Dialogue: Women will be waiting forever for a fair deal

I remember quite well the most recent, and perhaps most spectacular, occasion on which I watched a large group of supposedly cerebral, liberated females turn like a pack of hormonal curs on women who had made it in life.

It was at a formal debate/party that was held (and organised months in advance) specifically to celebrate suffrage, advances made in female rights in the past 30 years (women of all ages were present), and the joys of being female.

Needless to say, our lovely party, glistening with luminaries though it was, started to go horribly wrong about 20 seconds after it began.

An ideological crevasse revealed itself between the slightly older women (ie, the second-wave feminist) and the slightly younger women (ie, me). It was all the older girls' fault.

They started a fight in which they implied that women who sought, and held, genuine positions of power were not proper women. One hears this a lot, particularly from women and particularly those who hold positions of power.

The room was 10-deep with academics, lawyers, writers, feminist thinkers and various social luminaries but the intellectual energy was devoted chiefly to calculating various female politicians' chances of landing a shag.

"Isn't it wonderful to be in a country that has women in the top jobs at parliament?" observed our illustrious chair . Unfortunately (mainly for herself) she couldn't leave it there. "If you can call them women, that is," she added. If a man had said that, it would have been the last thing he did with a full set of genitals. From a woman, it went down beautifully.

Thus, the tenor of the event was set. Things shambled on from there. Insult piled on injury as these fatuous, middle-aged girls mocked every woman who'd (a) entered the so-called male power structure at some juncture, and (b) had betrayed the sisterhood forever by thriving in it.

To this dreary end, all the old cliches (which I imagine were fairly uninspiring, even in their day) were dragged out for their annual trot: "Women can't [sob] beat the male power structure by joining it;" "women who climb the corporate ladder aren't really women, they're just men with tits;" and my personal favourite, founded as it is in the far reaches of socialist cloud-cuckoo land, "I thought feminism was supposed to be about strengthening community, not personal gain."

Occasionally during the above intercourse, someone with half a brain came up for air and contributed something slightly loftier than 10 minutes of name-calling. I gave it a few hours, then, empty-handed, alas, sloped off home.

Anyway, it was all horribly, disappointingly childish.

One gets a little tired of hearing from women that real women should enjoy neither power nor the fight for it. One certainly gets tired of seeing that myth in action.

I started thinking about it at the weekend, when I read that story about female chefs leaving the country because they can't handle the sexism (the irony being that they have decided there is a better chance of pursuing equality in places like England).

I was struck by that story; the chef thing was neither here nor there, but it reminded me forcefully that women are not taught that life is tough and that one will wait forever if one waits for life to be fair. One really ought to stay, and just brain anyone who looks up one's skirt with a wok.

But no, you won't see that. Women are not taught that it is right to fight for power. One thinks about this a great deal, incidentally, when reading (on the rare occasions when one can stand it) young, trash-trampy feminists like Katie Roiphe or even Elizabeth Wurtzel.

For years now, these girls have been suggesting that the best way to rat out of the gender war is to enter it nude or at least tricked out in plenty of leather. Look the slut, in other words.

The idea here is that if one comes on strong sexually, one will be considered indispensable at work. The idea is that the girl who achieves that need never trouble herself with issues of hierarchy or indeed fight for her place in it. Simple measures for simple times.