SOS for a new feminism: How Obama's being hailed as a new champion for women
And with the march of the WAG culture, we need one more than ever, says LIZ JONES
For the first time in several decades, the F word is back on the agenda. No, I don't mean that we are all debating the merits of yet another misogynistic chef, but that feminism is taking centre stage.
The touch paper was lit by Ms magazine in the US when it placed Barack Obama on its latest cover. He was portrayed, Superman fashion, ripping off his shirt and tie to reveal a costume that said: 'This is what a feminist looks like.'
The magazine stuffed its issue with leading feminist writers of the day, all of whom are pinning their hopes on Obama doing more for women's rights than they had ever dreamed possible. Not only has he hired Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, there are six women in key, powerful roles.
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Champion: Obama is leading the way with women's rights - but feminism still has a long way to go, says Liz Jones
He has already torn up several anti-women edicts passed by President George W. Bush, including the 'global gag rule', barring international family planning groups that receive US aid from counselling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal.
On the face of it, life could soon be looking up for women, not just in the US, but around the world. Our own government, too, has introduced a raft of women-friendly rules. It recently decided that parents should be able to request flexible working until a child is 16.
David Cameron is a self-confessed feminist, while Gordon Brown when asked this question promised to get back to us; although he did 'allow' his wife to take centre stage at the Labour conference.
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But I am worried that everyone is speaking too soon. That, in fact, women are at crisis point, that all the hard-won battles for equal pay and equal rights are about to be overturned. That what we all really need now, much as Labour needed it in the mid-Nineties, is our very own brand of New Feminism.
You disagree? You think feminism is a dirty, outmoded word we don't need any more? Well, let's look at those women hired by Obama. The new homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is single, and regularly works 20-hour days. Susan Rice, the ambassador to the UN, is fiercely ambitious.
Every one of them, crucially, is past childbearing age. The message is clear: you can have this job, but only if you behave like a man.
More frivolously, but no less tellingly, look at how the inauguration day was reported globally.
Newspapers and TV stations were more fired up about what Michelle Obama was wearing (I wrote three stories on the subject) than what her husband had to say.
Women around the world are going to be hit hard by the recession: 40 per cent of women who work are part-timers, and these jobs are likely to be the most expendable. In the UK, we still earn 17 per cent less than our male counterparts. Rape has a conviction rate of 6 per cent.
In a recent survey for Women's Aid, a staggering one in six 15-year-olds said they'd been hit by their boyfriend. Only 12 per cent of FTSE 100 directorships are held by women. Women can take 52 weeks paid maternity leave, their partners only two: this clearly sends out the message that women are, simply, less valuable to their employers.
Parents might applaud the right to request flexible hours, but we all know, don't we, that most men just won't take it.
What summed up, though, for me the dire straits we women have found ourselves in was when I was talking to a group of women under the age of 25.
I asked them to name their role model and just over half (including graduates) cited Cheryl Cole, the Girls Aloud member that Germaine Greer famously said is 'too thin to be a feminist', a woman who married a rich footballer and wears more make-up than a drag queen.
I was appalled. 'Ah, but you're old-fashioned,' said one of them. 'We know we are equal. We can dress how we like. We don't dress provocatively to please men, it's to please ourselves.'
I find this argument a little hard to swallow. Why, if you want to express yourself, not dress up as a punk, or dye your hair pink? Why kowtow to the male fantasy of a sex worker?
It always makes me furious when women say they like going to lap-dancing clubs (the number of these clubs has doubled since 2004) because it is 'ironic'.
The old misogyny has merely been repackaged and brought into the open because men these days think we are so liberated we are okay with being treated as sex objects (in the same vein, the LSE a few weeks ago resurrected the beauty pageant for its female students).
The following isn't a scientific statistic, but I think it's relevant: my wax therapist told me that the majority of the women who come to see her now want a 'Hollywood', which means everything down below is removed. I wonder what other expensive, humiliating lengths young women today are going to just to please a man.
Too thin to be a feminist: Footballer's wife Cheryl Cole
I asked a friend's 18-year-old daughter why she didn't do well at school, and instead always seemed to be chasing boys and buying ludicrous outfits from Topshop, and she told me that the culture these days among girls is one of competition.
'It is all about the boys,' she told me. 'They come first. And the boys don't want to know you if you don't sleep with them. They were all raised on porn, they all read lads' mags, they think that is what we should be like. We dumb ourselves down for them.'
A young journalist I used to mentor got married, much to my annoyance, in her mid-20s and decided to go part time. I asked why she had not followed in the previous generation's footsteps and she said: 'God, I wouldn't dream of working as hard as you do. Who would want your life?'
The problem is that my generation of women, the one after the bra-burning trailblazers, moaned too much about how tiring it was 'having it all'.
Even those of us who, like me, chose a career over a family - the sight of my mum raising seven children put me off - and therefore didn't even try to 'juggle' have turned out not to be an inspiration for well-educated girls.
It seems to me that young women have become more stupid, less ambitious and more eager to take a back seat.
We are now bombarded with 'literature' covered in pink cartoons and swirly typefaces, and images of women who only want to shop and get married.
Now, it might seem trite to cite fashion as a party to feminism's demise, but let's just see what is hot at the moment. Ooh, false eyelashes (not only on Cheryl Cole but on Michelle Obama), platform bondage shoes with 8in heels we can't walk in, corset belts and models who look like fragile little girls.
OK, I admit that feminism the first time around made mistakes. It turned us into man haters (I still, to this day, whenever I am told my BMW needs a new tyre, say, yell at the hapless man serving me: 'You wouldn't dare treat me this way if I were a man!'), and set impossible standards.
As Rosie Boycott, founder of Spare Rib magazine, admitted last week on Woman's Hour (isn't the title of that programme sexist or have I gone mad?): 'In the Seventies feminism was too narrow, it bore no relationship to my life: I liked men.'
What the original feminists didn't factor in was how alienated men felt. It seems they have been floundering ever since.
After I wrote a piece criticising mothers who take a year's maternity leave, no matter that there is a recession, a woman emailed to say: 'The recession means men want to hang on to their jobs as never before. They don't want to seem weak, ie stay at home. And they have never, not even those with feminist mums, taken over their share of the boring household stuff.'
So, while we need young women to be more demanding, as Theresa May, Shadow Secretary for Women, said: 'We need the next stage of the revolution. We need to change men's lives.' Young men are as lost as women were before the Sixties.
I spoke to a 26-year-old male friend yesterday, and asked if he even knows where he stands. 'I find women competitive with each other, confrontational, liberated sexually, oh my goodness yes, but they also demand we pay for everything. We are not supposed to object to anything they do, how they dress, how much they drink. It's confusing.
'Of the group of women I hang around with, I know that if I marry any one of them, she will want me to work until I drop while she takes a back seat, no matter that she has a better degree than me. Is that fair?'
Finally, I asked my 11-year-old nephew what he's been learning in school. Does he know what the word suffragette means? 'No.' Has he heard of Germaine Greer? 'Who?'
In sex education, have the teachers talked about love and consent? 'Yes. That means a person only doing what they want to.'
Would he like his mum to stay at home without a job, or be a high-flier who uses her brain, is fulfilled, but won't be home as much to cook things?
'Stay-at-home mum, definitely.' The new feminism, it seems, still has an awfully long way to go.
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