Anyone who has ever called themselves a feminist - even with a laugh in their voice and a toss of their hair - knows that the word is a red rag to misogynists, and that in the face of this, you have to find ways to bolster yourself. Deep-held conviction helps, as does the camaraderie of brilliant, politicised women. There's the self-respect that comes with recognising that not having a penis is no actual impediment, and, finally, crucially, there's the element of results: the sense that the culture is chugging forward.

There has always been resistance to feminism - the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project - the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less - is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women's rights, I felt smug. Thank God that's not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.

Of course, if you're feeling smug, you've got it wrong. In the weeks after Pollitt's article, I found myself tripping over signs, left and right, that not only does the feminist movement still have far to go, but that arguments we thought were long-won have been re-opened, rights we thought were settled are suddenly under threat. These signs came in a whole variety of forms, some ridiculous, some devastating.

On the ridiculous side, for instance, came a survey by Marketing magazine of the nation's most-loved and least-loved celebrities. The respondents' top five most loved were men: Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. Of the five most hated, the top four were women: Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona, with Simon Cowell coming in at number five. On some level, reacting to this at all seemed stupid, and yet ...

Another small sign came in the response to a post on the British feminist website the F Word. The average number of comments on any post on the site is around 10, but after one of the site's bloggers asked whether readers had experienced street harassment, hundreds of responses poured in. "Of course," wrote one woman, "I can't go out without being honked at, and people have asked me to 'suck their cock' when I was just walking down the street." "Yup," wrote another, "got threatened with rape on my way home just under a fortnight ago - when I responded angrily the creeps followed me down the road."

Then there are all the signs about attitudes to women and work. Flicking through the newspapers one day, I came across an interview with Theo Paphitis, who appears on the TV show, Dragon's Den, as well as on the country's Rich List each year; he is easily one of the UK's most prominent business people. "All this feminist stuff," he said, "are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?" Paphitis went on to note that women "get themselves bloody pregnant and ... they always argue that they'll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal". On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks "it's a bit soppy".

And, sadly, Paphitis isn't alone in his unreconstructed views. In interviews earlier this year, Alan Sugar, Amstrad founder, Apprentice star and government business adviser, repeatedly challenged a law instituted more than three decades ago. This law was one of the big wins of the 1970s feminist movement, making it illegal for women to be asked at interview whether they plan to have children, on the grounds that it is clearly discriminatory: a chance for employers to weed out any woman who wants to combine a family with work. "You're not allowed to ask, so it's easy," said Sugar, "just don't employ them."

A survey showed that 68% of employers agree with Sugar, and it was at this point, admits Katherine Rake, director of equality campaign, the Fawcett Society, that she seriously began to worry that a major backlash was underway - suddenly she found herself having to speak up for rights that are so long-established they had seemed entirely beyond debate. More cause for concern arrived in a particularly unlikely and depressing figure: former feminist icon, Rosie Boycott, one of the founders of the ground-breaking 70s magazine, Spare Rib. Writing in the Sunday Times, Boycott, who now runs a smallholding, said that "my pigs certainly aren't going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business. Little wonder, then, that plenty of angry voices were last week demanding that women should get back to the kitchen".

If women aren't wanted in the workplace - and the fact that we're still paid 17% less than men for full-time work, 36% less for part-time work, is a sign in itself - then at least our right to be safe from violence is recognised and protected, right? Far from it. Just as the attitudes of business leaders seem to be regressing at speed, the number of women being killed by a current or former partner has remained constant at two a week, and the rape conviction rate has been diminishing to the point of near-invisibility.

I was reminded of this last fact when the Washington Post, a newspaper that rarely picks up on British feminist issues (the US frankly having enough issues of its own) ran a long article about this disgrace in our justice system. The piece pointed out that the rape conviction rate in Britain has plummeted from 33% in the 70s to just 5.7% today, and that the 14,000 rapes reported each year are thought to be the tip of the iceberg - Solicitor General, Vera Baird, suggested that only 10%-20% of all cases are brought to the attention of the authorities. The article quoted a barrister called Kerim Fuad, who has represented many men accused of rape, and who admitted that he had been surprised by some "not guilty" verdicts - including those in which the plaintiff had sustained internal injuries. It alluded to an Amnesty International poll, conducted in 2005, which found that 26% of respondents thought that a woman was totally or partially responsible for being raped if she was wearing revealing clothing, and 30% thought she was totally or partially responsible if she was drunk.

