The London newspapers regularly report the fact that girls are doing much better at school than boys, who are falling behind and dropping out, and that women are crowding into universities and performing better all round at work – many of them while raising children on their own. I’m told that the same thing is happening here, with girls scoring higher at school, getting better grades at university, and achieving more in the workplace. Well, most women know that if you want to get something done you can ask a man, but if you want to get something finished, and the debris sorted out afterwards, you should ask a woman.

I have no doubt that this is the reason why girls are doing better at school and women are outperforming men at work: the clue is organisation. Lots of gay men have similar traits, which is why they’re forging ahead in the workplace, though straight men prefer to tell themselves that it’s because of the pink mafia. Men are supposed to be very good at organisation because they compartmentalise everything – but really compartmentalisation makes for inflexibility, an inability to do two things at once, and chaos when any such attempt is made.

Another problem is that men are literal-minded, and this often produces the same adverse results as being feeble-minded. Because I made the transition from living in a family of five women and one man to living in a family of four men and one woman, it took me a long time to understand this. I am sure that many relationships crack up under the strain of men taking things literally while women accuse them of deliberately pretending to misunderstand so as to be bloody-minded or skive off.

It took me years to accept that if I wished to have the laundry brought in off the line and put in the ironing-tub or folded and put away, for example, I would have to say: “Please bring in the laundry, put the clothes that need ironing in the tub, and fold the rest.” A simple instruction to bring in the laundry would result in a tub of crushed clothes left on the washroom floor until I fell over it, resulting in a row and the furious protestation that “you only asked me to bring in the laundry, not to put it away.” A woman, on the other hand, would immediately interpret the instruction to bring in the laundry as including the unspoken instruction to deal with it once it has been brought in.

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The difference is not just in communication style, but in task orientation and attitude. So what happens in the workplace is that when the boss has a choice between asking a man or a woman to perform a particular task, the temptation is to ask the woman. In the past, these differences in mentality and task-orientation were not so obvious because the education of girls was treated lightly as something of no importance, and there were not enough women in the workplace to make comparisons between their performance and men’s. When women did begin to go out to work, their natural ability to organise, multi-task and deal efficiently with matters in hand had them relegated to a support role for men – as secretaries, personal assistants and girl Fridays.

All this began to change when girls got themselves a good education and a better view of equality, and realised that instead of keeping their boss – invariably a man – afloat, they might as well be the boss themselves. When you remove the social, legal and educational restrictions that are designed to keep women down and in their place, the inevitable happens: women begin to outdo men; girls begin to outdo boys. And then you begin to wonder: is this the reason why girls and women have been locked up, locked in, bullied and controlled by the law, society and men for thousands of years – for fear that they would take over otherwise?

For the first time in history, we are seeing what happens when girls are set forth in life on an equal footing with boys. They are the natural leaders and doers, and today’s young girls don’t feel any need to pacify or mollify men, or to pretend to know less or be incapable of opening the jam-jar of life, as my generation and older generations of women were expected to do – not that I did, anyway; it’s much too boring. Some years ago, one of my sons came home from a meeting of his sixth form Young Enterprise team in a black fug. The problem was the girls, apparently. “They’re like something out of The Godfather,” he said. “They tell the boys to go and watch television, then they take over the kitchen with their business plans and their accounts and their discussions. They don’t involve us at all, and if we try to do something, they yell at us for not doing it properly, or tell us not to bother because they can do it better themselves.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s because it’s a complete reversal of what used to happen in my generation, when the boys used to take over, run the show, not let the girls butt in, and yell at us for “interfering”.

Now I have read a Reuters news story that says more women than men will make financial decisions in the home by 2020, in Britain at least. The story quoted a report by National Savings & Investments, an organisation backed by the British government. This report was based on research by the Future Foundation, which said through a spokesman: “We are seeing the emergence of a generation of women who are better educated, more ambitious and more financially confident than any before them. This generation is already more likely to handle day-to-day financial matters than their male partners, and demands to have at least an equal say in the big decisions.” I would go further than that, and say that many of these women are already making lots of the big decisions themselves, and their men are happy to go along with them.

That’s another male characteristic that has been overlooked: the wish not to be bothered, or to be bothered as little as possible. “Honey, can’t you go and buy that wedding present without me?” – a remark familiar to all women, and which comes with the unspoken qualifier, “And please don’t come back home and tell me what it is, how much you spent on it, why you chose it, how many things you looked at before you made your decision, and how you wrapped it” – becomes before long, and in the right circumstances, “Honey, can’t you buy the furniture, sort out the bathroom tiles, book the flights and hotels, choose the new doors and windows, without me?” And so honey does.

