Hulu’s recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was chilling for a number of reasons. The ritualization of rape. The insidious efficacy of the informant state. The appeal of reaction in the face of existential threat. The willingness with which people acquiesce to abusive leadership when it arrives cloaked in politesse. The realization, very early on, that someone like me — agnostic, big-mouthed, anti-authority — wouldn’t have lasted much past day one of the Gilead insurrection.

But a dystopian vision is most frightening for its credibility. As I watched Offred’s abasement at the hands of well-dressed slavers and systemic misogyny, I couldn’t help thinking: This world — this world in which men subjugate women in the name of spiritual rectitude while permitting themselves to indulge in posh bordellos — is what a certain version of masculine utopia actually looks like.

I have already written about the epiphanies of maturity — how certain contextual realities, which might seem remote or implausible in the idealism of youth, tend to bear more heavily as you get older. The springboard for this particular reflection stems from my growing apprehension that men are genuinely useless shits. Were it not for the more physical demands of pre-21st-century work and war, I’ve come to wonder, would the patriarchy have existed at all?

Consider, for a moment, this summation of male hegemony, and by all means reply with spittle-laden refutations if they don’t tally with the world you see. For the great span of human history, with a few anomalous exceptions, society has been controlled by, and for the benefit of, people with penises.

Results have been…mixed. Sure, there has been some good stuff. The masculine prerogative to ignore the mundane demands of domesticity has enabled some great achievements in art and science. But this record has been more than a little tarnished by a seemingly bottomless capacity for conflict, chest beating, and emotional constipation.

Now, we all know biological determinism is an unpalatable business. It should go without saying that gender tropes are by no means universal; that some men are ceaselessly compassionate and brilliant, while some women are cruel and inept. But this essay just wouldn’t work without recourse to generalities, so if you are easily offended by stereotypes, consider yourself forewarned.

Generally speaking, I’ve started wondering, sincerely and often, whether we might be much better off if women took the steering wheel once and for all.

My personal suspicion that women are the more capable gender of our species has been gestating for years. I was raised by a single mother after my dad died of lymphomatoid cancer when I was four years old. Mum, to borrow from a recent internet meme, was (still is) a much badder bitch than Taylor Swift, the sort of woman who could dispense all the right hugs but still scatter a playground full of bullies with a maternal snarl. The seed this family background planted — that the women stayed strong while the men shuffled off this mortal coil — later geminated at my co-ed high school, where the girls achieved a level of maturity and industry that most of the boys, more preoccupied with weed, football, and computer games, could only dream of.

Two decades on, I’m the father of two kids: Lily, five, and Ben, two. And it’s this latest chapter of my life that has really set me on the path to pondering the benefits of matriarchy. It’s not just the fact that the girl was talking in polysyllables and compound sentences in the time it’s taken the boy to perfect the words “Roar!” and “No!” and to call both of his parents “mummy.” Instead, it’s been the realization that for most of human history, women have been saddled with the most vital and influential job of all: the rearing of happy, well-adjusted, confident human beings.

While your great-grandfather was down in the pits hefting lumps of coal, great-grandmother was being puked on, screamed at, disobeyed, and run ragged. Chances are she seldom complained, even when old Gramps came home sloshed on Friday evening, having spunked half his wages on ale. Few if any tasks are as relentlessly taxing as parenthood; none, surely, demand such a versatile repertoire of empathy, dedication, and forbearance. Certainly none have such negative repercussions for society when performed badly.

For all the joy it brings, most men I know are parentally challenged. It’s not that women find child rearing easy. (No one who has undergone the daily rigmarole of getting two writhing infants dressed for nursery at 7 a.m. would employ that particular epithet.) But they do take it more in stride, and by my reckoning they’re about 20 times less likely to say something like “I need to pop out to get…erm…um…some printer paper” if it gets them out of supervising bath time.

In the time it takes me to bring some pasta to the boil, my partner has fed the children, gone through the homework, read the books, plumped the pillows, tucked in the kids, poured some wine, and sat down to watch the news. And while my own parental inferiority provides no kind of empiric sample for concrete conclusions, my suspicion is that many blokes reading this will recognize this portrait.

