When I was a young lesbian feminist campaigning to overthrow patriarchy, what irked me most was the fact that some men would impose their own idiotic view of my sexuality on me, by asking if I would perform threesomes with them, or titillate them with a porny kissing display with my girlfriend.

Today it would seem that, for a number of lesbians, dissatisfaction and anger at being viewed as a male sex toy has been replaced with the desire to become as badly behaved as they are, paradoxically in the name of equality. Last week the Washington Times reported that a lesbian, Tamara Yatkin, who was refused entry to a California strip club because she was not accompanied by a man, is suing the owners for discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation.

The club's manager is alleged to have said to Yatkin that it was policy not to allow women entrance unless they were with a man, because of "past problems".

I have no doubt that Yatkin was denied entry because of her gender and sexuality, and, in both law and principle, that makes it discrimination. But how have we got to a situation where some of us are trying to enter such bastions of male privilege rather than campaign against the sexual exploitation of women?

Lesbians behaving badly is, unfortunately, nothing new. In 2000, Candy Bar, a lesbian club in London, organised a group trip to the Greek island of Lesbos, the birthplace of the poet Sappho, and the top lesbian holiday destination. Flyers advertising a "Wet Pussy Party" flooded the town of Eressos, prompting the then mayor to attempt to stop the women disembarking. Candy Bar, which has since closed down, had regular events featuring women stripping in front of crowds of baying lesbians, some pushing banknotes into the dancers' underwear.

Paying for this type of entertainment is exploitation. One young lesbian I interviewed for a research project told me she regularly visited lesbian strip clubs and believed that the dancers working for a pittance in such clubs were lesbians and definitely enjoying themselves. I have interviewed strippers and lap-dancers. Some are lesbians, but none enjoyed their work and all despised their customers, whether seedy, horrible men or equally seedy women.

Lesbian feminists have long been at the coal face of campaigns to eradicate sexual abuse and degradation, and yet increasingly it would seem, some of us would rather behave like lads than challenge laddism.

Is liberation tantamount to behaving like some lesbian version of Hugh Heffner? In these times of "choice feminism" and neoliberalism, it seems that the very basis of our political movement is being eroded and replaced with an "anything goes" attitude. Lesbians have long suffered discrimination by those telling us we are perverted and defining us by sexual acts rather than sexual identity. Do we really want to play into the hands of the bigots who say we are pseudo men, or can we, instead, challenge the kind of sexual objectification of women that is so prevalent in the world of heterosexual men that we are supposed to have left behind?