It being Valentine’s Day as I write this, I feel compelled to write about love and gender issues.

But because I don’t know that much about love, I will skip that and go directly to gender issues and risk going to jail should I say something politically incorrect.

I feel I am a little more qualified to write about gender issues because I have just watched zoologist and author Desmond Morris being interviewed on Hard Talk on BBC.

Morris is a bit of a hero of mine. Forty years ago, he wrote “The Naked Ape” and changed the way we looked at ourselves in relation to animals. I still remember that scene where he compared monkeys and women with lipsticks – to this day, I still feel like a monkey when I slap on lipstick.

Anyway, he’s now 80 years old and he’s been a very busy man, having just written his 55th book. While his thesis that “man is essentially primitive in his behaviour has been widely criticised, particularly by feminists” (quoting from the BBC descriptive of the interview), the man actually regards himself as a feminist.

In the bit I caught, Morris was talking about how urbanisation has been the biggest injustice done to womankind. He says that, back in the days of firewood and when men were hunters and gatherers, women ruled the roost as men had to go to the periphery to get and bring back the spoils.

With urbanisation, the city centre became the new hunting ground and men displaced women at the centre of communities, and made rules that were inherently unfair to women.

He says that if women were to rule the world, it’d be a better place. Politics should be the domain of women because he says, women take less risks and are less prone to posturing and preening “and going to war just to save face”.

Men and women’s brains are wired differently, he says, relating one experiment he did which showed different areas of the brains lighting up when subjected to different stimuli, depending on the gender. Men’s brains light up in a confined area while women’s brains lit up all over the place, so to speak.

Anyway, after his ascent to fame, Morris disappeared to Malta where he lived for six years, pursuing what he says was his passion for painting.

Interviewer Stephen Sackur though wasn’t about to let him go that lightly, saying during that time, Morris bought Rolls Royces and generally lived the good life. “You were posturing and preening, weren’t you?” he said.

Morris prefers to call it “playing”. Calling Man the “ultimate Peter Pan”, he says Man is the only animal who plays throughout life. Other species play only when young but mankind play even when old. Music, plays, concerts, art – all playful activities indulged in by man.

And despite all that talk about climate change, Morris is optimistic about the state of mankind. Saying we are the most inventive animal that ever lived, he believes we will one day come up with an invention that will change the way we live.

“100 years from now, someone will say, how did they ever live without that anti-gravity machine or whatever it will be,” he says.

Happy Valentine’s Day, all you naked apes out there.