I'm well aware that saying: "As we saw on Celebrity Big Brother the other night…" is about as likely to elicit a nod of recognition from this newspaper's smarty-pants readers as opening with: "As I was saying to my mate the Lib Dem unicorn the other night." None of us admits to knowing any Lib Dems, so what's the point?
But anyway, the Celebrity Big Brother house played host last week to the mother-in-law of all cat-fights when what started as a harmless "girls' night in", complete with pyjamas, chardonnay and Cyndi Lauper keening "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", ended up as Mean Girls as imagined by Bruegel. It took in many a Daily Mail why-o-whine on the way – female drunkenness, age-appropriate behaviour, thespian lesbianism – and ended up as a debate over the rights of glamour models not to be stripped bare in the name of female fun, with an ex-Page 3 girl and footballer's wife tearfully proclaiming herself "a secret feminist. I might have got my boobs out, but that's my choice".
Birdsong it was not – thank the Lord. This was reality TV in all its gory glory and showed Quality Drama up for the stick-up-fundament mugging it really is. I found it wildly entertaining – and a little bit scary. All it needed was Adele bellowing like a wounded elk with PMT on the morning-after soundtrack to sum up everything I have come to loathe and fear about female friendship. Here come the girls – to chop off your head with a carving knife.
Are we worth it? All of us, all the time? You tell me, sister. I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances. Of course the former was worse – being beaten up by a man is far scarier than having a bitch-fight with someone of your own strength, and usually comes without the handy advantage of earring-pulling. But the sisterhood warns you about the first, whereas the second is swept under the carpet in the phoney name of feminism.
There are other aspects to broad-bonding that make me feel I'd rather be a surrendered wife for an evening than have a girls' night in. At least you'd get some proper sex out of it.
"Pampering", for a start. When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio? Tellingly, spending a huge proportion of one's income on preening oneself for men's approval ("I'm doing it for me, not for men" – oh, give it a rest, you lying cow!) as a leisure option has gone hand in hand with the rise of ceaseless recreational moaning about men, and if I thought that I had to spend three-quarters of my time and money turning myself into a hairless, poreless living doll in order to get someone's affection, I'd probably resent them too. But the cult of pampering – like fashion – is not a thing that straight men make women do. Straight men couldn't care less – they generally just want women to have a wash, bring beer, show up and strip off. Women do it to themselves. It's like someone tying their own legs together and then complaining that some unseen but all-powerful deity is making them hop.
Sadly, a lot of what passes for feminism these days is just moaning about men, congratulating ourselves on nothing in particular, and mocking them for being big kids while doing everything we can to keep them that way. (That Boots Christmas advert, in which women were seen pulling off superhuman feats of generosity and efficiency while their menfolk blundered around them like well-groomed zombies, was truly chilling in its portrayal of the genders as complete and utter strangers to each other – right up there with The SCUM Manifesto.)
But moaning about men doesn't make you a feminist – it just makes you a moaner who can't get along with men for reasons that are probably at least as much to do with your failings, flaws and foibles as they are with some imagined horridness on the part of men. Lots of women love to accuse men of being immature when the fellow in question displays a reluctance to "commit" – though what is childish about being self-sufficient and showing understandable reluctance to throw oneself into a smothery relationship with an obviously unhappy fellow human being (because surely only extremely unhappy people look to others for salvation) escapes me somewhat.
As a kid, I grew to define what I didn't want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined. Too many allegedly smart women these days have merely substituted males for maladies and seem hellbent on moaning their lives away rather than changing them.
Einstein said that a definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and I think of this when I hear a friend describing men – yet again – as ****wits. Look, hon, I want to say, if men don't suit you, go celibate. Go lesbo (but not with me, thanks) but stop moaning!
The older I get, the more I find that the friendships I treasure, which leave me wanting more, are those based around doing specific things – from the living hell of kettlebell classes to the transcendent bliss of learning Hebrew – rather than just sitting around shooting the breeze in a gender-specific environment. Because even the most well-moisturised girls' night in tends to trickle down to a pity party as the years take their toll.
And, yes, to go back to fight night in the Celebrity Big Brother house, it was wrong of Denise Welch to pull down the pyjama bottoms of the Playboy model, no matter how much support from the harpies of Twitter she has received. Support that looks suspiciously like the spite of average women venting their spleen on one of the best in breed who makes them feel bad about themselves simply by existing, from where I'm sitting. "She asked for it," is no less vile an excuse for assaulting women coming from other women than it is from men. And saying that a glamour model has no right to personal modesty in her off-duty lounge-wear is as reactionary as saying that it is impossible for a prostitute to be raped.
Still, it's just a bit of fun, right? All girls together! Put on the Adele records, break out the cava and let's pamper ourselves stupid. But there will be tears before bedtime, more likely than not, and men for once won't be to blame. The party's over and we did it to ourselves.
