Are men really necessary? That was the question that raised its ugly head following reports that scientists had created human sperm from embryonic stem cells. A team from Newcastle University claims to have produced fully mature, mobile sperm in the laboratory, which may soon be able to create a living child. If men are no longer needed for producing sperm, perhaps they are no longer needed at all — that was the suggestion humming in the media and the blogosphere last week, often rather nastily disguised as humour, with lists of ways in which men are worse than useless. Misandry — the dislike of men — is a powerful force.

It reminds me of my student days, when feminist meetings had signs at the door saying, “Women and girl children only”, and when extremists told us that all men were rapists. Free of men, the feminist separatists told us, we would be free of aggression, competition and war, as well as all that ideologically unsound and nasty penetration.

Those ideas trickled down fast into the playground: I once found my eight-year-old daughter telling her poor little brother that boys are all rough and nasty and do all the bad things in the world. She was lisping the conventional orthodoxies around her, which still prevail.

With the feminisation of the media and of education and with decades of so-called positive discrimination favouring women, we have seen a growing female triumphalism; it has been accompanied by a growing bewilderment and displacement of men. There is an increasing sense that women can do well enough without them, and more and more women are embarking on a life to which men are only incidental. So perhaps, for our daughters and granddaughters, it is worth pointing out why men are both necessary and desirable, generally speaking.

Women who suggest that men are dispensable seem, rather oddly, to have forgotten about sex. It can hardly be denied, surely, that heterosexual sex would be rather difficult without a man. There are plenty of crude substitutes on the market, but none of them could really be called the full Monty. Besides, sexual love with a man is one of the greatest joys on earth. It isn’t necessary to physical survival, as the production of sperm so obviously is, but it is desirable for the survival and the development of the spirit, or at least of the vast majority of spirits that way inclined.

A great male lover, or even a fairly good one, is one of the triumphs of civilisation. And profound sexual love is one of the few things that bring undoubted meaning to life. Both great lovers and great love may be all too rare; as La Rochefoucauld said, more or less, it’s like seeing ghosts — we believe in them but few of us have seen one. But that is no reason for deciding that men are surplus to requirements and can be replaced by a high-end turkey baster.

Quite apart from sex, I strongly believe that masculinity itself is a good thing. I write as someone who is glad to have a masculine person in her life, since I grew up without a father. I know, for that reason, that a capable woman can get by pretty well without a man in her life, even with four children, but it is hard and lonely. It is limited and unbalanced, both for her and for her children. I shall not forget the sight of my mother, alone with young children in a snowstorm in a remote Dorset lane, putting snow chains on the wheels of her car by herself; men have their uses.

More importantly, I understand now that my mother had no other perspective, no moral support and nobody to be intelligent about money or electric sockets or maps or how to teach boys boy stuff: there is now a mass of evidence that men tend to be better at all that. There was nobody to tell her to stop fussing and nobody to offer us a balance of authority or a living example of the negotiation of power between a man and a woman.

Women need men precisely for the ways in which they are different from us. In my youth it was fashionable to believe that men and women were pretty much the same, but that is now scientifically known to be nonsense. Generally and statistically speaking, men and women have different and sometimes complementary minds and abilities, just as they have different and sometimes complementary bodies. There is even good clinical evidence that something in the smell of male armpits is soothing to women, and perhaps that odd fact can stand for all the mysterious affinities between the sexes, who in so many ways are naturally at odds with each other.

For that and many other reasons, it is quite natural (however old-fashioned it may sound) for most women to look to a particular man for reassurance, for protection and for many of the qualities traditionally seen as masculine — decisiveness, assertiveness and even the wrongly much-derided stiff upper lip. And men bring many of these qualities not just to wives and lovers but also to women friends and acquaintances. It will not have escaped many readers that talking to a man is different from talking to a woman: it is precious in its own, different way.

Without belittling my own sex, I think it cannot be too often said these days, now that masculinity seems to be in the doghouse, that despite decades of female freedom, men outdo women in all kinds of useful ways.

This generalisation doesn’t apply to every individual, but men quite obviously excel overall in the three-dimensional and creative skills that go from map-reading, car-parking and messing about with gadgets to designing buildings, composing music, making technological inventions and great intellectual leaps, telling jokes, making speeches, playing chess and making mathematical and scientific discoveries. Men are over-represented at the extremes of innate intelligence. And I would say that men and boys are generally — of course there are exceptions both ways — more playful and more inquisitive than women and girls.

I have always had a small, sneaking sympathy with Camille Paglia, who notoriously said that if civilisation had been left to women, we would still be living in grass huts. It is also true that if it were left entirely to men, the huts would all be burning down. But anyone who is inclined to write men off should remember Mozart and Darwin and Fleming and Einstein, not to mention our own dear sons and lovers. In short, however aggressive, selfish, steeped in historical guilt and reproductively redundant they may be, men are great.

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