JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER: Today’s feminists are so out of touch with how most women live, they might as well be on another planet.

I had to break some terrible news to my young daughter this morning.

At the tender age of nine, I knew that what I was going to tell her would shake her world to the core and affect her life forever.

We live, I gently explained, in a patriarchal society that limits women’s choices and that she will never be truly free to be all that she can be simply because she was born a girl.

My daughter shook her head in bemused disbelief and, with a disdainful roll of her eyes, went off to clean her teeth as she pondered whether to be a doctor, a stable girl or Prime Minister when she grows up.

I guess she must have missed the memo.

So what had prompted this grand revelation from mother to daughter? Well, last night I attended a Guardian newspaper-sponsored event at the National Theatre to discuss whether feminism is “the new F-word”. Everyone else there had definitely got the memo. The whole place positively oozed with patriarchal oppression.

Here we were, a bunch of highly educated, well paid, successful women sitting in a theatre moaning about how women are being held back by sexism. Cue the irony klaxon.

Women have to be oppressed. Because if you’re not oppressed, you’re not special.