How does the wider culture respond to this? Does it do everything it can to make sure that rapists are punished, that women are granted justice, that the balance is redressed? It does not. In the years in which the rape conviction rate has stood at a point so insultingly low that it represents a backlash in and of itself, the papers have often focused, not on the victims, not on the rapists, but instead on running multiple articles about women who have apparently lied about being raped. The number of women who take false complaints to the police is thought to stand at 3% of the total, as it does with other crimes, but the media focus has casually, simply, successfully, helped ingrain in the public imagination that, when it comes to rape, women lie - a notion that, naturally, has a rather serious effect when it comes to trial by jury.

If rapists aren't going to be punished, then there must at least be good support services in place for women who have been raped. Well, no. The women's movement of the 70s and early 80s fought for provision for rape victims, a network of Rape Crisis centres, and, by 1984, there were 68 of these essential services across England and Wales. Today, with rapes at an unprecedented high (the tally of recorded rapes rose by 247% between 1991 and 2004), the number of Rape Crisis centres has almost halved - there are now only 38. This massive shortfall in services is less surprising when you consider that three of the most important women's charities in the UK - Refuge, Women's Aid and Eaves Housing for Women - all of which support female victims of violence, have a combined income considerably lower than that of The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that supports ageing donkeys.

As the number of Rape Crisis centres plummets, the number of lapdancing clubs has proliferated, bolstered by a 2003 change in licensing laws, which bracketed them with coffee shops and karaoke bars. Since this legislative change came into effect, the number of lapdancing clubs has doubled. In the small city of Brighton and Hove, for instance, six clubs opened in quick succession and across the country they are now opening at a rate of almost one each week. The government has recently pledged to tackle this issue, by reclassifying lapdancing clubs as "sex encounter" establishments, and while that's great, it doesn't change what we've learned in the meantime - the fact that there is clearly a massive demand for these clubs, that venues which involve women's bodies being marketed to men are patently a brilliant business proposition. This isn't surprising when you consider that the sex industry is more casually accepted than ever: one in 10 men now admit to having visited a prostitute, stag party visits to brothels are seen as par for the course, and the consumption of internet pornography has gone far beyond the point of familiarity.

The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women's bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we've seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women's bodies are pored over - a pound gained provoking headlines that they're fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they're too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they've failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye - which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women's bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there's then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There's something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.

That intense scrutiny of women's bodies is one trend in pop culture. Another related one is the current obsession with women as mothers, a trend being played out all over our cinema screens - in films including Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Happy Endings, Waitress and Smart People. It's also being played out in the gossip magazines. In the past few years we have seen Jennifer Lopez paid a reported $6m (£3m) for exclusive pictures of her with her twin babies; Angelina Jolie is expected to clear $10m if she agrees to pose with the twins she will give birth to later this year.

In fact, the obsession is such that one magazine editor has said that "it's at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos". We've seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years - as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is "this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?"

Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women's worth is directly tied to childbearing, the constant images of mothers are a siren call for women to get back into the home, and yet we're also seeing more and more blame put on mothers. Women whose children are murdered or abducted are increasingly blamed for not having looked after their offspring well enough, for not having been on constant watch; those who work with the victims of child sexual abuse say that this is true in those cases too - there is often more blame put on the mother of a child who has been abused, than whoever actually abused them. And on a more day-to-day basis, it seems that it's impossible for women to live up to social standards of motherhood. Mothers who go out to work are seen as neglectful, those who stay at home are seen as dullards. Today's mothers are regularly defined as too overbearing - when they're not being reviled as too lax.

