How many women have penises?

My first reaction is to say none. In fact, a human being born with a penis is a good working definition of a man, not of a woman.

But that’s only my uneducated guess. Admittedly I haven’t conducted any surveys, nor, truth to tell, even read them. My reply is based strictly on general principles, and they aren’t always a reliable guide to the truth.

Now, Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition and probably our next prime minister, is different from me. He withdraws judgement until he has studied the issue in detail. And then he speaks, with each word carrying the weight of his erudition and also the extra gravitas of his exalted position.

Don’t know about you, but I’m humbled by his authority. And I applaud the conclusion his research led him to. According to Sir Keir, 340,000 British women are blessed with the appendage in question.

To be fair, he didn’t quite put it that way. When asked if women could have penises, Sir Keir begrudgingly admitted that 99.99 per cent don’t.

The rest of it is my pocket calculator speaking. There are about 34 million women in the UK. If only 99.99 per cent of them don’t have penises, then 0.1 per cent do. Translating percentages into absolute numbers, we get 340,000. That’s how many British lasses must show a noticeable bulge in their knickers.

Since you know, and I know, and even Sir Keir knows that this is insane bilge, we have to consider the reasons for his statement. After all, his Tory counterpart, Prime Minister Sunak, gave the same answer I did: none.

So why did Sir Keir lie to us? Now, politicians have been known to tell porkies strictly for electoral reasons. So did Sir Keir state that 340,000 British women have penises because he thinks that’s an election winner? Sort of like promising to cut taxes in half?

On the surface of it, he miscalculated. Every poll I’ve seen says that most Britons agree with Mr Sunak on this subject, not with Sir Keir. So is he cutting his electoral throat to spite his political face?

He isn’t. But to understand why we need to delve beneath the surface.

Over the past few decades, politicians of both parties, ably assisted by the media, the academy and the liberal intelligentsia, have succeeded in effecting one seismic shift, even if they’ve failed in most other undertakings. They’ve replaced actual reality with the virtual kind.

If you remember Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, its protagonist Cincinnatus C. is sentenced to death because in a country where everyone is transparent he alone is opaque. Since in reality people aren’t made of a see-through material, that was a strong dystopic metaphor for virtual reality ousting the actual kind.

In Nabokov’s novel those who remained opaque were sentenced to death. Transparency was elevated to a totemic ideology enforceable by every means possible.

Read wokery for transparency, and virtual for actual reality, and you’ll get the picture. Wokery in the modern West is the secular equivalent of religion in a theocracy, or perhaps of the communist party in the Soviet Union.

Not every denizen of a theocracy has to espouse the state religion, and not every Russian had to belong to the Party. Moreover, neither the former nor the latter even have to believe the dominant ideology. However, they all without a single exception must pay lip service to it.

When that goes on for a couple of generations, interesting psychological mechanisms whirr into life. People may continue to disbelieve, especially when incontrovertible empirical data support their apostasy. But they feel guilty about it.

That sense of guilt is cultivated by total, not to say totalitarian, propaganda they are inundated with from cradle to grave. They know they themselves don’t mean the sanctimonious phrases they utter. But everybody else around them may, for all they know.

So how can they be right and everyone else wrong? Their parents taught them that thinking so is egoistic, immoral or – in modern parlance – uncool. Then their tribal instinct kicks in: no one wants to be a pariah. People feel a compulsion to belong somewhere, ideally everywhere.

They’ve been trained to identify themselves by group membership. It could be something small, a book club, supporters of a football team, fans of a pop group. Or it could be something all-embracing: a religion, an ideology, general coolness as it’s commonly understood.

Every totemic cult comes with its own set of shibboleths. They act as passwords, a sort of Open, Sesame. A man is asked to say the password of the day before he is admitted to the sanctum of the initiated. Most are so well-trained that they know the magic word intuitively. They are also trained to welcome the kindred possessors of that knowledge – and reject those ignorant of it.

Actual reality isn’t allowed to interfere with the virtual kind. Thus, in our example, every sane person knows that hundreds of thousands of British women can’t have penises. But that’s not the point. Facts belong in actual reality, and it has been disfranchised.

Most people are fully paid-up members in the virtual reality club, and they hunger for the company of their own kind. The whole system of today’s one-man-one-vote democracy is based on this presupposition.

Sir Keir knows this. He may not know it in his mind, but that is superseded by his viscera. And those organs combine to send a signal directly to his tongue, bypassing whatever he has for a mind.

He doesn’t have to think. He just knows that, by uttering that idiotic falsehood, he’ll gain more support than he’ll lose. The audience, he feels, has been sufficiently primed to accept make-believe as real and reality as make-believe.

The media act as formulators, promulgators and enforcers of virtual reality. Before it triumphed, a question like “Do women have penises?” couldn’t even have been conceived, never mind publicly asked.

Now it acts as a demand for the password, with the journalist cast in the role of sentry. A politician facing that demand has a stark choice. He has to make an instant judgement of the encroachment virtual reality has made on the actual kind. Is it total or partial? And how partial is that?

If he delivers the requisite password, he thereby announces his allegiance to virtual reality, hoping most people worship at the same totem pole. Conversely, obtusely sticking with actual reality may either win votes for him or lose them. It all depends on how accurately he assesses the public mood.

The very fact that the penile question has become ubiquitous testifies to a collapse of culture, morality, reason, indeed public sanity. Who was the first British prime minister who wouldn’t have laughed in the face of the inquirer? Probably Tony Blair, would be my guess. That gives us roughly the time when virtual reality conquered, or at least began to do so.

A mere generation ago, if that. That’s when Britain was hit with a pandemic of insanity much worse and more durable than any Covid. And that virus isn’t going to die out by itself. It’ll continue to multiply in the medium beneficial to it: our anomic modernity.