matt kenyon 0803
Illustration by Matt Kenyon

I'm not that fussed about pornography. I never have been. I accept the practical point that a lot of porn degrades women intentionally so can't be made without the humiliation of women involved in it; and I accept the theoretical point that it is made for the male gaze, so women aren't agents of their own pleasure, they're just accessories to male pleasure. But I can't make the leap from there to any serious belief that the act of filming two people having sex is necessarily demeaning to women. I don't accept that women who like porn have somehow been enslaved by a male cultural coding – or if they have, what is anybody's sexuality but a series of triggers and preferences they've picked up on the way to maturity?

Nor am I incensed about what we'd call "raunch" culture, in which a porn aesthetic has seeped into "normal" life, and young women on primetime television might casually wear outfits that 30 years ago you'd only have been able to buy in a specialist shop. Sure, I think there's a solid Marxist critique to be made of it, about market forces and how they flatten everything into one acceptable, sellable shape, and in so doing taint physical intimacy, which is idiosyncratic in its nature. But at the same time I think it's in the nature of young, beautiful people to flaunt themselves to one another. The idea that you can banish the objectification of the body, in either direction, from the business of being human I find neither realistic nor especially desirable.

At the opposite end of this male cultural coding, you have the burqa, and I no longer feel strongly about that. I used to think that it was a tragedy that a woman's dress and, by extension, her public identity, should have to be mediated through male paranoia. But that was before all the attempts I've seen at intervention – from the French law against the veil, which has the effect of ejecting girls from school, to any given liberal argument that takes as its necessary starting point the laughable idea that western women are somehow immune to the exigencies of male paranoia.

And just while we're doing feminist heresies, I don't think that thin models make young girls anorexic. I think that's actually an insult to women, to suggest that the cause and effect of a mental illness should be so bleeding obvious.

It sounds like I've mellowed, but in fact, on other things, I've become more hardline. I no longer think it's possible to be a rightwing feminist. It makes no logical sense to seek equality just for your own gender then step away from egalitarianism more generally. Pragmatically, what kind of equality are you talking about if it only applies among women? Are you just fighting for some kind of tiered parity, where middle-class women have the same rights and prospects as middle-class men, and working-class women have the rights and prospects of working-class men?

I have not turned into one of those beaming, inclusive feminists who looks at Louise Mensch (to take a wild for instance) and says, "Sure, you're anti-abortion, you're rabidly free market, you chip away at all the financial mechanisms that make work possible for mothers and then stop in the middle of a parliamentary inquiry and say 'I've got to leave at lunchtime to do the school run', which does working mothers no favours … but you self-identify as a feminist, and that's what counts."

There are plenty of conversations in the name of feminism that I would happily stamp out like fags in a dry forest. If I read one more article in which someone confuses sisterliness with feminism and wonders why women aren't nicer to one another in the workplace, or on Twitter, or in parliament, or at Asda, I don't think my spirit can take it.

But my International Women's Day pledge is for us to act more like a football team and less like synchronised swimmers. Synchronicity is a mug's game, and things move faster when everybody concentrates on what they're good at. There is no way we'll ever reach an agenda where all of us agree, in equal measure, with everything on it. I've seen larger, more vivid, more optimistic feminist gatherings in the past six months than in the rest of my life put together, but not one of them has reached its end without a load of time being wasted on one of these classic faultlines: someone frozen out for admitting she likes Debbie Does Dallas; someone else saying, "What do I care about some middle-income woman's childcare arrangements when rape is being used as an act of war in the Congo?"; or some feud erupting about whether Hooters is more or less sexist than David Cameron.

The women's movement has a problem with ideological purism: in its discourse it demands not only that we all adhere to a central set of truths but also that we agree on their priority. This task is impossible – you cannot agree a priority between the defence of a woman's reproductive rights and the rights of women to be protected from violence.

You cannot say that, because women suffer injustices far more severe in other parts of the world, a woman who's had to give up work in Harlesden because her tax credits were cut is not a feminist issue. You cannot hope that a belief in equality will lead everybody to the same conclusions about body shapes, or all-women shortlists, or gender essentialism. When we try to present a united front, we're not asking too much of ourselves, we're asking too little: waiting for an unattainable unity is just another way of doing nothing. When we divide, we can burn more brightly in many places.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams