Why are we so vicious to women like Cherie Blair?

When the results came in yesterday for the Today programme's poll to find out whom the British public wanted out of the country and whom they would welcome as a new citizen, it came as rather a shock to find that the winner and loser were both women.

To be sure, the results of the poll were a little finessed, since two early winners – Mandela and Blair – were sidelined. But even so, it was an unlikely result. After all, if you had dropped by from another planet and looked over the reviews of the year that fell out of all the newspapers last weekend, you would think that nine in 10 of the inhabitants of Earth spent their time shooting guns or chasing balls.

There are so few women who get to be featured in those summaries of our public culture that the only females who appeared with any regularity were either dead (the Queen Mother) or wearing a bikini (Gisele Bundchen). But when the Today poll closed yesterday, it was Aung San Suu Kyi who had been chosen as a potential British citizen, and Cherie Booth who had been asked to leave.

This is the way we tend to see prominent women; as perfectly wonderful or as absolutely vicious. It has to be said that the latter view tends to dominate the British media. Indeed, if Aung San Suu Kyi were to take up the putative offer of British citizenship, it probably wouldn't be long before even this great heroine were found to have feet of clay. Her enormous bravery, her great beauty, her irreproachable integrity notwithstanding, it is impossible for us to imagine anyone managing to hold on to such heroic stature within the bitter culture of British media and politics.

Although we are able to admire women if they live very far away – like Aung San Suu Kyi herself; or if they are dead – like Princess Diana; or if they have no purchase on worldly power – like Aung San Suu Kyi or Princess Diana; we are still rather troubled by the idea that women might want to exercise any power right here and now. And those who do try tend to find that it is just a hop and skip from the status of hero to that of villain.

It may seem absurd to talk about the barriers that women face in the West after mentioning Aung San Suu Kyi. But for all our great good luck in living in a democracy that has experienced two centuries of feminism, we need not pretend that such barriers do not even exist.

The perennial debate about the absence of women in British public life has recently re-opened. But this time, due to over-repetition, it has a doomy, futile air. It has just become clear that, despite the wonderfully good intentions that have fuelled the spirits of politicians for a couple of decades, there will be no improvement in the political fortunes of British women in the first years of this century.

That's true even for Labour women, who can benefit from the once-controversial all-women shortlists, because even those women have to wait for men to retire in Labour seats, and so few are doing so that any move towards equality at the next election will be minimal, or even non-existent.

And for those parties without all-women shortlists, any changes in the party's personnel could even result in backsliding. Although Theresa May is the first Conservative chairman to talk such fighting talk about wanting to encourage more women into the party, there is absolutely no evidence yet that the Conservative party has any interest in walking the long walk to equality.

There is a danger, anyway, in concentrating only on simple mechanisms that might equalise the chances that women have to enter politics. The dearth of women in British public life is certainly not just about the barriers that they have to scale in order to enter. There is something else going on that lies deeper and is harder to confront, and that is the culture, evident throughout politics and the media, that marginalises and belittles women.

All politicians are mocked by the British media, but there is a relentlessly demeaning edge to that mockery when it is directed at women. For instance, when Theresa May gave her speech about the need to modernise the Conservative party, BBC's News at Ten and Newsnight both led the story with footage of her smart leopard-skin shoes, tapping as she talked.

Whatever the justification for that decision, the effect was simple: it took the attention off her words and directed it straight to her appearance. That effect wasn't achieved in the satiric comments of a couple of humorous commentators, but right there on the mainstream news programmes.

And more than this patronising mockery, there is also a current of much nastier misogyny at work in the media. The choice of Cherie Booth as the arch-villain of our times is ludicrous proof of that. Cherie Booth, most hated British citizen? Above, say, Sheikh Abu Hamza, above Ian Brady?

However you feel about Cherie's sins – and I can't be the only one who sees being conned by a conman and then wanting to cover up one's mistake as a forgiveable misdemeanour – nothing could justify the torrent of filth that spewed out of the tabloids on to her private life at the end of last year. At the time I thought that readers were too smart to believe all the rubbish they were being fed about her evil doings, but since they have tried to vote her out of the country, it looks as though quite a few lapped it up.

No wonder many women who might do well in public life feel that entering it is not worth the pain, and no wonder that many who do enter don't want to stick around.

The lack of privacy afforded to any public figure has now reached absurd proportions. And although men who are hungry for power may be able to kid themselves that they are able to live without a private life, I think women are, rightly, far less able to tell themselves that such a monumental sacrifice of their domestic and sexual privacy for the sake of worldly power could ever be worthwhile.

Women are not only oddly absent in conventional politics. Even in the alternative political worlds of protest and dissent you now have to listen hard to find the voices of women. Polls show that women are far less convinced by the need for war than men are. There was a time when women were able to link arms on such an issue and make their voices stronger by raising them together. And yet the voices that are picked up by the media from the anti-war movement now tend to be male ones; when we do hear from female dissenters, such as the student, Jo Wilding, who is planning to travel to Baghdad to provide a human shield against Western attacks on civilian targets, they tend to be presented as lone mavericks.

Perhaps it isn't that we need great heroines or great villainesses right now in Britain, but just some more perfectly ordinary women to enter public life. Ordinarily competent women who could do as good a job in politics as the men who are there; ordinarily energetic women who could raise women's interests; ordinarily idealistic women who could voice their ideas of alternatives to the current order of things.

But if we are to allow them in, we have to give them the space to talk, to act, and to be heard. And here's my prediction for the year ahead: that is not going to happen any time soon.

n.walter@btinternet.com