Every era has its noble lies – the ideas that underpin a civilisation. The noble lie of contemporary culture is that sisters are doing it for themselves. The media bombard us with this message. And most people believe the myth because they either can’t think or won’t think. But it’s simply not true. All the dirty, heavy and dangerous jobs are done by men. Maslow outlined a hierarchy of needs, but there is a deeper, more fundamental hierarchy – a hierarchy of practical necessity – and it is men who build and maintain the foundations of society, which are based on male physical strength. Without men the whole edifice of civilisation collapses. Every civilised institution or technology, whether it’s a hospital, a fridge or cooker, a library, a computer, an art gallery, a school or university, an airplane, train or car, even the building in which you work or the house in which you live, ultimately relies for its existence on men.

To put this in simple terms: if women were removed from society the edifice of civilisation would wobble but still stand – if men were removed, civilisation would collapse because the foundations upon which every good exists would disappear. This fact may be unpalatable to contemporary feminist sensibilities but being offended by hearing a truth you don’t like doesn’t make something untrue. Sisters, to put it bluntly, are not doing it for themselves.

A deeper truth is hiding in plain sight. It’s that contemporary Western culture has replaced men’s traditional role in society with the state. The state has freed women from a reliance on men, but like contemporary shoppers who think that meat comes in plastic packages and not from the bodies of dead animals, feminists see the state and not the men holding up the state. The state, though, also depends on male strength. The state has an unintentional function – it shields people from reality. Like the person on the dole who never thinks of someone paying taxes, which provide him with food, shelter and entertainment, feminists never think of how the world actually works. To them, it’s all surface and no depth. But if you burrow down to the foundations on which society is built, whether it’s mining, construction, the army, the navy, the air force, policing, firefighting or garbage collection, in other words, every hard, dirty job that requires strength, you’ll find men doing the job. You can’t have an art gallery without a building, which men construct. You can’t have mobile phones without copper, gold, palladium, aluminium and magnesium, which are mined by men. You can’t have a car without a factory, all of whose components have been produced by men. You can’t have doctors without a hospital, which needs technology to function, and which depend on resources provided by men. You can’t have a library without books – paper is made from trees. Who cuts down trees? The list goes on, at every juncture: at home, at work or at play, the world fundamentally depends on the physical strength that is unique to men.

The answer from feminists to this blindingly obvious truth is that women are doing these jobs too. This answer is disingenuous nonsense. Some women may be doing something akin to this work but when you tease out what women are actually doing, you’ll find they’re doing everything except the hard, difficult parts of the job. And even if there are a number of women doing exactly the same job as men, this would not prove that women – as a gender – could replace men.

As a thought experiment, try to imagine an all-female police force, an all-female army, or an all-female navy or air force. Imagine a building site with an all-female workforce. You can’t because strength is a prerequisite for doing these jobs. To put it bluntly – Rosie the Riveter is a myth. The argument outlined here is not the obvious one: that building sites and factories are full of men, or that men fix your plumbing or mend your car or install your kitchen. All of this is true. The argument, though, is more fundamental. It’s that the very tasks that society is founded on are based on male strength. Without the raw materials provided by men, the intelligent and creative people of the world would have no materials to work with.

Liberal democracy and capitalism have created the conditions where women are thriving. For the first time in history women are not slaves to biology. This is an unmitigated good. Think of the extraordinary female brainpower that has been unleashed since the advent of capitalism and which will become even more important in the future when technology supplants male strength. But the utopia of equal male/female representation is still in the future, and even then the feminist dream of equality may not be realised because men and women like different things.

Psychology will still influence lifestyle choices in the future just as it affects male and female choices in the present. The idea of a society with equal male/female productive input is a possibility which should be welcomed. It hasn’t happened yet, no matter how much feminist rhetoric says otherwise, either in the past or the present.

It is not only women who depend on male strength. All of society does, including men, like myself, who are incapable of physically-demanding labour.

But feminists are the only ones singing songs about doing it for themselves. They’re also the only ones who suffer a severe form of myopia when it comes to how society operates. The ubiquitous jokes about stupid men and intelligent women are so old now they’re creaking. Men’s vital role holding the world on their shoulders is invisible to feminists. At least that’s the charitable interpretation. Feminist attitudes to men are like the old joke about racists who don’t understand why immigrants are still in the country when we have the recipe for chicken tikka masala.

They want the goods but they never want to acknowledge where the goods came from. The next time you’re out and about, try and spot a physical artefact that, at its core, doesn’t rely on male strength. Sisters aren’t doing it for themselves.