Deborah Orr: We know what modern feminists look like, but do we know what they now believe?

That estimable campaigning group The Fawcett Society has challenged "well-known public figures" to don its "infamous" T-shirts saying: "This is what a feminist looks like" to mark International Women's Day 2007. I don't suppose there's any great harm in the wheeze, but still I'm strangely hostile to it.

I hate clothes with stuff written on them. I hate slogans. I hate celebrity-led "awareness-raising" campaigns. I don't even like T-shirts very much, particularly the classic loose-cut ones that are OK for men but do nothing for women, especially when they haven't got a bra on. All of which conspires to suggest that a feminist doesn't look very much like me.

Still, maybe I should console myself with the news that quite a few people I thought looked like feminists don't appear to be feminists after all. According to Oona King, who has been there, done that and got the T-shirt: "A feminist respects men and women in equal measure - therefore all decent human beings are feminists."

Does this mean that Julie Bindel, my favourite living feminist in Britain, and a tireless campaigner for female victims of male violence, is not a feminist at all? Bindel's brand of feminism is definitely woman-biased, to the extent that she recently wrote a muscular article entitled "Why I hate men". You don't have to agree with Bindel to understand that her views are worthy of examination, and her work is considerably more valuable than is the wearing of a T-shirt.

Equally, you don't have to be a feminist to understand that King's definition is just too blandly inclusive to be useful. Feminism evolved precisely because men and women were, and are not, respected in equal measure. King's feminism, as portrayed in this soundbite, is a feminism that can only be signed up to at the point when there's no need for feminism any more. Why not simply wear a T-shirt saying: "A feminist is a person who admires other feminists", or one saying "This is what a decent person looks like"?

Because, I suppose, that wouldn't be a precise or useful definition. But let's face it, neither is the slogan in question. It's been a while since the conventional wisdom decreed that feminists looked like men in dungarees who hadn't had a wash - so long that it is banal rather than illuminating to "discover" that those rising to the Fawcett Society's challenge range in physical appearance from my minxy colleague on The Independent, Tracey Emin, to the fundamentalist Muslim apologist, Ken Livingstone.

They are what feminists look like. They look like everyone else. They look like anyone who says they are one. They look like Jordan. They look like someone who's just kitted herself out for her married-with-children lover in Ann Summers gear. They look like, God help us, John Prescott.

The thriller writer Sarah Waters, who has also been co-opted into this great struggle to ascertain that a feminist has no defining physical characteristics, takes the knotty problem of feminist identification one step further. "Surely the real question should be not 'why are you a feminist?' But 'why aren't you one?'"

For me, I'm afraid, this is a much more pertinent question. Why am I not a feminist, even though I believe in all the same stuff as feminists do? Or why, at least, do I find it so hard to put on the T-shirt? It's because I believe that the vagaries of human nature, and the development of human society, dictates that the most vulnerable will always do least well. Feminism, however much feminists deny it, idealises the "strong woman", and is rather irritated by women who don't seem able or willing to access their womanly strength.

It is easy for a strong woman to subscribe to feminism, just as easy as it is for her to put on a T-shirt and be photographed. It's harder to admit that worldwide, on pretty much every economic measure, women do less well than men, because women need more support than men do. Heresy, I know, but true nonetheless.

Women are more vulnerable than men for a few reasons, but the main one in a neo-liberal society is because we bear children, and want to nurture them. The feminism I subscribe to takes this as a given. The feminism I reject tells me that having a child changes nothing, and that once I find the right childcare my life can continue more or less as before. Maybe that's true for some women, and good luck to them. But it is generally far from being the case.

Feminism has to exist because men and women are not equal, and never will be. Feminism is, or at least should be, about real sisterhood: thinking of, and promoting ways of protecting vulnerable women, because without help they are always at the bottom of the heap. That's why Bindel is a great feminist, because that's what she's spent her adult life struggling to do.

I can't agree with Bindel's demonisation of men - in fact, I'm repulsed by it. But I think she is right in identifying women's vulnerability as the defining issue, whether that is expressed physically, economically or culturally.

A feminism that strives for "equality" is simply an ideology that is engaged in the thankless task of searching for the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. The Fawcett Society declares that "feminism has a strong and vibrant future". That's really a way of saying that feminism has so far achieved nothing like what it should have.

This is no surprise, in large part because there has been a huge backlash against feminism. Again, that's simply because people are very reluctant to give up their unearned power. It's an attitude that feminism has proved better at railing against than challenging as the vast obstacle to social cohesion that it is.

Feminism does have to make a positive response to the set-backs it has encountered, if it is to move forward in a meaningful way. The truth is that unless men and women can look with some clarity at the gains and the losses that feminism has so far chalked up, and take a serious look at what has worked and what hasn't, feminism runs the risk of promoting inequality between women just as well as many of the other systems of thought we are currently in thrall to do.

This is dangerous territory, there is no doubt about it. There are plenty of people who continue to insist that the extreme limitations that were until recently placed on women in this country, and continue to be placed on women around the world, were the fair price that we paid for being cosseted as "the weaker sex".

Nowadays, it seems, merely refusing to accept that mendaciously imprecise definition is enough to qualify one as a feminist. But it is all a great deal more complex and nuanced than that. We know what a feminist looks like. But we do have to be clearer about what a feminist really thinks.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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