Is it really true that, as the veteran agony aunt Irma Kurtz claimed in an interview, women still see each other mainly as rivals? I have been pondering this when contrasting the rise and rise of the "bromance", in which two men form a platonic friendship, with the way popular culture depicts relations between two women.
This month sees the publication of a splendid new thriller, The Strangler Vine, by the historian Miranda Carter. It's set in colonial India and features a naive young officer in the East India Company unwillingly assigned to work against the murderous Thugs with an ungentlemanly special agent. Inevitably, the two become friends, saving each other's lives and behaving just like all those other chums in yarns from Sherlock to Master and Commander.
By contrast, the exquisitely sinister psychological thriller that is going to take us all by storm this summer, Harriet Lane's Her, has a Notes on a Scandal-type relationship between an exhausted young mother and her rich, sophisticated neighbour. The same toxicity is evident in Claire Messud's recent, much-praised novel The Woman Upstairs. Women can be loyal to men, children, sisters or mothers – but as equals – never!
It is depressing that neither popular nor highbrow culture can seem to get its head around the way that women, too, can have genuine friendships. Books set in single-sex boarding schools like Angela Brazil's once celebrated this. But in literature, the only one I can think of comes in Jane Eyre, between the heroine and her saintly fellow-pupil Helen – who is, of course, dying.
This attitude is pervasive. Despite being a cradle feminist, I am ashamed to remember feeling bored by the majority of my own sex for most of my twenties, because men were what interested me. It wasn't just the quest for love and a husband; I was convinced that the way women seemed to think, with the emphasis on emotional sensitivity rather than robust debate, was tiresome – a prejudice largely derived from the inferior education my sex received, which time and experience disproved.
Those who see women as people first, and every bit as brave, loyal, bright, funny and strong-minded as men, still seem too thin on the ground. My generation had to struggle to get to university and into professional jobs, but it's different for our daughters, who seem to be, if anything, more confident and better-qualified than young men. They also seem to have much stronger friendships with their own sex, rather than being fixated on romance. Yet every time a TV series such as The Apprentice shows women unable to work in a team, I groan and wonder where they have found these young dinosaurs.
Despite this, the female bromance remains elusive. Why don't we ever see women doing what we do in real life, whether it's enjoying a conversation, being friends, quarrelling, promoting or firing each other at work and, in short, behaving like men?
I suspect it may have something to do with the perception that female friendship is something left to the fag-end of life, when all passion is spent. Traditionally, women, as the longer-lived sex, tend to end up with each other as second-best – though even that may be changing, according to a report this week that claims that men are closing the gap in life expectancy.
Hurrah for that if it means less loneliness, but not if it reinforces prejudice. For while advertisers persist in believing that women can behave amicably together only while discussing how our digestive problems may be cured by drinking a brand of yoghurt, in real life we long ago discovered that the best and funniest conversation is likely to be had by the sex that isn't discussing football.
