In the week that Made in Dagenham opens at the cinema, celebrating those heroic women who walked out of the Ford plant in 1968 to fight for equal pay, how depressing to read that 37% of British schools now offer cheerleading as a "sport". One march forward, two twirling skips back.

The other day, someone asked me on Twitter: "Are you a feminist?"

"Of course!" I tweeted back.

Five minutes later, possibly over-thinking a brief exchange of sentences with someone I will never meet, I added: "But it depends what you mean by the word."

Feminism has matured nicely, to the stage where its definition is complex and flexible. My first, instinctive reply had taken the question to mean: "Do you believe in equal pay, equal rights and social freedom for all?", but, in 2010, that is surely just another way of asking: "Are you normal or a moron?"

If my tweeter was inquiring whether I am an active, campaigning feminist, that would be no. But I know where my heart lies when I hear those great old birds from Dagenham reminiscing about their struggle – and when I see teenage girls in boots and knickers, waving pompoms and being told they are "doing sport".

They aren't doing sport. They are waggling their arses near boys who are doing sport. The boys are motivated to compete harder and triumph in the subliminal (or not so subliminal) hope that they'll get first pick of these little minxes on the sidelines. Even if you don't think it's sexual – and I do; I think these girls might as well be bent over a rock, waiting to be mounted by whichever caveman gets back first with a rabbit in his hand – at best, their job is to support the action rather than take part in it.

Boring, boring, boring. This is the week of the London EPT poker festival in Paddington. I have been playing for 15 years and only now are we starting to see more women at the tables, trying to win tournaments rather than sitting on the rail looking pretty for their competing boyfriends. I've been having the same tedious conversation for over a decade – "Why can't women win at poker?"; "They can, they just don't think it's their place to try" – and just as that mind-numbing Q&A starts to die down, I open a newspaper to find that a whole new generation of young women is being trained in the watching-and-waving role, rather than getting stuck in.

For God's sake, girls, think of Dagenham! Put your trousers back on and try to score a goal!

It isn't just my inner feminist that balks at a supportive, beautifying role for girls in their formative years – it is also my inner geek.

I was your classic school nerd: chubby, blotchy, badly dressed, maladroit, scared of alcohol and readier to die than dance. I was quite bright, but that doesn't get you invited to parties. It gets you invited to speak at the debating society, to an audience of none.

When I wasn't angrily reading David Copperfield and thinking: "I can spell every word in this book, so if you don't want to kiss me then you lose, sucker!", I was browsing American teen fiction in the secret hope of learning how to be a cooler girl. But all it ever made me think was: "At least we don't have cheerleaders."

In American teen fiction (and, presumably, culture), the gap between the cool, pretty girls and the losers was infinitely more pronounced, because the cheerleading squad was a formal division between them. Wrongly shaped American girls didn't just feel left out, they were.

These days, as you can probably tell, I wear squareness as a badge of pride. I present the absurdly difficult quiz programme Only Connect, Monday nights on BBC4, which some have been kind enough to call "the geekiest show on television". I am free to be proud of that now.

That's not just because I'm older and worry less, nor because someone else does my makeup for me (though that's a mercy). It's also because "geekiness" has become rather fashionable.

The Information Age gives kudos to anyone who understands or cares about technology. Social networking allows kids to type their hellos, rather than mime them across the terrors of the dance floor. The average teen film hero, now, has thick glasses, striped clothes and a brain like a computer.

I'm not saying that kids who score lower on brainpower and higher on hotness should be denied their chance to shine. They'll shine anyway, don't worry about that. There is barely a teenage girl alive who wouldn't swap a 150-point IQ for a size 8 figure and perfect skin – and those are the clever ones.

But the social gap between beautiful, "cool" teenagers and shy, clumsy, late-developing ones (which causes real misery for millions of young people) was narrowing with the rise of geek chic. The opportunity may finally be there for school sport Utopia: everyone kicking around in the mud, having fun, learning to compete hard yet be gracious in defeat, with those who are always defeated having their other strengths respected so they don't feel like big, fat failures.

Or, you know, have cheerleading. Jam that teenage beauty contest right on to the actual curriculum. Forty years after the Dagenham strikes, four out of 10 British schools are putting the hot girls in porny costumes and teaching them to shake their buns through life. The chubby or self-conscious girls can only watch, envy and remember that they don't look "right". Meanwhile, the boys play football and learn that competition is a male thing. In another 40 years, perhaps these men can be paid more than women for the same jobs because they are, literally, more goal-oriented.

Well done, everybody.

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