Let us for a minute extend the benefit of the doubt to the 12% of men who believe they could take a point from Serena Williams in a tennis match, no doubt further emboldened by her defeat in the Wimbledon final.

For who can say what manner of fugue state they fell into as they answered a simple polling question? Could they have collectively imagined, as they pictured the holder of 23 grand slam titles shaping up to serve, a freak calamity overtaking her? A sinkhole opening up on her side of the net, perhaps, or a thunderbolt sent by a jealous athletic god; or, in more sinister fashion, a tripwire rigged up by an incel saboteur to fell her as she rushed in for the volley.

No: social media chatter suggested that what many of these tsars of self-belief were relying on was an unforced error – specifically a double fault. Such pyrrhic victory would not, it seems, worry them; a point, after all, is a point.

But we walk a tightrope when we condemn such apparently delusional thinking in the sporting arena; for where else are we supposed to indulge our fantasies of combining physical prowess, technical skill and mental toughness in pursuit of lifting a gilded trophy above our heads?

The Venus Rosewater dish (of course the ladies get a dish, useful for serving canapés later), the Jules Rimet trophy, the green jacket, the yellow jersey – every sports fan has dreamt of getting their hands on one or more of them; every one of us has drafted an acceptance speech, waved ecstatically from an open-topped bus, humbly collected our Sports Personality of the Year award. Allow me to break the fourth wall for an instant and reveal that my editor at the Observer still trusts that if he could sneak on at Goodison Park and get on the end of a decent cross, he’d do the business. Good on him.

Elite sports provide us with a proof of excellence that our rational selves know we will never reach, but which our gloriously irrational selves hanker after, knowing there’s no penalty for wishing and hoping.

OK: that’s the positive interpretation. Now let’s change ends for the less lenient take. Guys, guys: are you kidding? As one bright spark tweeted, the best you could hope for if you saw a Serena serve come your way is not to soil yourself. The idea of you getting a touch on the ball is laughable; the match would last for precisely 48 points, 6-0 6-0, after which point she would generously and magnanimously thank you for a good competition and you would retire to a darkened room to mop your fevered brow, possibly for the rest of your lives.

That only 3% of women responded with such brazen optimism to the question is instructive, implying a greater acquaintance with reality and less imperative to assert one’s ability to compete with a champion. Everywhere, from White House to boardroom to pub, we are surrounded by a male belief in male meritocracy, in which exceptional women are slotted into a hierarchy built to contain and often downplay their achievements. Much of the time this is done in clumsily coded fashion: Serena Williams, a black woman, is presented as an almost aberrant example of powerful physicality; Megan Rapinoe, a gay woman, is arrogant, cocky, self-aggrandising.

Back off, blokes. You’ve got most of the world stitched up like a kipper, and if that isn’t enough for you, tough luck. The meritocracy that props you up has given us a slew of political candidates utterly at home with the fact that they barely know what their brief is, let alone having mastered it, a sleazocracy only now coming into the light, a judicial system weighted in your favour, a culture designed around you. One of the by-products of Caroline Criado-Perez’s trenchant book Invisible Women has been women posting photographs of queues for loos in public places; non-existent for you, like the Jarrow March for us. Enough, already. As one of the sayings of the era goes, you won, get over it.

• Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer