As men, we know we could get a better deal.  We look at women and see modernity; expansive people exploring new roles, conquering the world. Quietly, secretly, we admire the gathering pace of their achievement. And we say to ourselves, what about us?  Isn't this how we are supposed to be; bright, confident, going places?

So what's getting in our way?  There is no point in blaming women, stoking a sex war. This remains, after all, a man's world.  If we knew what we wanted, we could enact it. No, the problem is our lack of imagination. Ask women, as women, what they want and they'll tell you, equality. Men? We haven't a clue. And the reason is simple.  We have failed to understand the opportunities of this century's greatest social movement, the collapse of the sexual division of labour.

Women know the demise of the old order makes them more powerful, because it provides economic independence. So they have shed the past with enthusiasm.  But we are confused.  We think that because the old order gave us economic power over women, the world must have been designed to meet our specifically male needs.  So we see change as a source of loss, not gain, and desperately hang on to the vestiges of the past.  While women surf the tide of history, we seem to be drowning.

We're making a mistake.  The past ill-served our real needs. It forced us into a narrow sense of ourselves as workers, which fell apart when we were sacked, retired or fell ill. It drove us out of our homes and made us strangers to our children. It meant we subcontracted our physical, emotional and practical needs to women.  They fed us, nurtured us, gave us access to our feelings, mediated a social world for us.  They did our private labour, just as we did their public work.

For all the adult behaviour we demonstrated outside the home, we remained children within it. It left us, particularly the elderly, half-dead, living sad, limited lives, often stuck in soured relationships.

We can change all this.  And it isn't just wishful thinking. A fair wind was behind women's liberation; in a few decades, they gained control of their own fertility, while the economy demanded a vast expansion in the labour force.  Even conservative men couldn't stop them.

Likewise, technological change is on our side. Today's information revolution – and the job flexibility pioneered by women – allows many of us to bring work back into the home. Low birthrates, female income-earners and improved life expectancy for women free us from being simply breadwinners. The way is open for us to cast aside our father's dependence on women.  Indeed, it is possible today for a man to father his own child via a surrogate mother and raise it without having a woman around. Most men would not seek this arrangement, but the possibility is a liberation. Soon, though we will still love women, we will no longer need them in the traditional way.

The first step must be for us to break our silence.  Hence this manifesto.

1.Just imagine how we might be

When the sexual division of labour underpinned notions of being a man, we defined ourselves in three ways: as breadwinning workers, as the opposite of women, and as fathers who did what mothers did not do. Each notion rules out a vast sphere of activity and stifles men. We must rewrite these definitions.

2.Work is not the promised land

When people ask me what I am.  I say I'm a journalist. Not men, not a father, not a husband, not a son, a brother, not a citizen, not even a combination of these, a journalist.  Like many men, I am my work.  When work is OK, I'm OK. Everything else might be falling apart, but success at work sustains a man.  It provides status, power and a means to be a breadwinning father. The women's movement has only further emphasised the paramount status of work and that, by implication, domesticity and child rearing is drudgery.

Yet expecting work to support our sense of self so fundamentally is a mistake. Many self-definitions survive the passage of time. Job isn't one of them. It's too insecure. One day we know we'll get fired, sick or retire.  For those who are young and can't get a job or are dumped on the scrap heap at an early age, failure at work leads to depression, crime, and violence and, in some cases, suicide. Must a man go mad before he discovers a sounder way of valuing himself?  We have to realise that putting faith in work is a con.

3.Man is not the opposite of woman

When women were seen as weak, we had to be strong. We did what women didn't do, but now there's hardly anything women won't do; they play sports, earn money, attend football matches, fly fighter planes and initiate sex.  Yet we persist in thinking of ourselves as the "opposite" of women. At this rate, we'll end up defined as the people who do the few activities women don't want to do, rape, murder and abuse.

4.Fathers, too, can fulfil all a child's needs

We remain limited by the traditional image of fathers as providing income, discipline and in some cases, a playmate for a child. Physical and emotional intimacy with children has been the prerogative of women and largely continues to be so. Today, many men want to be closer to their children and are active fathers. We enjoy it and are competent. But some women refuse to treat us equals.

