No sooner did I digest the news that 40 percent of American babies are now born out of wedlock (the fathers are now quaintly known in newspaper announcements as “fiancés”) than along comes an article by Sandra Tsing Loh in the current Atlantic revealing that she’s getting divorced. It turns out she’s unhappy with her otherwise happy marriage because of her sex life. With a hefty dose of pissed-offedness, the author excoriates the institution of marriage for failing to sustain romantic and sexual love. (Ultimately, to mix metaphors, she had to go off the ranch to get her ashes properly hauled.) Ms. Tsing Loh offers what she considers the stunning insight that traditional marriage is outdated and tells the rest of us—in considerably more words than Dorothy Parker needed to convey the same message—never to get married.

Whoa! Them’s big conclusions to draw from one particular divorce. But her musings got me thinking. Sandra Tsing Loh’s conclusion isn’t big enough. The real problem is, very simply, the existence of men. What the hell do we need them for anyway?

Granted, men are already here in the billions, and eradicating them would be a logistical challenge. And granted, civilization thus far was built mostly by male brainpower and testosterone. Now, building civilization was no mean feat, but it was accompanied by an awful lot of rape, pillage, beheadings, spearings, burnings-at-the-stake, you name it. Not many of those good deeds were performed by women.

But the building phase of civilization is by now more or less complete. (Nation-states? Check. Constitution? Check. Airliners? Check. Cable TV? Check? Internet? Check. Diet Coke? Check.) We’ve moved firmly into the maintenance and improvement phase, and it’s time for women to take over. They’ve proved themselves superb at keeping things going whenever men went marching off to kill each other. There’s no reason they can’t now be handed the reins of civilization itself. They already hog more than half the educational pie here in America, and are, when all is said and done, the smarter of the sexes.

By cutting to the chase, and getting rid of men entirely, women could care for and improve civilization very nicely by themselves, thank you. OK, a few male geniuses won’t get born. But who needs them at this point? All they’d do is discover some new thing that would make even more pollution or superweapons and end up making us even more miserable than we already are. And we’ve already loaded Mozart onto our i-Pods.

If we did away with men, we wouldn’t have to worry about women like Ms. Tsing Loh being unhappy in marriage. Why, there’d be no more marriage! No more self-absorbed loutish husbands, no more men who can’t sexually satisfy their wives, no more men who won’t take out the garbage or do the dishes or make the kids’ school lunches (like Mom does before she goes off to her 9-to-5 job). And, outside the issue of marriage, there’d be no need for highly-paid male statistician-nerds to track divorce rates, or wimpy education consultants to do studies on wiggly boys in junior high, or philandering politicians to defend the sanctity of marriage. Children (nice, orderly, studious female children, that is) would be happier, too. They’d never again be made miserable by the desertion of a father. And there’d be a reduction in the murder rate of approximately 93 percent.

Men may protest. They’ll say that they’re indispensable to the running of the world. Wrong. Male bodies aren’t necessary. We’ve still got water buffalo for the heavy hauling and robots for more complex tasks (men might have invented them, but women will be great at keeping them oiled). True, no more NFL or NBA, but only men watch that stuff, so it’s two birds with one stone there. Anyway, Candace Parker can dunk. Male minds? A no-brainer (pun intended).

To perpetuate the species, only women are necessary. Sperm you can harvest now and freeze for later, storing it in big vats in Hackensack, New Jersey. And the Brits are about to whip up an artificial (we’ll stop saying “man-made” right now) version. Women could order sperm online, and with the help of their female gynos, could give birth to only female babies. In a generation or two, the few remaining males on the planet could be rounded up and put into petting zoos. As for sex, that’s what all those toy stores in Greenwich Village are for: a couple of “D” batteries, and away you go! For those heterosexual women whose sexual tastes run to the nostalgic, maybe a few men could be kept on a Viagra drip in brothels.

Think of this wonderful new world! No more war, rape or pillage! No more “The Man Show,” Spike TV or Jerry Bruckheimer movies! No more women getting blamed for men getting lost when it’s a man driving. No more computer crashes due to hard drives clogged with porn. No more wide receiver touchdown dances. Five out of six prisons turned into hospitals or community colleges. No more commercials for Extenze, Hair Club for Men, or beer for men with no sense of touch who need the can to turn blue to know that it’s cold. Sure, women would still have hissy-fits and bad hair days, and there’d be the rise of the occasional threatening woman—a Sarah Palin or a Hillary Clinton. But since women—even studies conducted by males prove—are by nature more cooperative, caring, loving, and nurturing than men, it’d all end in a big hugfest on Oprah.

Sorry, men, but the writing’s on the wall, right above the urinal: The world no longer needs you.