Test men in other ways. In an era when the survival of the fittest depends upon brains rather than brawn, provoke men to assert their prowess with absurd theories about the oppression of women. Tell men whose forefathers fought and laboured to provide for and protect their wives and children that they were tyrants in the home. Bring forward Sartre’s highbrow doxy, Simone de Beauvoir, to ascribe the mediocrity of women to their disdainful treatment by men. Praise Betty Friedan for holding that women are better off without husbands, and Germaine Greer’s view that children flourish without fathers. The female of the species knows this is nonsense. In her viscera she is looking for a mate who will fertilise her and provide for both her and the ensuing offspring but thinks her feminist bravura will eliminate the wimps; that, like a Stone Age hunk with his club, the real man will grab her and fuck her and tell her to shut up.

But he does not. The real man does not rise to the challenge. He does not swat the feminist absurdities like pesky flies. Why not? Because the feminist hypothesis suits him just fine. By all means liberate women! Free them to work. Let them pay their own way and have sex at will. Abolish all those pejorative terms – tart, bolter, slag, slapper, whore, demi-mondaine – and with them cad, bounder, blackguard, roué, scoundrel, rake, libertine. The male of the species who until now had to pay for sex – either in cash to a prostitute or with a joint account to a wife – now calls the feminist’s bluff and enjoys sex without strings. No longer need he deploy the subterfuge of a Vicomte de Valmont to seduce today’s Cécile. Her virginity is an embarrassment. She seduces him.

At the back of her mind there is an endgame – commitment, marriage, children – but before that stretch two decades of mix & match, test drives, sea, sun and sex. Lord Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter gathers dust on the shelves: the norms for today’s young woman come from Friends, Frasier and Sex and the City. She emulates the heroines of Hollywood movies who bestow their ‘final favours’ on the first date. Thanks to the pill, she no longer worries about getting pregnant; and thanks to the zeitgeist, about being thought loose. Her only concerns: Is he wearing a condom? Will he find me ‘good in bed’?