The only reason most men wanted input in any of the bigger financial decisions in the home in the past was because it was “their” money that was being spent. That made them want to have a say in the colour and shape of the sofa, matters they rarely understood, and to be as querulous and difficult as possible about finishing, delivery dates, and Why We Don’t Need A New Fridge Because This One Still Works. The great new discovery of the 21st century is that women who earn their own money can make their own financial decisions, overriding the objections of the man in their life if they think it necessary.

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All this has not gone down too well with men, of course, as they feel themselves to be undermined and their position threatened. Men raised to be confident in themselves do not react so pitifully; they derive their self-esteem from their innate or perceived personal qualities rather than from their essential maleness. Ah, but those who were brought up to think of themselves as intrinsically superior to women, and more important than women, simply because they are men have a very real problem and it manifests itself as sexual insecurity and as hostility towards women in the workplace and in life in general. Every morning I open my email inbox and junk mail folders to find a few hundred messages targeted at the threatened men of the western world. These are just some of today’s choice selection: Erection: pay 70% less on the medicines you need; Have an unforgettable night with Ci@alis; Still need it huh?; Wanna be more man? Check this, dude; Be the most confident man in town; It can also add excitement; Say “I can have sex all night long!”; Paris Hilton likes them big; An increase in cells allows for more blood to…; Boost your sexual power now; Men’s pills at superior prices!; Become the man you have always wanted to; Not enough sperm? Increase five times more; Improve sexual endurance; Be satisfied for life!; Tips for a real macho; Male enhancers at a laughable price; Medical info for men over 30; Important info about male enhancers!; Are you insecure?; No more embarrassment!; Viagra with a rebate reduction.

Anyway, you get the drift. The impression is that there are millions of men out there who are terrified of Monster Nanny, or terrified that if they whip off their fig-leaf, Eve is going to snigger and ask them if that’s all they’ve got, and then they’ll be outperformed in the bedroom as well as the workplace.

That would account for the rise in violent pornography, in which girls and women are shown being bound, raped, beaten, bloodied, made to crawl and used as naked slaves. It’s the way some men have of dealing with the threatening reality of women who won’t do as they’re told any more, and who might be telling them what to do instead.

They handle the situation in the same way that children do, when they decapitate and ill-treat dolls that represent threatening adults. The difference is that children’s anger isn’t dangerous, but the anger of men towards women is as dangerous as hell. This kind of violent wishful thinking and fantasising about captive women has made its way even into mainstream films. There was something on at the cinema a few weeks ago called Black Snake Moan. It is about a man who rescues a bad girl (another male fantasy) and who, to save her from herself – or so we are given to understand – keeps her in chains until she learns to behave herself.

I suppose it was not entirely coincidental that the outfit she wore while in chains, the one shown in the film’s publicity stills, was composed of a pair of tiny white cotton briefs – signifiers of vulnerable sexuality, as opposed to the sexual aggression of a red G-string, say – and a T-shirt cropped to her breasts. She had that wild, bed-hair and bruised eyes look that drives a certain kind of man wild (vulnerability again), and the heavy chain was locked flatteringly around her small waist, rather than round her ankle or wrists, which would have made more sense.

The film was reviewed with the kind of gravitas usually reserved for productions like Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, by a (male) film critic in one of our Sunday newspapers. “Jackson gives a strong portrayal of a man whose initial motivation to cure Rae of her wickedness may be due to his bitterness over his wife’s adultery. But along the way, they discover one another and in saving the girl, he saves himself.”

And what do you know? When he found Rae, she was lying unconscious in the snow, wearing clothes ripped in all the right places, after having been savagely beaten and kicked out of the van in which she had been raped. The man takes Rae in, gives her an ice bath to break her fever, and slicks petroleum jelly over her bruised face. Now, now – let’s not get too excited here.

All this is not new, of course. What has changed are the laws that prevent men from putting women in those compartmentalised boxes and out of the way when they become too annoying or threatening. The image of the giantess first made an appearance in popular culture in Britain and the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. Soldiers had returned home from the war to find that women had taken on a more powerful role in the household in the absence of their men, and that they had filled all the jobs left open by the men who went to war. The psychological trauma to the men resulted in films like Attack of the 50ft Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

But the fear evaporated when the women were forced to leave their jobs so that the men could take them instead. They were whisked briskly back to the kitchen and their floral pinafores on a tide of 1950s adverts depicting women as happy housewives getting a thrill out of the latest washing-machine, and putting on lipstick before welcoming home the returning hero every evening. The media’s obsession with the woman as housewife in the 1950s was a direct result of women’s relative liberation during the war years.

And now the Incredible Shrinking Man is back again, only this time he’s surfing the net for something to impress his partner and boost his sexual power. Each time women take a quick look at their junk mail folder, it helps them understand why laws were necessary to keep them down.