A few weeks ago I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: ‘The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.’ I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: ‘Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.’

A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.

Some will think I’m being deliberately provocative, so I’ll reel off some facts and figures to illustrate this point with respect to just two groups: men and women. Their relative status is the exact opposite of how it’s usually described, making it the perfect illustration of Young’s Second Law. Some of the stats about just how underprivileged men are probably won’t come as a surprise. We all know boys fare worse than girls at school, one reason 35,000 fewer 18-year-old boys will go to university this month than 18-year-old girls. We also know that men are more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, account for three-quarters of all suicides and almost 90 per cent of the homeless. But did you know men make up 96.2 per cent of Britain’s prison population and are 23 times more likely to die at work than women? Research carried out by the Future Men charity found that 29 per cent of young men feel ignored, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that we have a minister for women and equalities and a women’s health ambassador, but no minister for men.

The idea that women are the less ‘privileged’ sex is a cliché that men are obliged to trot out if they’re to avoid social ostracisation or worse. But it’s a myth, as the American journalist John Tierney pointed out in a brilliant article in City Journal last week. ‘If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be the “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson,’ he wrote. ‘Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons and dim-witted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.’

Unfortunately, they do. I’m not just thinking of the success of politicians like Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern, but the way in which public life has become feminised over the past 25 years. Women may still be a minority in the chancelleries of Europe – although for how much longer? – yet because they’re so much more confident and morally forthright than their ‘privileged’ male colleagues, they’ve become the key decision-makers. How else to explain the emergence of ‘safety’ as a sacred value in all areas of public policy? Women are, on average, more risk-averse than men, which means they’re less hesitant about jettisoning hard-won liberties to reduce the likelihood of various worst-case scenarios materialising, whether it’s locking us in our homes to ‘protect’ us from a flu-like respiratory virus or forcing us to drive at 20mph to avoid thermogeddon.

It is thanks to female privilege that the liberal societies of the West are sliding inexorably towards a kind of nice totalitarianism in which we’ll be expected to sacrifice our rights in the name of protecting us from harm – not so much Brave New World as Safe New World. As C.S. Lewis said: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.’

What can be done? I was discussing the problem the other day with a prominent female intellectual who won’t want to be named. As she said, it’s unrealistic to reverse the gains of the women’s rights movement and, in any case, wouldn’t that just be replacing one form of tyranny with another? No, what’s needed, she suggested, is something like the Equality Act. In the same way that made workplaces safe for women by reining in toxic male behaviour, this would stop female public servants giving in to their overprotective instincts. The Barbie Act? The trouble is, to get it through parliament we’ll have to first debunk the myth of male privilege.