Paul Thomas: Strip, bump and grind all the way down to the bank

Not so long ago a woman's place was in the home and beyond the venetian blinds lay a man's world. That all changed in the space of a single decade - the 1970s.

To paraphrase historian James Belich in Paradise Reforged, New Zealand feminism had four main goals: equal treatment in and through politics; greater control by women of their own health and reproduction; the elimination of male violence towards women; and an end to gender discrimination, notably in the workplace.

It would be a wild over-statement to claim these goals have been fully achieved, but the degree of change over three and a half decades is significant enough to encourage commentators to refer to the feminisation of society.

In 1976 less than 5 per cent of MPs were women; today that proportion is almost a third. The Prime Minister, the Chief Justice and the head of our largest company are all women and, until recently, so was the Governor-General.

Feminism also aspired to eradicate what it identified as the male tendency to sexualise women, to view them first and foremost as sexual objects, a process and mindset that culminates in pornography. Here the current picture is much cloudier.

On the one hand it sometimes seems as if social interaction with the opposite sex has become a minefield for the fun-loving but unwary male.

Those who wish to lampoon or denounce this development (usually men prone to overusing the phrase "political correctness gone mad") evoke an atmosphere of stifling hypersensitivity marked by a hair-trigger ability to detect impropriety.

Thus as the sisterhood continues its relentless drive to codify male-female contact and keep men on the back foot, the clumsy compliment, the flirtatious sally, the ribald email, the casual sampling of adult magazines or websites get blown up into unwarrantable liberties, if not sackable offences or triggers for sexual harassment claims.

If women can't do without men, so the conspiracy theory goes, they're making damn sure they have the whip-hand.

While it's certainly true that the sexual predator can no longer prowl the workplace with impunity, there are good grounds for believing that feminism's campaign to rein in the depiction and treatment of women as sexual objects hasn't got very far at all.

The most obvious evidence of this is the explosive growth and increasing respectability of pornography.

Porn is now so big and expanding at such a rate that attempts to quantify it are out of date the moment they appear.

As Martin Amis has suggested, it's almost impossible to exaggerate porn's pervasiveness and market penetration because, if it's not true now, it soon will be.

Thirty years ago porn stars didn't really exist. Outside their furtive, largely underground cottage industry, women who earned a living in porn were viewed in a similar light to prostitutes.

These days porn stars are celebrities who appear on talk shows, open shopping malls, publish autobiographies and even run for political office.

Popular music is now joined at the hip to music television, a medium that deals heavily in sexual stereotyping. (The mainly gay Scissor Sisters acidly summed up this development in their song You Can't See Tits on the Radio.)

Most rap videos look as if they were shot in a harem. While our local rap artists are in many respects slavishly imitative of their American counterparts, to their credit they've largely resisted the temptation to cram scantily clad camp followers into every second frame of their videos.

And while the fight for equal pay for women's tennis continues, one wonders what its advocates make of the revelation that last year the fourth-ranked woman, Maria Sharapova, earned more than Roger Federer, winner of eight grand slam events and already talked of as the greatest tennis player ever.

She reportedly made $40 million, only $3 million of which was from tennis. The rest came from her ability to generate wealth from her increasingly sexualised image.

Sharapova doesn't have to play tennis in a glorified negligee; movie stars don't have to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair in a bikini or less; pop stars don't have to strip down to their underwear and bump and grind like strippers. The choice is theirs.

You could argue it's the only game in town and men still make the rules, so the real choice is to play along or not play at all; you could argue that pretty young women have a brief window of opportunity so they have to make the most of it. But not too many of them look like they're doing it under sufferance. They look as if they're laughing all the way to the bank.

The American feminist writer Ariel Levy coined the term "raunch culture" to describe this phenomenon of women willingly conforming to the very stereotypes of female sexuality that feminism sought to banish.

She found that many of the women taking lap-dancing lessons and wearing T-shirts with the words "porn star" emblazoned across their chests see their behaviour as liberating and empowering, arguing that the fact that women can now choose to make sex objects of themselves proves feminism has achieved its goal.

Levy doesn't buy it and she's not the only one.