Kerre Woodham: Girls just want to have funds

Feminists from the 60s must be shaking their wise old heads in horror and asking what the battle was for. A survey of more than 2000 young British women aged between 21 and 25 has found that what the women wanted to be, more than anything else in the whole wide world, was a footballer's wife or girlfriend.

Margaret Thatcher might never have existed. They've probably never heard of Anita Roddick. Nope. They just wanted to bag themselves a rich boy.

These are working women, many with tertiary qualifications. And all they want to be is a girlfriend. Not just any old girlfriend, mind you. If you're a bloke in a low-paying job and the best you can offer a girl is a weekend away in your grandparents' caravan at Skegness, these girls won't look at you twice. They want to shop, they want to party, they want to look the very best they can, and they want a good-looking, successful man to pick up the tab.

The early feminists may have thought that by liberating women from the shackles of domesticity, they would choose to use their brains, drive and ambition to take their place at the top of the decision-making food chain. And some have, especially in this country.

But the modern girl wants to stay a girl, and she's willing to spend a lot of money and time doing it. The survey found that nearly half of the women surveyed had credit card debt of around $12,000 each and that most of the money had been spent on looking good.

There's nothing natural about these beauties. Following in the expensively shod footsteps of their style icon Victoria Beckham, they spend hundreds of dollars having other women's hair heat-glued on to their scalps, and girls as young as 20 have Botox injected into their foreheads and collagen pumped into their lips.

They ask for silicone tits for their birthdays and, in gratitude, have all their body hair ripped out on a six-weekly basis. Even old bags in the colonies are feeling the pressure.

Before every big function I attend, I'm hunched, white, shivering and goose-bumped, looking for all the world like a Christmas turkey before it goes into the oven, waiting for the lady with the spray-tan gun to transform me from pale and mottled to California tanned.

And although I haven't yet succumbed to Botox and boob jobs, the expensive uplift bra hoiks me up to such an extent I feel like an airbag's exploded in front of me.

I wish I had the courage to defy the dictates of fashion - just as those early feminists did. And we're only doing it for other women. Men don't seem to find the Victoria Beckhams of this world attractive.

As one of my Radio Sport colleagues put it so succinctly, "Jeez! What does Beckham see in her? It'd be like bonking a crayfish!" Indeed.

And yet for all that one might despair of the modern generation's values, spending your life shopping, partying, travelling and being a pampered wife and mother sure as hell seems attractive when you're trying to combine meaningful well-paid work, good parenting, running a home, doing community work, maintaining a good network of friends and finding personal fulfilment through your own pursuits.

The early feminists insisted that women be given free choice - that if they wanted to work and have a family, they should be able to. Well, we got what we asked for - and after years of bitching and moaning about how tough it all is, I suppose it's no surprise that younger women have decided it all looks like too much hard work. And that's the thing about choice - intelligent, pointy-headed bluestockings may have thought that women would rejoice in throwing off the shackles - they didn't count on young women joyfully snapping on the shackles and begging to be spanked.