Sometimes it feels right to knock Nigella

She writes a newspaper column, has her own television show and has just published a hugely successful book, How to be a Domestic Goddess. Her critics have been denounced in one national newspaper as bullies and harpies, while another devoted half a page to explaining "why the sniping sisters show no mercy to a woman of integrity". It is a familiar story, according to Carol Sarler: "They turned on Nigella Lawson because bitches do turn on their own kind."

She writes a newspaper column, has her own television show and has just published a hugely successful book, How to be a Domestic Goddess. Her critics have been denounced in one national newspaper as bullies and harpies, while another devoted half a page to explaining "why the sniping sisters show no mercy to a woman of integrity". It is a familiar story, according to Carol Sarler: "They turned on Nigella Lawson because bitches do turn on their own kind."

Well, that's the theory, although the image that usually comes to mind when women attack each other is a cat fight. There are few things the press loves more than the spectacle of women spitting, kicking and pulling each other's hair, metaphorically at least. Columnists are positively encouraged to go for each other in this way, often by editors who delight in watching the fur fly. What could be more pleasurable than to find Ms Sarler in The Observer laying into Charlotte Raven, of The Guardian, insisting that the latter needs her bottom smacked for daring to criticise Ms Lawson's book?

Like the spat a few years ago between Germaine Greer and Suzanne Moore, it was an argument made in media heaven, even before Sarah Sands of The Daily Telegraph weighed in with her perplexing claim that Ms Lawson "has become a divinity". The extremity of language is striking, with the cookery writer beginning to resemble Diana, Princess of Wales, pursued by a pack of baying media hounds. Preposterous though this is, it reveals depressing assumptions about women, some of them reinforced by women themselves.

Chief among these is the notion that any disagreement among the "sisters", as we are ironically called on these occasions, must be personal.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when a political editor, a man I like and admire, scolded me for my review of Julia Langdon's biography of Mo Mowlam. He was amazed, he said, by the savagery with which "the sisterhood" attack each other - an assertion that astonished me in turn because my critique was not remotely ad feminam. I had not claimed that Ms Langdon was stupid or cruel to animals, although I did suggest that her book had been badly written.

If a man had made this observation, I don't think it would have been remarked on, let alone produce a heated conversation. When Tony Blair mocked William Hague at the Labour party conference, his speech was not deconstructed as the spiteful ravings of a man who secretly envies his rival's large penis (I am, of course, speaking hypothetically here). But women are not allowed to disagree with each other in public without being accused of betraying the cause or having a nasty little personal agenda. This is convenient in all sorts of ways, for it appears to expose the underlying hypocrisy of feminism while also confirming the old stereotype of women as emotional, unintellectual and - hey guys, you can relax! - even more misogynist than men.

OK, time for a bit of rapid rebuttal here. Being a feminist does not require you to sign a pledge that you will never, ever say anything negative about another woman. This is especially true when the woman in question is playing into the hands of woman-haters, as Ms Sarler egregiously did last weekend. More to the point, it is perfectly possible for one woman to criticise another because she disagrees with her ideas, not because she covets her wardrobe or her boyfriends. I do it all the time, whether the woman in question is Baroness Thatcher or an author whose book happens to strike me as absurdly hyped.

Which brings me back to Ms Lawson. Her book is cleverly marketed, feeding nostalgic fantasies of chirpily sexy domesticity, but it is in the final analysis just a cook book. That she is being written about in such hyperbolic terms demonstrates only that the marketing process works. Such a deliberate conflation of author and product makes it easy to portray Ms Lawson's critics as malicious wannabes.

And yet, even if we acknowledge her beauty and the courage with which she has faced her husband's illness, they say nothing about her writing ability. To suggest otherwise is special pleading, of a kind the women's movement has previously resisted. Nor can it disguise the fact that some of us remain unseduced not on account of Ms Lawson's goodness, but by the shortcomings of her prose.