I shouldn’t, I suppose, as a high-minded broadsheet journalist, be peddling details about the private lives of my colleagues on The Independent. But I cannot forbear from mentioning here that Deborah Ross stopped at one child. She obviously has a better memory than me. I was about nine hours into my second labour when I suddenly thought: “Shit. It’s impossible. This one is going worse than the last one.” About 21 hours later I’d had the baby but hadn’t actually held it because I was too busy haemorrhaging to death. Luckily, I happened to be in a hospital at the time, so they were able to staunch the flow after only five or six pints had sprayed round the room in the manner of the “salad days” sketch from Monty Python. Within 10 weeks I was back at work, even though this strategy had been such a disaster the last time around that I’d lost the job by the time my first son was six months old.

Lots of women who go back to work full-time after one child find that, with two, it’s just not possible. In journalism though, there’s a third option that isn’t necessarily available in other industries. It’s the one I plumped for myself, when, so early in my stab at “having it all”, push came to shove. Mothers move from executive roles into writing jobs, which offer them much more flexibility. Often they write about the subject that obsesses them — work/life balance. They are encouraged to, of course, because all newspapers and most magazines, are keen to woo the elusive female reader.

Virtually the only wider acknowledgement of this huge journalistic genre, though, is the “Polly Filler” satire in Private Eye, featuring a narcissistic female columnist who does nothing but complain about her easy life. I have no objection to the column — it does what satire is supposed to, mocking the comfortable and comforting the afflicted (who are working women without au pairs and partners to moan about). But what I do find amazing is that much of the other writing about the real difficulties of having and raising children in our complex and demanding western society is totally ignored.

Gory details of babyhood

I was invited to write this piece because some comments I’d made in The Guardian about the tenth anniversary of Women In Journalism had aroused the BJR editor’s curiosity. I’d been a founder member of the group, but left for a combination of reasons, not least of which was its emphasis on networking, equal pay with men, breaking through the glass ceiling and generally treating male achievements in the workplace as the gold standard by which any successful life ought to be measured. Above all else, most of the women in the early meetings of WIJ wanted their own female network that would rival the old boys’ network, as if nepotistic, all-stick-together, notwhat- you-know-who-you-know, tipping-the-wink was a perfectly fair way of going about things (apart from its gender bias).

Women In Journalism did have other aims, apart from throwing good parties, providing female solidarity, and doing things in exactly the same way as men. It wanted, for example, to improve the way in which the media portrayed women. The organisation has had no impact on that because the media, in the last 10 years, have become more of an anti-female propaganda source than ever before. Ten years ago, it was considered progressive that a new breed of general interest men’s magazines were seemingly replacing top-shelf pornography. Now those titles, and the titles they have spawned, are full of pictures of sexually-objectified women. Yet it does not do for women anymore to suggest that this soft pornography is something that is being propagated by men, with women as the exploited victims. In a recent interview with Times columnist Janice Turner, the editor of men’s weekly Nuts, Phil Hilton, explained that it was young women themselves who clamoured to be photographed, naked or semi-naked, in his publication. Women who did not understand this were simply out of touch with the liberal sexuality of girls today. I believe his assertion, as far as it goes. But I think what is underlying this is the pressure on women to marginalise or ignore the overwhelming, life-changing significance of their role in human reproduction.

In a television interview, the artist Sarah Lucas — probably the most high-profile overtly feminist artist working in Britain today — said that all of her work was about sex, because all of life was about sex. She instructed the interviewer to look out of the window at the flowers. They too were sexual organs. Sex, she said, was everywhere. But she’s totally wrong — flowers don’t have sex, they exist only to reproduce. This is not a fact that people seem to take on board until the reality is staring them in the face from their cradled arms. Lucas herself has not had children.

Meanwhile, young women seem just as keen as men to forget what their breasts and vaginas are really for. Breasts are fetishised so much now as glands of sexual display that young women pay thousands of pounds to have them enlarged, even though this destroys their only practical function – the production of milk. Even with an early WIJ member as editor of The Sun, the paper continues every day to bring us the amazing news that women have breasts, although decades of Sun research have still not ascertained whether they still have breasts when over the age of 30. Rebekah Wade has not had children, so she doesn’t see that this really is not appropriate in a “family newspaper”.

Newspapers shouldn’t be publications that parents have to keep away from children — not for such vulgar and empty reasons anyway. It is not nudity I’m against. It’s porn. I find it ludicrous that penises are not, by common agreement, “allowed” to be shown in newspapers. Vaginas are of course beyond contempt. No newspaper printed a portrait by Lucien Freud, our greatest living painter, that portrayed female genitals on a middle-aged woman. (Oddly, the decision was right, even though the taboo is hypocritical.) This is in itself, of course, extremely meaningful. Far from the opening through which labouring women give birth to sons and daughters, vaginas, like the most vile of human beings, are “cunts”, the nastiest, most horrible, most despicable sort of enemies in existence. Some women — myself included in the past — have adopted the word. I was under the mistaken impression that I was reclaiming it, as black people had done with “nigger” and gays had done with “queer”. I’m sure that my colleague Janet Street-Porter was acting out a similar idea by wearing an expensive necklace spelling out the same word during her one-woman show. That delusion ended when I took my seven-year-old son into the family stand at a football match, and realised that the word had also been reclaimed by a hundred thousand disgustingly rude and insensitive men.

An ugly, messy painting

The vile thing wasn’t just that the men didn’t want to care for their infant children, or to support the women who did. It was that they were determined to consider such work beneath them, and suitable merely for women, whose ability to put up with the mess and the boredom and the exhaustion was “natural”. Further, while they were unanimous in asserting that they would never commit themselves to doing such work, it did not even occur to them that it might be kind for them at least to consider doing less baby-centred stuff, such as shopping or cooking or dropping off the dry-cleaning. Their tacit solution was to work even more, earn lots of money and pay other people to do all this necessary and dull stuff. But they were not even engaged with their own lives and their own families enough to admit this. They make Polly Filler look like the ideal parent.

The great irony is that while the macho media does more to denigrate family life and what, from the beginning of WIJ, Mary Anne Sieghart — bless her — called “family-friendly policies”, journalism is one of the industries that is actually in a good position to challenge the tyranny of the minimum 40-hour, full-time week. On the dailies, no editor works six days every week anyway, so someone has to deputise. Usually a job-share would make more sense. On the Sunday papers, turning up for work on a Tuesday is often an exercise to get one’s name ticked in the register. The newspaper industry manufactures the myth of long hours of dedicated time at the office being necessary. Mostly, journalists sit around in the office reading the papers, since they are pathologically unable to spring into action until a deadline comes close enough to inspire the release of adrenaline. Hey guys — that’s just like childbirth. But of course, much harder, and much more important.

This ghastly conservative culture needs to be challenged not just for the sake of the workers themselves — who continue significantly to be a bunch of divorcees, alcoholics, lunatics and/or serial adulterers — but in order that the message being sent out to others can change as well. There’s a fat chance of that happening though, when the women in the industry get together and decide that the best they can do for each other is throw some parties and offer seminars on how to ask for more money. A great friend of mine believes ardently that a feminist by definition wants equal pay with men. It’s one reason why I’m not a feminist. I think that men should want equal pay with women. What would transform us into a happier, more rounded society is part-time work for all, a bit of downsizing and a realisation that work and money aren’t everything. Setting up an old-girls’ network and pushing for pay rises is just pouring fuel on what’s already a nasty destructive media fire.