This week, as you may have heard, four thin women will be overpaid, oversexed and overbalancing on their expensive shoes on the silver screen. The calorie-free cinematic confection that will be the Sex and the City movie may well go unwatched by me, but I see no harm in it. It is, after all, only a story. What I do squirm at is the idea that these women represent liberated womanhood. I thought that there was a little more to it than that. Is Carrie Bradshaw a feminist? Come to that, am I?

I had lunch with a friend lately. “Obviously,” he said, “you're a feminist.” But I didn't want to agree with him. Whatever being a feminist entails, I'm pretty sure that it forbids concurring with avuncular men who make statements that confuse you. If I was a feminist, I'd have to tell him to watch his assumptions when talking to an independent-minded woman, but then I would have been - tacitly - agreeing that I was a feminist and thus that he was right.

A paradox to baffle a pre-Socratic philosopher, and it was only lunchtime. I hadn't the fortitude to take it on. I did aggressively eat some more steak, which I felt was symbolic of strength and assertiveness. I refuse to be weakened by lack of food like women who succumb to the tyranny of diets.

However, the confusion of the conversation very nearly affected the digestion of my T-bone. To avoid this happening again, I thought I had better decide. Not whether to lay off the steaks, of course. I did, in fact, eat another steak that very evening, rendering me a sort of girl version of Desperate Dan - Desperate Danielle - with an insatiable craving for cow, which will, when I get my own cartoon strip, be a big step forward for womankind. No, what I had to conclude was whether I was a feminist or not. It was surprisingly difficult.

There are a number of possible reasons for this difficulty, but, as always when in doubt, I shall blame my mother. Or, at least, my mother's generation.

Because back then, going by the archive footage, it was easy to be a feminist because it was fun. It was like being a hippy, or supporting a football team. There was a feminist crowd to roll with. They didn't, admittedly, all put on the same clothes like football fans; they were more in the line of taking things off. But they all took the same things off - high heels, make-up, bras - and occasionally they set fire to them as well. Light, carefully controlled arson is good fun and strengthens bonds. And everyone read Germaine Greer and she thought about the body a lot more than, say, the Suffragettes had, so that was sexy, and there were clear injustices to be fought. It was simpler to identify yourself as a feminist, and to say what that meant. And, yes, of course there was subtlety and theory and dissent. But there was also a spirit, a trend. Feminism was fun. They never had it so good.

Cutting to the present, the strange thing about my awkwardness on being declared a feminist is that it's so rare to have to say that one is or one isn't these days. Women's esprit de corps is now more along the lines of mass cooing over the couture in SATC. Sisterhood doesn't come from shared ideals of women's liberation, and one doesn't become a feminist to be part of a crowd. Women now have to decide for themselves what they mean by feminism and it's more complex and, well, more boring.

Examining my own behaviour, I realise that I have never, for example, been recommended a modern book for its feminist message. Greer is not now a universal influence, but a half-remembered scold from some drear reality TV a couple of years back. I do resent the absence of women from the top of politics and industry, but I acknowledge that the reason for this is more complicated than simple prejudice. I do not regard my choice of clothing as a gendered political statement.

So, I miss the support of the Sixties' bombastic crusade and regret the lack of identifiable ideals to sign up to. But certainly I expect to be respected as much as men and I espouse feminism as part of a general yearning for equality.

Now I know this sounds like lazy feminism, but I can let that slide, except for one, big stain on my conscience. Frailty, thy name is Grazia. If feminists burnt their bras to challenge restrictive ideas of what the female body should look like, then their lingerie flamed in vain. I am addicted to the celebrity press, most of which is in the gutter, all of which is gawping at the stars. I can opine at length on the physique of Madonna or Britney Spears. I have beheld, as a result of an early addiction to Vogue, the waning waist of the average superstar, and on balance, I feel somewhat queasy that I have not managed to free myself from the idea that it matters a smidge what famous women look like.

And yet. It has always mattered a bit, has it not, the appearance of famous women? From the majestic hairstyles in sculptures of Roman matrons to the Romantic dreaminess of Lizzie Siddell in the pre-Raphaelite paintings, the values of the day have been embodied in celebrity women. I think that it would require a sea-change in our mentality beyond the powers of today's rudderless feminism to stop us looking at female icons. And if the SATC women are today's ideals in female form, then perhaps I should feel emboldened and empowered by their hard bodies and spike heels. Even if they are shallow, man-obsessed fashion victims, they are at least fierce and indomitable ones.

I have had to come to the conclusion that I cannot look my avuncular friend in the eye and declare that I am exactly as feminist as I would like to be. But, like being photographed by Heat magazine looking good getting out of a cab, these days, it's harder than it looks.

A lack of fizz makes me so lemoncholy

The lemonade is better in France and Italy than it is in Britain. You may not have noticed this, being struck, if you visited either country, by the superiority of the weather, the food, the figures, the suntans, the clothes, the ooh la las, and the ciao bellas. But once you get over all that, the lemonade really is splendid. I am not talking about freshly squeezed pressés or fragrant beverages from Sicilian groves, but just cans of fizzy drink.

In Italy they have Lemon Soda and in France they have Gini and they're both so zingy and sour and refreshing in contrast with the sugary nonsense that we have here.

In fact, I discover with outrage that Gini was once sold in Britain, wasn't popular and retreated back to France much as the Normans didn't. What's wrong with us? I thought that, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, we had the world's most sophisticated palates now.

This summer, invest a euro in the citrus fizz and, on your return, petition your newsagent for a lemonade you can believe in. Write to Schweppes. Refuse to be fobbed off with 7Up. We get the beverages we deserve. People power: drink sour.

Beware of a cat in a hat

Japan's trains are unfeminist places. The carriages are full of chikan (loose translation: pervs). The practice of using one's high-tech phone to take pictures up skirts is so prevalent that it is illegal to make a mobile that photographs silently. So I should be pleased that the Kishigawa Line now employs one female among its 36 employees. She is a cat called Tama, who is formally employed as stationmaster and wears a uniform hat every day. A cat in a hat is an unlikely source of strength in the fight for equality, but I suppose that there's no point railing against sexism if one's going to be speciesist. Welcome to the sisterhood, Tama.

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