The other big gossip-magazine trend is for women to be depicted as "mad". Over the past few years we've seen a massive media obsession with women who are considered to be out of control - Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and, to a lesser extent, Paris Hilton - and it's hard to avoid the sense that people want to watch these women's story arcs reach the same conclusion as that of their predecessor, the former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, who died of an overdose last year. Of course, at one point there was also a massive interest in Pete Doherty's behaviour, but it's notable that this was when he was going out with Kate Moss, and his transgressions therefore reflected on her. Once they had broken up, that interest quickly waned.

These pop cultural trends have been around for a few years, but one longstanding issue that renewed itself very recently was the backlash against abortion rights. This crept up on me suddenly in late Spring - I knew that a Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries, was campaigning to bring the abortion time limit down from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, but until a few days before the Commons vote on this issue, I had no idea that amendments had been tabled to bring the time limit down to 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, 18 weeks, 22 weeks. And while the outcome of that vote was a retention of the time limit, that was only because of the Labour majority in the House of Commons. Eighteen shadow cabinet ministers voted to reduce the limit to 22 weeks; David Cameron voted to reduce it to 20 weeks. A survey of prospective Conservative MPs found that only 9% would vote in favour of the current time limit - 86% want a lower limit.

With figures like this, there seems no doubt that it could be very difficult to retain current abortion rights if the Conservatives come to power, as many now consider inevitable. And this is especially true since analysis of parliamentary candidates shows that the already appallingly low rate of women in government - they make up just under 20% of MPs - may well fall given a Tory influx at the next election, and certainly won't rise.

"My big concern," says Rake, "is making sure that we create a feminist debate that sustains us through however many terms of Tory government we're going to have". And there are plenty of other signs that we're going to need such a debate - in fact, the backlash is intensely bound up with the current rightward shift in politics. Since taking office as Mayor of London, for instance, one of Boris Johnson's first acts has been to axe the role of women's adviser; an insider was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying that Johnson saw the role as a "throwback to the Eighties GLC".

Thankfully, there are signs that the feminist debate is growing - in fact, many of those I spoke to believe that this is exactly why the backlash is so strong at the moment. Before the abortion vote took place in the Commons, for instance, a large group of women gathered outside Parliament, and formed a rowdy protest against this potential assault on our rights. Rake says that membership of Fawcett has shot up recently, because "as the progressive space closes down at a national level, it just opens up somewhere else ... I do think that there's a general unease about the culture - we've been campaigning on the lapdancing issue, and we've had a lot of people saying, 'Thank God someone's finally saying something about the fact that I have to walk past a lapdancing club just to get home every night'. I think that there's that general concern about backslip on cultural issues, and then just a concern that, while on other issues we're moving vaguely in the right direction, the progress is incredibly slow. That's led to a kind of militancy that's re-arising now, in all sorts of quarters."

She points to the revival of the Reclaim the Night marches, and the recent Million Women Rise march. "I do think that there's a sense that people are beginning to get active, because they're also all waking up to the fact that a lot of the rights that we've taken for granted, can't be. I think that that activism and recognition is a cause for optimism."

Professor Liz Kelly, chair of the End Violence Against Women campaign agrees that we're in a time of resistance, but also sees a positive side to the situation: "I think that you always get the greatest resistance when you're actually doing something," she says. "I think it signals that there's a slightly stronger sense of feminist organisation and voice than there was 10 years ago. The irony, of course, is that you only get resistance if there's something to be resisted."

A friend of mine, a long-time feminist activist, notes that "there's always been a backlash, ever since day one of women's existence - long before it's ever been documented. So the concept of backlash is always alive, it's just that there are times when you think that we are really sinking into a cesspit. What I would say, though, is that, for all the resistance, I don't think we ever take two steps back. I think we only ever take steps forward, but those steps can be smaller and harder, like wading through treacle, or sometimes you can have a little sprint, a spurt, and think, 'That's fantastic, we've won that little battle.'

"What a backlash does is that it curtails us, but we never take those two steps back, and that's what I think can send the conservatives - and I mean that with a small 'c' - and the rightwingers, and the upholders of the traditional family, absolutely wild, because whatever they throw at us, so what? What do they think we're going to do? Go back to how we were before? Go back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich? We might be wading through treacle at the moment," she says, "but the fact is that they won't actually win".