CAN anyone be a feminist? Is it a mere matter of ''I am because I say I am'', or are there (or should there be) some agreed-upon criteria so that when someone says they are, you can be confident that person holds certain views?

Maybe this is a strange question to be asking when we are supposedly living in a post-feminist era, when feminism is still mocked and trivialised by the media and (no coincidence) when young women famously assert, ''I'm not a feminist, but …'', meaning: I want the equality but not the label.

But the question has come up recently in two very different examples. Meryl Streep said on 7.30 recently that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who she plays so brilliantly in The Iron Lady, ''was a feminist whether she likes it or not''.

You could almost hear the shrieks of disavowal around the Western world: No! No! she's not one of us.

Then last week we had the brouhaha around Melinda Tankard Reist, the Canberra-based campaigner against porn and the sexualisation of girls, who has threatened to sue for defamation a blogger who commented on Tankard Reist's failure to disclose her Christian beliefs in a recent magazine profile. The same article described Tankard Reist as one of several high-profile women who are ''redefining feminism - and making enemies in the process''. Sarah Palin was named as another. What these women have in common is their self-identification as ''pro-life feminists''. They are against abortion.