November will see the premiere of Pan Am on BBC2. It is a soft-focus drama series, bought from America, about the adventures of a group of Pan Am stewardesses in the 1960s. It is all big hair and pouting, with a preposterous photogenic-stewardess-as-CIA-operative subplot, to distract the viewer from the fact that Pan Am is all about big hair and pouting, a reductive and submissive fantasy, with working women as eye candy and, explicitly in the first episode, as sex aid. Even so, they are represented as empowered, because they are beautiful, and get on and off aeroplanes.

It is remarkably similar to Virgin Atlantic Airlines' repulsive 25th anniversary advert of 2009, which shows a group of big-haired, pouting Virgin stewardesses wafting through an airport terminal like women who forgot to get dressed. Outside the terminal, meanwhile, newspapers scream about the miners' strike, but you can forget the proper politics, because it does not exist in this glittering shagscape. When the plane eventually takes off, it has a semi-naked woman painted on the front, wrapped up in a British flag because her semi-nudity is a patriotic act. We are not even in 1960; 1960 is long gone. We are in 1940. "Still red hot," says the tagline. Yuck.

I mention this as last week, at the Fawcett Society's annual AGM, I pondered why the feminist movement seems so comprehensively to have stalled. Feminism seems so tiny today, so niche, of such little interest to the outside world and even to women. And yet it is needed; the facts are bewildering or depressing, depending on one's mental state. In the UK, the pay gap of 15.5% will not shift. When the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) polled 34,158 male and female executives in the private sector last year, they learned the average pay gap between men and women doing the same job is £10,031, and the average woman will, as such, be cheated out of £330,000 in her lifetime, which is a lot for a feminist, and also for a consumer.

The glass ceiling is still bulletproof; men outnumber women in parliament by four to one, and there are more millionaires than women in the cabinet (and it shows). Women who do make it into politics are mocked and debased; alongside Cameron's Cuties and Blair's Babes, we now have Millie's Fillies, a fine headline for the fact that there are now 13 women in the shadow cabinet, to Ed Miliband's credit. The cuts, as this newspaper has detailed, will affect women, who are the nation's carers, and who tend to work in the public sector, far more than men. Because childcare responsibilities still fall on women, women with children take low-paid, opportunity-free part-time work, and suffer economically and, presumably, spiritually.

Meanwhile, after a summer when single mothers were blamed for the riots, abortion rights are still routinely questioned, and it is now quite normal for editorials to denounce women for seeking to abort as murderers.

After the AGM, I went to a birthday party, and told others where I had been. I listened to men and women tell me how much they hate Harriet Harman, the woman who pushed the Equality Act, although in a neutered form, through parliament, and was abused for her trouble. (See Rod Liddle's columns, particularly the one where he called Caroline Flint "fit as a butcher's dog", although I am probably not meant to mention it again, it being old news, so I am a bad sport.) That was their comment on modern feminism – an indistinct, half-imagined dislike for Harriet Harman, although they cannot remember why. And I decided then that I lay the blame for the stalling of the feminist movement, almost entirely, at the door of the media.

The Fawcett Society and its concerns will almost never make it into the mainstream media. Some things, as I have learned in almost 15 years in journalism, are just not a story until they explode. The media seems to have reinvented itself not as a source of information, but escapism, a one-way conversation with your own internal idiot. In this world an octopus called Paul, who can predict the results of the World Cup, is a story, even if he cannot, actually, predict the results of the World Cup, because he is an octopus, and is probably above such things. Add squirrels on waterskis, obese rabbits, dogs that can use cash-points and – who knows? – semi-politicised fish, and you have a genre of the media that is probably bigger, and is certainly more profitable, than the section that cares about feminism.

You can dream of a fair, comprehensive and balanced article about the Equality Act, but you will not get it, even if Paul the Octopus offered to write it with one of his many arms. Nor will a piece about the achievements of women in politics get through – "Millie's Fillies" will cut it off at the knees and we can all fall about, laughing at the presumption of these women. The media still uses the ridiculous term "career woman", even though there is no such thing as a career man. Instead of debate, what we have are articles about how women bosses are evil (especially to, er, women!) and how women who work hate themselves because their children turn feral without a Cath Kidston-wrapped maniac in the kitchen. Statistics are rare. Statistics are too boring to print.

Instead, the media acts as a marketing tentacle for the beauty and fashion industries – no friend to women, merely selling the lie that purchase is a feminist act, because, in the words of the L'Oreal slogan, "We're worth it". Yes we are, and that is why I do not dye my hair. In fact, shopping is the only feminist act still possible in the media world because they think consumerism is feminism; buy, and feel good about yourself, even as you get into debt for your trouble, and forget that actually you looked OK in your old clothes, with your old hair, and with your old vagina. It also, due to its emphasis on shopping, mistakes what a feminist is. Two current TV heroes, Mary Portas and Kirsty Allsop, could be interpreted as feminists, because they have both their own TV shows. In fact, they are not feminists, but saleswomen, as committed to female dissatisfaction – buy a house, buy a dress, buy anything – as anyone in sales.

Celebrity is no friend to feminism either, even if Angelina Jolie once made a statement that could be reasonably divined as feminist. (I have no idea if she did make such a statement. But it is possible.) Because she had to starve, sweat and be surgically enhanced to be in a position to make it and be heard. Sex and the City is an OK conduit for a discussion of feminism, because it contains shoes, without the Sex and the City peg, you will get nowhere. I suppose celebrity's contribution to feminism is: if you are hot enough you will be heard, but hurry up, because you won't be hot for long.

My serious advice to the Fawcett Society, as it prepares for its day of action in Westminster and around the UK on 19 November? Get a psychic octopus to act as your spokesperson. Or, failing that, explode.

www.fawcettsociety.org.uk