Mae West — the silver screen siren known for her bawdy double entendres, and who famously issued the quote that gives this little meditation its title — would perhaps have been tickled pink to be living in these times. Or maybe not.

As a Mae West devotee myself who shares her love of men, I adopted this saying as a sort of mantra, a long time ago. But lately I’ve begun questioning this belief. This, of course, is against the backdrop of the new men’s movement I sense blowing in the air. Men in all their air-punching glory are back in style again.

And not a moment too soon, I can hear some of you men muttering, the ones of you who thought women were taking over the world. Well, maybe that had indeed been our not-so-secret agenda. But no worries: we women find ourselves more each day drowning in viscous testosterone fluids.

Personally, I blame Sarah Jessica Parker for walking away from Sex and the City and taking away some of our newfound feelings of privileged entitlement that came locked up in our Manolo Blahniks. Last week, I watched in stupefied horror as a few clumps of men in the Observer’s editorial department discussed with gleeful vim and outsized vigour Starz’ big new hit, the mini-series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

(A few years ago, those clumps of men would have been clumps of women gathered around speculating about the latest developments between Carrie and Mr Big. “Leave him, girl! You don’t need no stinking commitmentphobe to bring you down!”)

No woman I know watches Spartacus. I’ve tried to but have been put off by the sight of congealing blood in the sand. It’s, shall we say, a tad too strong. But men love the grittiness of it, and I get the feeling the show has given many of them back the right to take their balls out of protective custody and proudly hold onto them again.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that testosterone-fuelled stance taken by our prime minister in Parliament, wrong-headed as I believe it was, last Tuesday when, in response to their extradition request for the most famous man in Jamaica right now, he politely told the US State Department to go fly a kite.

Oh dear. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me nervous now that men have begun the tough talk once more. The male ego has been known to screw more things than the male sexual organ.

Speaking of lubricated conduits, back to Spartacus…

Damn it to hell, I thought with disgust, as one young man in particular, a tender sapling with Jesus never too far from his mind, rhapsodised about the sight of on-screen human entrails.

“I can’t wait for them to show a marathon of it,” one guy said with a schoolgirl’s delight. It dawned on me that these guys had just discovered what we women have long known: series television is our one true bonding agent.

They’ve begun taking away our things. With the ever-increasing popularity of mengagement rings, manscara, mantihose, muggings, and Spanx for men — oy! — a seismic shift had happened and men, once again, were the new black. What was the world coming to? I wondered sadly.

It’s like the last 50 years of the women’s movement never even existed. Or perhaps it’s simply that so many women have become embarrassing parodies of the women’s movement.

And then, just when it couldn’t possibly get any worse, another male-inspired pattern started to clearly emerge — drumroll, please — the ubiquity of the hard man. I’m not referring to the two-fisted, Clint Eastwood type of retrosexual he-man, either. I mean the hard man, he of the constant erection about whom Mae West yearned.

Penises are getting a bad rap.

These days, there are apparently more hard men than you can shake a stick at. It seems you can’t turn on the idiot box without being bombarded by news that some man’s up-and-coming has landed him in a world of trouble. Sports figures, politicians, actors, musicians, members of the clergy — nobody’s keeping it in their pants anymore. Oh, to be back in the good old days when the only trauma one could reasonably expect to experience on TV each night was the sight of the devastation in Haiti. I mean, really. Between Tiger Woods and his sex circus sideshow, and John Mayer’s boast about the white supremacy of his, ahem, wonder rod, hard men seem to be virtually falling from the sky, but is it really a pleasure to find them?

In the case of Tiger Woods — and I’m still trying to find out why the media determined that all the sleazy, intimate details of his sex life were, well, par for the course in terms of the amount they decided was good for public consumption — all I want to know is this: how could he possibly have found the time to service all the women he allegedly serviced? I guess it just goes to underline an opinion I’ve always held: that golf really is not a sport. (How could it be if there was so much leftover energy to go good will hunting like that?) Talk about putting a spin on the phrase ‘to be young, gifted and… Blasian’.

Then there’s the unfortunate John Mayer, that walking erection who for the last couple of years was busy bedding celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Jessica Simpson, and basically any hot female lined up for miles to get a taste of the vanilla goodness that is John Mayer, he who must have been under the influence of mind-altering substances when he boldly proclaimed in that infamous Playboy interview that he couldn’t have sex with a black woman since he simply couldn’t rise to the occasion. Oh my God. Need we express what a waste of good baby-making capability this ignoramus is? Seriously, who needs this? Makes you kind of want to revert to the original pre-Mae saying: a good man is hard to find.