I'm all for Women's Lib, honest I am. It is, after all, us women who have to put up with so much: going to work, looking after the little ones, cleaning, cooking, (unless of course, you're living with the Naked Chef), plucking and waxing. Times have certainly changed.

Gone are the days when you could expect a man to go hunting for food or even put up the shelves, or mow the lawn. Or carry your bags. Though if you're very lucky he may be able to put together a four-piece Teletubby jigsaw.

Nowadays sisters have to do it for themselves. Female emancipation means "do it yourself" which is all very well but...

I even toyed with the idea of going to Saudi Arabia so at least I wouldn't have to drive (females don't do that kind of nonsense over there). One less headache I'd have, I thought to myself. And I wouldn't have to battle with early morning commuters in order to get to work where my fingers would be worn to the bone as I chattered away with colleagues and had breaks at 11.30.

All my female co-workers would be modestly covered from head to toe and we would laugh at the poor man while he cleaned the windows. What fun we would have had. And we would have had some pretty racy gossip too, such as: "Did you see the state of the flirty Yasmin the other day, my, she was walking around with her veil nearly down. What a trollop!"

But no, these are not those days. Now we rightly have equality in many areas of life. Women work, men work, men change nappies, bath babies, suffer post-natal depression, the change, wear sandals, watch soaps. But there are still places where you don't see women.

On building sites, for example. There was a furore recently over the Bob the Builder children's programme which was deemed sexist because the only female character was Bob's sidekick, Wendy, who sat in the office and answered the telephone. Er, what's wrong with that? Talking on the phone is a very hard job, as those of you who have tried to get rid of double-glazing salesmen, I mean people, will know.

Of course, there are lots of role models for us nowadays, women who have fought hard and achieved so much. But up until now they have looked feminine. Well, apart from Annie Lennox in her suit-wearing days in the Eighties.

Men and women should be equal but can't they at least look different?

American movie star Julia Roberts has already tried to make body hair fashionable, and now Madonna is muscling in on the act and trying to look hard with her new body-builder physique. We already know she is tough. She wouldn't have survived in such a cut-throat business with that nasal twang of hers if she wasn't. But does she have to walk round like a Grant Mitchell lookalike?

That's not girl power. That's gorilla power.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.