A world without men wouldn’t be utopia, but absolute hell

It’s a question many women ask themselves: “How far would I go to escape my husband?” Although, in fairness, it’s usually a decade or two before you start posing it with any real intent. But newlywed Natalie Corbett has wasted no time in finding the answer. The 31-year-old is about to put 9,000 miles between her and her spouse, having volunteered to join a four-strong, all-female group in the Antarctic, counting penguins and sorting mail at the world’s most remote post office, Port Lockroy on Goudier Island.

She’s billed it as a “solo honeymoon”, which sounds self-empowering until you ponder the fact she’s actually “quattro”, there are no flush lavatories or running water, it’s freezing cold, she’ll sleep in a bunk bed and run a gift shop for South Pole tourists. Then it sounds like Jane Eyre’s schooldays, only 1,000 times more brutal.

And we haven’t even tackled the all-women dorm side of things yet. I’d shrink from that, even though few women relish female company as much as I do. I have two sisters, the staff of my two magazines was almost entirely female, and I generally hang out with a coven of mates. But that still doesn’t mean I want to live from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, for months on end, solely with people of my own sex.

As Elena Ferrante made clear in My Brilliant Friend, which tracks two girls’ friendship to adulthood, women’s intimacies can match any romantic relationship for intensity while proving more psychologically penetrating. When you’re with a close female friend, you’re under scrutiny in a way no man can equal. The sensation can be exhilarating – but equally you can feel desperately raw.

As anyone who’s watched teenage girls squabbling can tell you, insights can be weaponised to cruel effect. That’s why the word “frenemy” is invariably applied to female friendships, which tend to tilt two ways simultaneously. And that’s before you throw in well-documented bouts of all-female hysteria, when something in group chemistry leads to mass fainting or simultaneous Tourettes-like tics.

That’s why I tend to feel cynical when someone proposes a woman-only community as the ultimate utopia. The Greenham Common camp is generally portrayed that way, but a friend’s mum who protested said the camaraderie sometimes subsided into over-vigorous policing of your feminist credentials. She was once ticked off for wearing eyeshadow: “You certainly couldn’t be a lipstick lesbian back then.”

The best novels I’ve read about matriarchal societies involve high-minded intentions giving way to dystopia. Just look at Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, where women prove as competitive and swift to conflict as men. I can’t help feeling that once the four women have lived on Goudier Island for a couple of months, one will be saying to another: “How come I’m wading through effing penguin poo in sub-zero temperatures, while you flounce around flogging tourist tat?”

The quartet may even come to miss men and their ignorance of women’s internal landscapes; the welcome way they insist on talking about widgets instead of launching into an impromptu bout of “conflict resolution”, having not noticed there was any conflict in the first place. In fact, living with men is much like Churchill’s observation on democracy: the worst possible system until you consider the alternatives.