“Why are they always men?” my 11-year old daughter asked disgustedly, emerging from Spiderman 2 last week. Many feminists have repeatedly asked the same question, but it seems that once again, Hollywood is embracing the idea of the action heroine. A slew of them is about to high-kick their way across the big screen this summer, from the adorable teen-queen Keira Knightley in King Arthur, to Halle Berry in Catwoman, who is transformed from an “incompetent”, powerless woman to one who lives without fear and refuses to play by the rules – other than those that demand action heroines leap about scantily-dressed as a dominatrix.

I love action-women, the more so for having spent much of this year in and out of hospital having major surgery for cancer. Like much of the population I’m hopelessly unfit, and prefer curling up on the sofa with a good book to pounding away at the gym, but my fantasy-life is deeply involved with images of myself jumping from log to log in a raging river (otherwise known as being a working mother during the summer holidays), swinging across deep gorges on a few strands of handy creeper and cutting up that nasty man in the white van during the school run instead of meekly letting him pass. If, as Cyril Connolly claimed, there is a thin man inside every fat man desperately signalling to be let out, there is an action heroine inside every tired mum telling her that actually, she’s still got her inner Emma Peel alive and kicking.

There are, needless to say, feminists who deplore these over-sexualised images of what women could become, arguing that films featuring butt-kicking babes simply re-establishes the existing inequality between men and women. When you see really bad films, like Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson’s ill-fated venture into films) or Tarantino’s Kill Bill (another excuse for an orgy of violence) you can perfectly see why. I’m just as troubled by the recent spate of advertisements featuring aggressive, disdainful women humiliating their male partners while driving. Showing either sex as contemptuous of, or violent towards the other is silly and does absolutely nothing for the feminist cause. Yet why shouldn’t girls and women be able to use the myths, fairy-tales and illusions inspired by latent rage against their lot, just as men fantasise about turning from nerdy Peter Parker into the swooping, diving muscular Spidey?

Having nursed quite a few bruises inflicted every time my children watch another episode of Xena Warrior Princess, I know that such fantasies can feed aggression rather than give it a safe outlet. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that girls should have such figures in their fantasy life. The alternative is the passive, pretty, someday-my-prince-will-come model of girlhood that, as my daughter says, sucks. Nowadays, as those who have seen Shrek will know, a girl isn’t impressed by Prince Charming. She has to discover her inner ogre to find true happiness.

I spent my childhood in what now passes for the white-heat of popular feminism, with Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman genteelly pulping the bad guys while never experiencing a bad hair day, Cagney & Lacey raising the profile of women police-officers, and the glorious Emma Peel in the Avengers (who just happened to live in the North London street where I grew up) elegantly kicking villains in the pants. One absorbed the idea that it was exciting to be active more or less with our free school milk. Later, thrillingly, there was Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien, who actually got dirty and sweaty and who saved a little girl from the clutches of a monster – action heroines from Linda Hamilton in Terminator to Lara Croft usually exert themselves only to save boys and men. Then, in the 1980s, it all went into a nose-dive. From Supergirl to Joan of Arc, action heroines spelt box-office death. (Strangely, the Far East is much more comfortable with action heroines, because of the gender equality of manga comics.) While real women increasingly succeeded in the real world, the women we saw on screen for the past twenty years were either bunny-boilers or as passive as your average Nicole Kidman heroine.

Why has it taken until now for the action heroine to return? Partly it’s just the cyclical nature of Hollywood, which is periodically forced to return to old stories because it runs out of new ones. More cheeringly, it could be more in tune with the new feminism which has no problem with lipstick and spandex being a part of female empowerment, as long as we, like Catwoman, accept who we are and lose our fear of playing outside the rules of what is and isn’t proper for a woman to do.

There are still very few role-models for such girls in books, it has to be said. My fierce little daughter refused to read CS Lewis after coming across Aslan’s opinion in The Lion the Witch & the Wardrobe that girls shouldn’t fight in wars, and it’s still true that our sex is remarkably badly-served, even today, despite being quite as capable of thumping each other as boys. The fantasy writer Tamora Pierce is one of the very few modern children’s authors to feature girls becoming knights and fighting in combat, and even has a web-site devoted to “Sheroes” (www.sheroes.com) or outstanding women in history and literature. You don’t have to think that violence per se is a good thing to feel sad about this. Too often girls start off as tomboys, like Philip Pullman’s Lyra in His Dark Materials and become feminised, wittering on about how nice it would be to be clean, and have little babies. Alas for them, and us. Hollywood has it right: your imagination should not be fettered by questions of personal hygiene and fertility, especially when young. It wants to swoop through the air, gallop about in armour and whack a few villainous heads off. How else are we to discover the thrill of ambition and self-reliance?

Action heroines matter, and not only as inspiration for our frail and failing physical selves as to what we might aspire to. I’ve always believed girls should be taught martial arts rather than the idiotic gymnastics they’re still made to do in school. Having the bare minimum of karate once enabled me to take out a man who attacked me on the Underground, and I learnt this because of what impressed me when I was an impressionable young thing. Right now I’m marooned on my sofa, feeling as feeble as you do when convalescing, but determined to do something about it. I’ll never look good in spandex, or jump up sky-scrapers or even be a dominatrix with a Magimix, but the fantasy of doing so might just about drag me to the gym.