Shopping is just shopping. It really has no hidden feminist meaning

Once women were urged, in the interests of liberation, to burn our bras. Now, in the further interests of liberation, we're urged to get them properly fitted at Rigby and Peller. Since, of course, the personal remains political, this is not merely self-indulgence. It is striking a blow for female identity. It is empowering. It is feminist.

Once women were urged, in the interests of liberation, to burn our bras. Now, in the further interests of liberation, we're urged to get them properly fitted at Rigby and Peller. Since, of course, the personal remains political, this is not merely self-indulgence. It is striking a blow for female identity. It is empowering. It is feminist.

Molly Jong-Fast, for one, believes: "Feminism is definitely shifting towards consumerism. Women today can be frivolous every now and again and not feel ashamed." Ms Jong-Fast, the daughter of the writer Erica Jong, has little time for this, or for many of the other achievements her mother's generation might have attained for women.

"My generation don't need to believe that we should be the same as men in every way, because we know that we're not," she says. "It means we can wear make-up and buy a new bag and just enjoy the moment, without having to feel that we should be playing a man's game."

She's not the only woman who holds such a torch for shopping. The respected feminist writer Linda Grant is similarly something of a champion. "A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked to discover a survey that said half of British women hate shopping," she wrote in an essay this week. "I don't know how this can be. I love shopping. It's the most relaxing, pleasurable activity I can think of."

What I find most annoying about all this is the idea that somehow you're not quite all woman unless you spend every weekend running up credit card bills by purchasing shoes you'll wear four times. These people sound to me like Stepford capitalists, brainwashed so totally by the glossy pages of advertising-financed magazines that they honestly believe that only spending money and earning it are worthwhile activities (and that they're the only people who can anoint the activity with credibility).

What is going on there? Maybe these women see their compulsion to buy new things as a new rebellion, this time against the clichés of old-style feminism. Or maybe they're just shouting so loudly in order to justify their own guilt. (Just because Sarah Jessica Parker is advertising Gap doesn't mean that the Indonesian woman making the gear is having great sex.)

Sometimes I have to laugh when I survey the amazing synchronicity between the achievements of feminism and the march of capitalism. The right of women to be out there in the economic marketplace, even when they have small babies, is so well established that many women who stay at home to care for their children feel embarrassment bordering on shame when they tell acquaintances that this is what they do. Now it turns out that the truly liberated woman spends all the time she isn't generating wealth, spending it. As if that isn't enough, this rich woman's hobby has to be treated with reverence.

The latest is that Marks & Spencer is running crèches for men, where they can wait while their supposedly liberated partners shop. Why can't they just go to the football instead? Can't football just be the overrated rip-off that men often seem inexplicably to like, while shopping is the overrated rip-off that women often seem inexplicably to like? Or is that just too obvious?

¿ I'm troubled by other aspects of Ms Jong-Fast's post-feminist lifestyle, since her particular neo-double-barrel crystallises a worry I've had for a while.

What if Molly's son Max wants to get it together with, say, Sophie Ellis-Bextor? Junior Jong-Fast-Ellis-Bextor is a mouthful. So do the children have bits of the different names? Isn't it confusing when everyone has different surnames with two bits in them? Patriarchy may be an evil world conspiracy. But no one can deny that it's simple.

Festive foolery

What larks at Madame Tussauds, whose management decided this Christmas to insult all true believers by dressing their waxworks of Posh and Becks up as Mary and Joseph.

Still, at least the company is traditional enough to have a nativity scene. The Sun's front page a couple of days ago claimed that "meddling politically correct jobsworths" accuse "the nativity scene cherished by millions of Britons" of being "offensive". They are "banning it in their drive to obliterate festive traditions".

At the Daily Mail, "Christmas Killjoys" are subscribers to "a £10bn compensation culture in which staff are encouraged to take their firms to courts". Apparently, such behaviour signals a death-knell for the office Christmas party, because companies are scared that people will sue if they are subjected to drunken sexual harassment.

Just imagine. If what these papers say is true, then surely the fact that Christmas is upon us should be hardly discernible, except perhaps to those people actually entering a place of worship to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Instead, the festival gets louder, longer and more vulgar. If political correctness and compensation culture can save us from David and Victoria nativity scenes and pissed passes over the copier, then what's the problem?

Desperate parents, fertility treatment and medical ethics

Lord Winston this week accused the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority of being "incompetent" and in need of a "far-reaching shake-up". He said that he had felt compelled to speak out because of the body's "shocking mismanagement" of recent issues.

Lord Winston was one of the pioneers of IVF but is known to have been concerned by reports suggesting that IVF babies were more likely to have a low birth weight, with all the problems this brings. Sensibly enough, he wants more research into the long-term health effects, and has even accused the medical establishment of conducting a "mass experiment" on parents desperate for babies, whose offspring are "human guinea pigs".

These are strong words. Yet it is difficult to see how the medical profession can test the limits of assisted fertility without trying out techniques on humans. Lord Winston himself was at the forefront of such experimentation, perfectly justifiably, which is why he finds himself at the forefront still, now that the time has come for some retrospective analysis to be applied.

I'm not absolutely sure that the HFEA alone deserves to be pilloried though. The sinister aspect to all of this is that businesses have now been established that are reliant on the continuing flow of desperate parents willing to pay up and take risks. It is the commercialisation of the baby business, rather than its regulation, that will cause the future difficulties.