I am just about old enough to remember dinners where the hostess would lead the women out of the room after pudding, leaving the men to their port. The dinners didn’t mark any special occasion, but the guests would be in black tie.

They usually took place in remote rural locations, which added an extra layer of faint ludicrousness to the already not unludicrous proceedings: everyone sporting their best frocks in the middle of nowhere, for the sole benefit of each other and any passing livestock. Looking back, such dinners also took place when I was at university in the mid1980s, but they tended to be held by a tiny minority of people who had perhaps read Brideshead Revisited one time too many. (Several grew up and turned into MPs. There’s a surprise.)

It’s interesting, the segregation of the sexes. It seems incredibly old-fashioned, but we do it all the time. Leaving the men to it, to go and powder one’s nose, may be on the verge of extinction (unless the nose-powdering is a euphemism for cocaine, in which case it’s alive and kicking), but I know more men than I could name who – now in their thirties and forties – still view the “boys’ night out” as an inalienable right, a small reward for being a father and husband and pretending to be interested in Cath Kidston oilcloth patterns.

You work and do your share of parenting for six days and nights, and on the seventh, God creates beer and amusement just for you and your mates (Chatham House rules: the more picaresque elements of the inevitably drunken proceedings are never alluded to in mixed company). Women do it as well, the “girls’ night out” being viewed by many as an integral aid to not losing your marbles if you have small children, and nice – comforting, fortifying – it is too.

Last week Jim Fitzpatrick, the farming minister who is the MP for the east London constituency of Poplar and Canning Town, walked out of the marriage ceremony of one of his Muslim constituents after discovering that he and his wife were expected to sit in different rooms because the wedding was a segregated affair.

Fitzpatrick, who told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme he had attended “dozens, if not hundreds” of Muslim weddings and only come across the his’n’hers version twice, said he saw the segregation as a sign of increasing radicalisation and as damaging to social cohesion. Most of his constituency is in Tower Hamlets, where almost a third of residents are Bangladeshi Muslims. The wedding was at the London Muslim Centre, which is next door to the East London Mosque, home to a hardline group – the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).

“We’ve been attending Muslim weddings for years but only recently has this strict line been taken,” Fitzpatrick said. “It is an indication of the stricter application of rules that didn’t exist before. I think the stranglehold influence of the IFE is present more than ever before.”

A spokesman for the mosque said: “Segregated weddings have always been popular in the Muslim community; the London Muslim Centre has facilitated them for over five years. It is part of the attraction for Muslim families so they can celebrate their happy day in a religious atmosphere, a custom which is also found in other religious traditions represented in Britain.

“We have always allowed nonMuslim guests to be seated together without segregation, but this is entirely at the discretion of the families who have hired the halls.”

A spokesman for the IFE said: “How we influenced the private arrangements of this wedding is beyond me. This was a personal choice of the bride and groom. How they choose to seat people and conduct their wedding is entirely up to them.”

To me, the idea of a union of the sexes, of all things, taking place in a segregated context seems mighty peculiar. But then I am not a Muslim. If, as Fitzpatrick has it, segregated marriages are a new thing instigated by the more hardline Muslim groups, then it’s hard to contemplate them terribly cheerfully.

(By the by, I do also think it’s pretty rude to leave a wedding because you don’t like the arrangements. It’s a guest’s job to fall in with the proceedings – and, if nervous, to find out what those proceedings might be in advance, to avoid the eventuality of flouncing out because there’s too much incense/a loony priest with a guitar/bearded men droning on/wild pagan dancing you’re supposed to join in with. Also, Fitzpatrick’s attendance at “dozens if not hundreds” of Muslim weddings suggests he has no issue with arranged marriages, so it seems odd to make such a public song and dance about different rooms.)

Outside of mosques with questionable links, however, there’s a lot to be said for segregating the sexes every now and then. It keeps everybody sane. The idea that men and women should do everything together because they’re exactly the same and their interests are identical is not, as some would have it, a sign of maturity but a desperate form of wishful thinking – surely what keeps things interesting is our differences. Believing men and women to have the same interests and desires seems to me to be an odd mixture of insecurity and narcissism: “If you like me, that means you have to be the same as me.”

Segregation on the basis of gender lies behind swathes of cultural history: depending on how keen you are on domesticity, you may or may not find the idea of women cooking together while gossiping and telling stories appealing, but it’s how whole oral traditions come into being. It’s through segregated activities – from shopping to fishing – that women and men forge formative relationships with mothers, aunts, grandmothers, or with fathers, uncles and grandfathers.

The truth is, there is still enormous comfort to be found in the company of one’s own gender and much to be learnt. Mixed stag and hen parties may be on the rise, but nothing’s going to dislodge the tried-and-tested single-sex version for the very good reason that women, and men, like and often prefer their own company. It may be incredibly irritating when you’re woken up at 2am by the happy hunter staggering in from a night out with “the boys”, but the fact that we can all function and have a good time in the company of our own gender ought to be celebrated more often.

+ I have enormous difficulty finding things to watch on television: there’s just too much on, on too many channels, and wading through the listings takes up a disproportionate amount of time (which might explain why the Radio Times’s circulation has just fallen to below 1m for the first time). Like many people, I rely increasingly on word-of-mouth recommendations and I have a real humdinger of a one for you. It’s a series called True Blood, currently being shown on FX, a previously unknown to me cable channel. It’s about vampires (I know, but trust me) in a fictional Louisiana town called Bon Temps, and was developed by Alan Ball, who previously worked on American Beauty and the brilliant Six Feet Under.

True Blood is absolutely fantastic, with stunning cinematography, and is also the sexiest thing I’ve seen on television in a very long time (and not remotely suitable for family viewing).

If you’re scrabbling around for something to watch as the summer starts feeling more and more like autumn and the schedules limp on uselessly, I couldn’t recommend it more highly; check listings for the catchup times.

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