My mother is one of those sickeningly perfect women we'd all like to be. She's professionally successful, has great relationships with her husband, friends, and children, is well-travelled, well-read, multi-lingual, and interesting. In addition, she's gorgeous, an amazing cook, and can accessorise like a dream. In fact, she is the only reason I believe that such women exist outside the realm of fiction.
But even she feels that all she has achieved is not enough, and that she could have done more with her life had she taken different paths, made different decisions.
What went wrong with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s that turned 'having it all' into 'doing it all'?
I am 25 years old. My female friends comprise academics, students, retail assistants, and office workers, to give but a few examples. They all have ambition in their careers - to write novels, to become buyers for international chains, to start their own magazines.
They all have boyfriends they support.
Sure, they may get the occasional help with the cooking or cleaning, and there's always a massage waiting when they want one, but these girls* all go out every day to earn the money
to pay for rent, food, and bills while their boyfriends slob around playing MMORPGs, doing the odd bit of washing up as 5pm edges closer.
What on earth is going on here?
Even the small minority of boyfriends with jobs have nothing to crow about. They've stayed in the same role year after year, not even fighting for inflation-based pay raises. Once their basic needs are taken care of, ambition and the desire to improve disappear.
Has feminism failed men as much as it's failed women? Or is it just that the men I know are so emasculated by the drive they see encapsulated in the women around them that they give up
completely, and instead float along in banal complacency?
In 2005 I read a report of a study in the New York Times that said for the first time in American history, more black women would be graduating from university than white males. The same article pointed out that SAT scores were higher for women across the board, irrespective of geography or race. They posited that it was because high-school boys were too caught up in playing at - or living as - macho gangstas to have considered the value of education to their futures, or those of their children.
While they may be right, I think it's the parents who are at fault. I, and all my female friends, grew up being told repeatedly by our mothers that education was paramount, and that once we were educated we could achieve anything we put our minds to, thanks to the efforts of their generation and all the feminists who came before. My male friends, on the other hand, were told by their fathers which football team to support, and how to master basic DIY.
Girls were taught to pursue success, to fight for it. Boys were told that success was theirs by right, and that it would come by sheer virtue of the three to eight inches of flesh dangling between their thighs.
In the 21st century, girls have won the battle for professional success - and the self-worth and pride that comes with it. Depressingly, however, I think the boys may still have won. After all, self-worth may taste good for a lifetime, but there's still a lot to be said for the short-term satisfaction of being completely selfish with your time, knowing that there's a woman out there paying for the food on your table and the roof over your head. Which you'll get round to appreciating once you've used your +7/+7 sword of power to defeat the mythical priestess of Feminista in front of all your friends.
* Because I don't feel old enough for "woman" and nor do they. I'm not patronising anyone here.
Kate Walker will probably send her daughters out to work if she has them. The drive to succeed starts young!