Meanwhile, as modern men like me struggle to uphold our side of the gender-equality compact in the home, the social exigencies that traditionally held women back no longer hold. Physicality is no longer a primary yardstick of social usefulness. We have lots of robots to do the heavy lifting, and infantry-based warfare is less popular than ever!

A little over a hundred years after Emily Davison jumped in front of the king’s horse at Epsom shouting “Votes for women!,” women throughout the Western world are busy tailgating and, in some cases, overtaking their dads and brothers in just about every other sphere of life. Women may still lag way behind in terms of pay and opportunity, but the trend toward parity is clear.

In the face of deep-rooted cultural disadvantage and endemic misogyny, the speed with which womankind has shed its subordinate status in politics, science, business, and the arts belies whatever residual chauvinistic notions some people harbor about the inevitability of male dominion. And in the most progressive countries of all — like Iceland, where the prime minister, 47 percent of all CEOs, and 48 percent of lawmakers are female — the fight is all but won.

What, then, would matriarchy look like?

If, like me, you subscribe to the idea that the environmental and geopolitical challenges facing society have started to appear existential, there is cause to hope that feminine propensities might leave us better equipped for the road ahead.

Opinion surveys suggest that women, less in thrall to the macho imperative to look tough, are more likely to be concerned about and take personal responsibility for climate change. Women are also more inclined toward cooperative solutions. In a recent article for Aeon entitled “Would the World Be More Peaceful If There Were More Women Leaders?,” journalist Josie Glausiusz cites sociological research suggesting that female leadership exponentially diminishes the prospect of future conflict.

“In 2017, the worldwide average of women in parliament is only 23.3 percent — a 6.5 percent gain over the past decade,” Glaususz writes. “That gain is significant: Caprioli’s data shows that, as the number of women in parliament increases by 5 percent, a state is five times less likely to use violence when confronted with an international crisis (perhaps because women are more likely to use a ‘collective or consensual approach’ to conflict resolution).”

But perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of matriarchy rests less upon the cast-iron guarantee of female competence and more upon the flailing dysfunction of extant patriarchy. There is a reason my earlier article on the ubiquity and new political potency of “losers” employed exclusively masculine pronouns. Today’s losers are mostly guys. Across the Western world, we seem to be witnessing a near-universal crisis in male identity.

Much of what we see as the runaway anger of modern democratic discourse of today, with its constituent backlashes against every social justice movement, can be framed as the resentment of those accustomed to enjoying privilege seeing that privilege gradually eroded. The apprehension that the equality project may be a zero-sum game — that if the women are to continue ascending, the men must suffer — has left millions of men flirting with nihilism (and this, at a point in time when we don’t yet have anything close to full equality).

“Combine male fragility with white fragility and the perennial fear of falling, and you end up with something lethal, potentially,” wrote Dayna Tortorici in a recent essay about male resentment for n+1. “The indignity of downward mobility, real or perceived, is a painful one to suffer, and a man takes it out where he can.”

It is an affliction one encounters everywhere, from the violent bigotry of 4chan message boards to the Oval Office, where Donald Trump’s presidency, an unspooling case study of malignant entitlement, continues to embarrass the human genome. As evidence, we need only look to the inevitable chagrin that this glib and inconsequential little screed will likely provoke in some of its male readers. At a time of gathering crises, toxic masculinity has become a millstone for civilization.

It’s not that I don’t get it. I do. Hell, sometimes even I feel a prick of embitterment as I watch my own privilege slip through my fingers, harrumphing that I would get more writing gigs if I were black, transgender, and recovering from alcoholism. However, it only takes a moment of objectivity to recognize the selective reasoning behind such victimhood, and the way it conveniently ignores the huge advantages my race and gender continue to afford.

The hard truth is that modernity—and the individual agency humans have been pursuing ever since Magna Carta—demands a level playing field. And if that aspiration is proving to be poison to the male ego, perhaps we would be better off if the men all just shuffled off to the garden shed to play toy soldiers or something.

Of course, all this is arguable. The “men’s rights activist” fraternity would doubtless contend that society’s rapid march toward gender equality is the product of compensatory bias and the supplementary motivation that comes from having a fair crack of the whip. Perhaps male aggression is not so much a corollary of our testosterone levels as it is the inevitable byproduct of the pursuit, and wielding, of power.

But I, for one, would welcome our new female overlords. Can they really do any worse?