History exposes these attitudes as nonsense. As Adrienne Burgess shows in her new book Fatherhood Reclaimed. In the 19th Century there were many more lone fathers because of high rates of maternal mortality and because custody of the children was automatically granted to fathers after separation. These days, the supports available to modern parenting – manufactured baby milk, child minders, and nurseries – means a father can do everything a mother does.

Yet we have failed to challenge the anti-father culture. Schools ignore a boy's potential to become a father and offer no training. At antenatal appointments, health workers look straight through expectant dads. When a child is born there is no state entitlement to paternity.

Employers don't usually expect to make concessions to fatherhood (such as his looking after a sick child). Most men can forget trying to go part-time that way lies redundancy. And a divorced father can expect only limited access to his children, while an unmarried one may have no rights at all.

In the past, the only relationship many mothers had to the working world was to keep their husbands going by cooking and washing for them. We regard such notions as outdated. Yet most women Western institutions still act as though a fathers only role is to earn money so his wife can bring up the kids. And while equal opportunities commissions exist to support women's rights in the workplace, there is no equivalent to encourage a man's rightful place to stay at home with his children. The Child Support agency chase dads to pay up but does nothing to help us father our children.

We have the power to strike a better deal. But if you don't ask you don't get.

5. All men should aspire to the spirit of fatherhood

The importance of reclaiming fatherhood goes beyond men with children fulfilling the potential of their role. The father concept is a way we can generally modernise ourselves. As the father of a baby daughter, it allows me to be caring and emotional without being judged a wimp or gay. It's a grown-up role, freeing me from what might otherwise be a narcissistic Peter Pan existence. It's a channel for my male desire to be protective. And I'll always be a dad, whether or not I've got a job.

 I'm not suggesting every man should throw away the condoms and start breeding. But men should be encouraged into fathering-type roles and attributes – particularly to young.  This new image could begin to solve the crisis for young men.

Children under the age of 11 spend most of their time in the company of women – at home, in nursery, at school. Boy's, especially in single parent homes, have little access to men, and it's hardly surprising they seem so lost. They need us to be more involved with them, mentoring them, helping them in sports, at school and general growing up. We could teach boys assertiveness and self defence so they learn non- violent ways of expressing themselves. We could provide them with a safe place to talk. Boys these days worry that they will say the wrong "Sexist" things – better to stick to the computer. If high – status jobs were created for men to work with children, it would help men themselves and give boys their missing role models.

6. Equality begins at home

In many homes men are passive, allowing women to organise their personal lives, letting them act a s gatekeepers of the home, determining which friendship are maintained, how involved the couple is the family. Many of us find it difficult to take the initiative or say no to women at home, because we never learnt how to say no to our mothers.

7. Good sex involves negotiating what we really want

Our passive and reactive nature is often reflected in our sexual relations. As young men, we develop much of our sexuality in a secret way, through masturbation, for example. And many of us never get past this furtive style of exploration. We never realise that it is OK to ask, indeed to argue with women for what we want. Many of us remain in awe of our lovers, as we were our mothers. We fear disapproval and, and above all, contempt. The popularity of pornography marks, at least in part, our failure to be honest with ourselves about our desires.

We are also confused about what women are asking for. They seem to despise "sensitive" Men. But don't want the old style, buttoned-up tough guys,either. And the rules of courtship seem to change all the time. We need everyone to be straight about what they really want.

8. Public institutions should look at men in a new light

Take the medical system. Significant gains are being made by targeting men. The system may have been created by men, but that does not mean it serves our needs well.

9. Respect comes from self-respect

The negative image of men has sprung from surrendering the public debate to those who are pissed off with us: women. We owe it. If not to ourselves, then to our sons, to correct the record.

10. Men must start doing it for themselves

Successful men must take up a leadership role. Too often they stay quiet because they have least to gain from rethinking their roles. Their jobs are relatively secure, with high status and power over women. They have some control over their working hours, can often work from home and afford childcare. They can still have it all.

So they hang on to what can be salvaged from the older order, and close their minds to reshaping the world in a way that better suits all of us. Angry, inarticulate men who lack an intellectual framework for understanding their dilemmas thus often inhabit the men's movement. Intelligent, educated men could lead the way. We need them to start thinking,fast.

 By Jack O'Sullivan – London  (The Age, Saturday 7 June 1997)
The writer is an associate editor of The Independent