My hairdresser asked me last week if I was a feminist. I was flummoxed.

I am used to random questions from my hairdresser; she is a singular person with an unusual capacity for lateral thinking. And yet, on this occasion I found myself stuck for an answer.

Ten years ago, a teenage me would have railed at her. A feminist! Of course I'm a feminist, I'd have bellowed in my most unladylike baritone, and flung an Ani Di Franco CD at her for having the temerity to even ask the question.

Heading into my twenties, head full of Adrianne Rich poems and bons mots from de Beauvoir, my feminist credentials were as firmly established as my penchant for black velvet swing-coats and Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick. And yet, how we change.

A decade on and it is far harder to say whether the term still has any meaning at all for my generation, or whether it has simply been subsumed into the morass of labels and -isms that reek of days gone by.

In our post-modern era of fractured texts, virtual realities and multiple layers of meaning, the idea of having only one system, one theory through which one sees the world, is impossibly old fashioned, quaint even.

Feminism, Bolshevism, pacifism, post-structuralism, dadaism. "Ism"s belong to a more innocent time, when people had the luxury (or the misfortune) to see things only one way.

We live - as we are constantly reminded by everyone from Paris Hilton to Barack Obama - in an age of irony. Irony is the most important filter in the way we see, and talk about, our world.

It's the reason John McCain can use a video of Paris to take a pot shot at Obama, and Paris can use a video of herself to take a pot shot at McCain. Parody, satire, self-reflexiveness. If I ever was a feminist, all of these things mean I can't be one any more.

Twenty years ago, or even 10, a sentence like the last one would have been enough to ensure a predictable deluge of what is euphemistically referred to as feedback.

The denial of feminism used to be a fairly dependable kick-start for a nicely rabid debate. And in between the "how dare yous" and the "good on yous" would have been many expressions of valid opinion on the issue. Because it was an issue that people - men as well as women - cared about. And now, I'll be surprised if there are any at all.

How many women of my generation would consider themselves feminists? Very few, I'd wager. It's a hopelessly dated term, and also, really, a given. Most of the women I know work, talk, and live in a state of equality with men.