Being a proper, angry, card-carrying feminist — when my two small daughters fall over, I have taught them to shout, “Thanks for that, the patriarchy” as loudly and sarcastically as possible — I should, all things being right, have a huge pantheon of feminist heroes. I should be racking up admirable chicks in some millennia-deep family tree of XX righteousness. An oestrogen Valhalla of the usual suspects: Boadicea, Cleopatra, African explorers in crinolines, Marie Curie, Nicola Horlick. Maybe Margaret Thatcher, but then, also, obviously, maybe not. Let’s face it: we angry feminists haven’t really finally ratified the Thatcher position yet. For us, Thatcher (first female prime minister = obviously amazing; but then there’s all that bad stuff with the miners and South Africa) is a bit like Gary Glitter for rock fans (back catalogue = obviously amazing; but then there’s all that bad stuff with the kids . . .).

But you know what? As I get older I can finally admit a big, and possibly shameful, truth: not one of those inspiring ladies has inspired me. Mary Seacole, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth I, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman — nah. I can’t tell you how nerve-racking, yet liberating, it feels to finally say this. I feel like a middle-class, bra-wearing version of Chuck D from Public Enemy, when, on Fight the Power, he shouted: “Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant s*** to me.” Amelia Earhart — no! Eleanor Roosevelt — no! That chick who helped with finding DNA — not bothered!

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t some faux anti-intellectual piece of reductionist posturing. I totally insist that we all admire and honour these women for as long as we keep history books. I don’t for one minute underestimate what, say, Curie did. Cheers for all the radiation! I love my microwave! Bummer about glowing to death!

I will respect Marie Curie for ever.

But asking me to be inspired by her is ultimately as surreal as asking a lovely, happy, quite stupid labrador to give it all up for Nelson Mandela. All these amazing birds from history are wasted on me. Look: I’m someone who still holds absolute respect to Slash from Guns N’Roses for simply wearing a top hat, smoking a fag and playing guitar, all at the same time. Ruling over the first British Empire is just not necessary to impress me.

As a teenager I was looking for something entirely different from my role models. When I look over my pantheon of female heroes — the random collection of women on whom, as a 1990s adolescent, I based some vision of what to aim towards as an adult — none of them is good at algebra, or international diplomacy. Indeed they are all, without exception, either a) funny, b) drunk or c) what Alan Partridge would describe as “mentalists”. And, often, all three: Miss Piggy, Julie Burchill, Queenie from Blackadder, the Wife of Bath, Doris from Fame, Princess Leia, Janis Joplin, Dorothy Parker, Kate Bush, Jo from Little Women, Dolly from Hello, Dolly!, and Miss Hannigan in Annie (as the eldest of eight children, I could see where she was coming from, childcare-wise.) I suspect, however, that it’s possible, with brain scans, to prove that the biggest influence on my life has been Courtney Love. I know. Courtney Love. Lead singer of the band Hole. Kurt Cobain’s widow. But I loved her then, and still do, because when Courtney came along I was 15, fat, talked too much, drank too much, and what I really needed — and what I am eternally grateful to her for being — was a woman who just didn’t give a s***. I needed a hero who’d repeatedly done incredibly embarrassing things, yet had signally failed to die of mortification. Courtney stood in the middle of s***-storms wearing a donkey jacket and smoking a fag, shouting out Sylvia Plath quotes, and her signature slogan, “You can’t rape the willing”, until, finally, everyone backed off and left her alone.

While we all make a great deal about the importance of aspirational role models, there’s much to be said for role models who just ... comfort. Help to fortify your mental trenches a bit. Make you feel a bit “grrrr”.

By contrast, the female role model I was supposed to be emulating at the time, had I paid any attention to “the world”, was Nicola Horlick. I can’t think of anything more likely to instigate a nervous breakdown in 15-year-old girls than suggesting that their future consists of working in the City, having six children and being probingly interviewed every three months as if you were some kind of business unicorn that must be marvelled at before it, inevitably, gets shot. I’d far rather have Courtney on my side, in her petticoat, with ratted hair, and amps up to 11, shouting about Rilke.

But while I knew I could never be Nicola Horlick, I also knew I didn’t want to be Courtney Love. She could live in my head - shouting “Shut up! Shut the f*** up!” at all my enemies, like some alt-rock Jiminy Cricket, but I didn’t have any inclination to co-opt her peripatetic lifestyle. At the time I was in Wolverhampton, staring down the barrel of a future that almost certain involved manning the Gateway checkout in a green and yellow checked tabard.

What I dreamt of, however, was that, one day, I might own a conservatory, in which I could drink whisky with “fascinating people”, and a large, lush garden, into which I could go to smoke fags with the fascinating people, weather permitting. I wanted to move up from working class to bohemian middle class. I also had an absolutely insatiable appetite for filth. So, really, it’s no wonder that the female role model who I then went on to base my whole future life around is the duchess of the bonkbuster: Jilly Cooper.

Yes, professors of feminist studies at Harvard University, Jilly Cooper. Jilly Cooper is my Aung San Suu Kyi. Cooper seemed to exist in an eminently achievable whirl of gin, gardening, parenting and sexual intrigue. In the days before Nigella, or “yummy mummies”, the idea that you might have both a lovely, Waitrose-esque family life and a load of gin, eyeliner and sex had only one real proponent: Cooper. And, of course, she wrote seminal pornography. I think, for most women of my age, our entire lexicon of desire has come from Riders and Rivals. Rolling around in damp riverside nettlebeds; urgent, illicit screwing in hay barns; “romps” covered in champagne. Still, now, I prefer a few pages of Cooper to anything hardcore and visceral you can buy on DVD. Indeed, I found one of the characters in Rivals, Caitlin, so exciting — for every reason — that, when I became a journalist, and needed a nom de plume, I stole hers.

So those are my two big heroes: Courtney, a blonde Loki, god of chaos, and Jilly, a pornographic yummy mummy with a mature herbaceous garden. Not the sort of people we are supposed to look up to during Women’s History Month, say. A bit marginal and random, I guess. But then, most of us want lives more marginal and random than the examples that Mary Seacole or Ellen MacArthur offer us. I don’t want to sail across the Atlantic singlehanded! I just want to have a nice husband, know when to prune my wisteria, try to become the most amusing person within 500 yards of my house and drink Martinis.

Boys have it easy. They have millennia of heroes. Girls, on the other hand, must fight to admit, slightly ashamedly, that when they were growing up who they really admired were Alexis Carrington Colby, Joan Rivers, Madonna, Marmalade Atkins, Grace Jones, Margo from The Good Life, Rizzo from Grease, Blanche from Corrie, Dorothy from The Golden Girls, Rebecca from Cheers, Harriet Harman, Tracey Emin, or, I dunno. Bananarama.

But we shouldn’t be ashamed. Not ashamed at all. Ultimately, it’s futile for people to tell you who your heroes are. You know who they are. They got you a long, long time ago.

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