There is a range of adverts at the moment for a certain brand of pseudo-Mexican corn chips. Each advert sees the same gaggle of over-styled teenagers draping themselves annoyingly around someone's living room, scratching themselves and practising their hair-dos and eating chips and endlessly debating the difference between men and women. It is always the kind of conversation that makes you wish you were neither man nor woman but rather some species of lawn grass or Andean llama, just so that you could escape being tainted by association with one or other faction.

"Girls can't make braais," says the male dim-bulb, chewing a chip meditatively.

"Oh, we so can!" exclaims the female dim-bulb.

The other dim-bulbs chortle in the background and reach for the guacamole. It is hard to tell whether the adverts are promoting chips, or chip-flavoured, orally administered lobotomies. I am not in the habit of having adolescent layabouts laying about adolescently in my home at the best of times, but should anyone ever show up at my door clutching a packet of that particular brand of chips, I will set about them with any kitchen utensils that come to hand and drive them screaming into the street.

It was a hard time to be a young fellow eager for female companionship

That may not seem like much of a threat, but you just ask the TV licence inspector how much fun it is to be simultaneously egg-beaten, plunged and whisked by an enraged television columnist with his dander up.

I suppose I shouldn't complain about the neurasthenic conversation on those chip ads - ghastly as it may be, it beats into a cocked hat the kinds of gender conversations we were forced to have when I was that age.

Only men of my specific generation will know what it was like to come to very early manhood on a liberal university campus in that narrow historical window period of insane lefty ideology when people actually believed, or more frequently pretended to believe, that all forms of gender and sexual identity - to say nothing of the rituals of personal grooming and depilation - were simply the pernicious products of middle-class capitalist brainwashing. It was the age of the ascendancy of the Women's Movement, and oh my friends, it was a hard time to be a young fellow eager for female companionship.

What made it worse was if you had not yet seen enough of the world to realise that sitting and nodding agreement to some lunatic's crackpot dogma is not materially going to affect your chances, one way or the other, of luring her into bed.

Gee, those were crazy times. I had a friend whose most successful pick-up line in 1990 was to affect a cryptically modern facial expression and state boldly: "I don't believe in penetrative sex." Oh wait, that wasn't a friend. That was me.

Happily, those days are behind us now. You can hardly watch an episode of Survivor: Amazon (SABC3; Tuesdays; 7.30pm) without being acutely aware that there are differences between men and women. At the start of the series the male and female contestants were divided along gender lines into two distinct tribes, which made for interesting viewing. Scarcely a day goes by nowadays without some new mutton-headed newspaper report that technological breakthroughs in sperm production or cloning or carpentry are ushering ever nearer that blessed day when men will be allowed to die out and women will be left to rule the world like a gentle spread of nurturing dinosaurs, happy and content for ever and ever, or until a light bulb needs changing.

Survivor: Amazon gave the opportunity to see how things would work out in this oestrogenic utopia. Would the female tribe all pitch in together, rejoicing that the bad old days of gender roles and labour division have been banished, relishing the mutually affirming joys of non-hierarchical social organisation? Not really. The first thing they did was divide themselves into those whose job it was to go fishing or foraging for food, and those whose job it was to lie around the fire, waiting for the food to be brought home. The second thing they did was start complaining about each other. "They just lie around all day and criticise us when we come home," said the providers. "We're thinner and younger and prettier than they are," said the fire-watchers. I am simplifying slightly for convenience, but they really did say these things.

It would not be fair to say that the female tribe did nothing but complain about each other, exclude the deaf girl and fail to catch fish - they also called regular group meetings to talk about issues and clear the air. "Talking about it", we are told, is one of the communicative advantages that women have over men. Did these yak sessions clear the air? Do they ever clear the air? Of course not. Whatever other indisputably admirable functions "talking about it" may fulfil in the veiled and perfumed female psyche, the solving of the problem at hand is seldom among them.

Do not get me wrong, mind - I can think of no fate more miserable than having to spend my days in the sole company of men (which is one of the reasons I have always declined invitations to go to the army, or jail, or Saudi Arabia). I am merely suggesting that the female-only utopia is very accurately and very precisely named. Strictly speaking, "utopia", if it means anything, means "nowhere", or "non-place". If you wanted to signify a happy place, some pain-free paradise on earth, all roses and no thorns, you would more properly call it "eutopia". But eutopia really is utopia. I guess we're all just stuck here together.

So think twice before phasing us out, ladies. Frankly, you need us. You may not need us to catch fish or build shelter or fight off anacondas, but there is another role we play that is far more important. We exist so that you don't have to turn on each other.