have kids and so you won't have grandchildren," she predicts.

From a certain kind of man, such insistence might sound gloating, but Sylvia Ann, who had the last of her four children after fertility treatment at the age of 51, just wants to save less adroit reproducers from themselves. "The basic problem is that women run out of eggs," she cautions. "Have your first child before 35." Women who do not want to end up like the pitiable case studies in her book (such as distraught Holly, "who left it too late") should perform a calculation she calls "backward mapping", a countdown from where they would like to be in their 30s - say, living in a gracious home supplied by an affluent high-achieving peer, with seven or eight children in private schools and a new baby on the way - and start planning in their 20s. "If you want children, you need to become seriously proactive," she writes. "Give urgent priority to finding a partner. This project is extremely time-sensitive and deserves special attention during your 20s."

But what of high-achieving men? Can they have it all? Or if not, the best bits? Who is to show them how to avoid the wrong turnings and immature lack of foresight that can lead so easily to lifelong regrets, public shame, fatal disease, or all three at the same time? In my forthcoming book, Woman Terror, I hope to save the current generation of young men from making the mistakes of their predecessors, many of whom ended up on a joyless treadmill, already supporting a wife and children in their 20s only to endure a mid-life crisis, usually accompanied by adultery, a new family and divorce proceedings in their 40s, followed in a tragically high number of cases by undiagnosed heart disease (often exacerbated by over-dependence on alcohol and Viagra), an early death and, in some especially sad cases, a pauper's grave, all their money having been siphoned away by a succession of wives and children. And that's the good news. The bad news is that as more and more women engage in Sylvia Ann Hewlett's backward mapping, these trends can only get worse.

What I shall be telling men, very much as Sylvia Ann urged women in the Times this week, is "do yourself a favour. If you are a twentysomething-year-old, try to figure out what you want in your 40s, and try and be intentional about it."

Don't just drift into commitment, then find yourself, like Giles, a classic case of doing it too soon, as a father of eight, paying for everything from school fees to his wife's Botox injections at an age when he hadn't even expected to start a family. I'm not saying don't have a child. I'm saying why bother even thinking about it until you're at least 35? Or older. It's not as if you have to reproduce with a high-achieving woman of your own generation. Indeed, at the age of 35 such a choice would be biologically perverse. Your sperm should still be in tip-top condition.

So what is Woman Terror? It is the feeling described by one of my case studies, Bert, who found himself a father and married in his 20s to a woman who, he now realises, was only interested in him because she was suffering from baby hunger and had reached a critical point in her backward mapping. He believes her unplanned pregnancy, six months into their relationship, was no accident. "I'd expected to be golfing and having meaningless sexual relationships until well into my 30s, or even 40s," he says. Now a ravaged father of six who looks a decade older than his 37 years, Bert has recently suffered from disfiguring boils and high blood pressure, and has been told to cut down on his workload. "But I can't," he says, helplessly. "I'm the breadwinner and there's no way out. If we divorce, she'll get the house. And anyway, I'd just get trapped again. There are so many desperate twentysomething women out there. I've cried myself to sleep for months."

I asked Bert what his advice was for a 25-year-old man and he said: "For God's sake, don't get hitched and have kids. Not until you're at least 40." And Bob is not alone. The statistics are terrifying. A US study found that 80% of married ultra-achievers wish they had more time for pets or hobbies. In England, 93% of men aged under 75 say they would like to visit a lap-dancing club, just to see what it was like, but are scared that their wives would find out.

For men such as Bert and Giles my book comes too late. For younger men with a high level of Woman Terror, a vasectomy may be advisable, though not necessarily reversible. And for the rest? Give urgent priority to avoiding potential partners. This project deserves special attention during your 20s, when your achieving women contemporaries are likely to be at their most cunning. But there are no easy answers. For men who try to have it all, the result - in at least 75% of cases, according to new US research - will be drudgery, disappointment and eternal damnation. Sorry!

A touch of the Persauds

When the psychologist Raj Persaud, late of the Daily Mail and other leading mental-health journals, decided to save his best insights for viewers of ITV's This Morning programme, few of us imagined we should see his like again. Would any clinical psychologist, other than Persaud, be willing, at the drop of a hat, or at any rate, a cheque, to write about the mental health of celebrities he had never met? The very unlikeliness of Persaud's mantle ever being passed on makes the arrival on the analytical scene of "psychologist Professor Alex Gardner" all the more deliciously welcome.

There have been some promising Gardner diagnoses over the past year, in particular a stern verdict on Chris Evans' childish behaviour ("This is because of the imbalance in the Evans psyche"), and a close look at "the darker side of Beckham's psychology", but it is his group analysis of the Sven, Ulrika, Nancy triangle this week which confirms that Gardner not only rivals Persaud, but actually excels the master's work, with an entirely idiosyncratic blend of disapproval and impertinence.

Writing in the Mail, Gardner detected in Sven long-standing "feelings of physical inadequacy" and in Ulrika an "obsessive, neurotic" character who makes "catastrophic errors of judgment". Nancy, however, he finds "dashing, highly intelligent" and "better suited to be Eriksson's partner than Ms Jonsson". Which is just as well since, as he warns Ulrika, "once more, daddy may be leaving".

At this still formative stage in his media career it is difficult to be absolutely certain about the workings of Gardner's psyche, but so far his behaviour suggests a provisional diagnosis of exhibitionism and greed, shamelessness and - no doubt hailing from his darker side - a little dash of wholly unprofessional cruelty. Further sessions will be necessary to ascertain whether, like Ulrika, Professor Gardner is also capable of catastrophic errors of judgment.