It takes two to make a baby. After that fathers are, biologically speaking, unnecessary. The meaning of ‘fathering’ is insemination; ‘mothering’ means child-rearing. But if biology makes fathers dispensable, society carves out particular roles for them. These roles are shaped by history and circumstance, so that fatherhood in pre-industrial France differs from fatherhood in the African Congo, and both appear foreign to an English urban businessman fathering his first child in the 1970s.

Yet in a sense the problem for every society is the same. If men are to feel involved with (or at least responsible for) their children, they must be impressed by a sense of indispensability: they must feel necessary. Our industrialised culture achieves this end via a logic of economic dependence: women and children must be supported by men. The logic is reinforced by an appeal to a set of ideas about the nature of both men and family life. A proper man fathers children, who are then visible confirmation of his sexual and social normality. A proper family is made up of a male and female parent and their children: a ‘family man’, a ‘housewife’ and the patter of tiny feet (or ‘may all your troubles be little ones’).

Looked at another way, the problem for men is how to share the experience. The seed that started it off is lost inside a foreign body and the long months that preface its re-emergence can often be a kind of limbo.