Please, spare us the 'women's politics' Girls, girls, girls: it's time we draw a line under the obsession with women and "our" issues. The level of debate over feminism reached a new low this week with the discussion between Laurie Penny and Louise Mensch on Newsnight. The media is fascinated by this issue, either focusing on the "battleground for women's votes" or on topics such as whether BBC Radio 4's Today programme has enough of us on. Newsnight seems to be leading the charge with its all-women panels. I suspect it's got to a point where feminism is now being given disproportionate air time, but no one's done a study on this yet. It's not often I agree with Laurie Penny over Louise Mensch, but on one key point I do. At the start of the discussion, teasingly chaired by Paxman, Laurie remarked: "There are many different types of feminism, but some of them are wrong." Not one would think that a particularly controversial comment, but Louise didn't agree: "I don't necessarily think there is a wrong kind of feminism," she said. "There are maybe different types of feminism," but they "want to get to the same goal." This in some ways is the crux of the matter. There are many different types of feminism, some based on ideas of sexual difference, others on a focus on androgyny; there are schools of feminism in a neo-Marxist tradition that look at power relationships between people, and there are others focused on the rights agenda. Some of them must logically be wrong, as they are trying to accomplish entirely contradictory things from each other. What is worrying about the Newsnight discussion is that these women came from the Left and the Right respectively, and they should have been subscribing to radically different understandings of feminism. But they weren't. They both seemed to agree that feminism is ultimately about the state trying to improve outcomes for women, measured it seems largely in terms of equal representation. The main point of difference between them seemed to be that Louise Mensch argued that conservative feminism is more holistic because it encompasses looking at a broader range of issues that affect women, including things such as personal taxation. I don't think this is an authentically conservative approach to feminism at all. The point of conservatism is that it is about the practical realities of life - not, unlike other political approaches, focused on abstract utopian ideas. Just think about the day-to-day realities of most women's lives in Britain. They are impossible to categorise. Women don't walk around defining themselves as members of a particular narrow interest group: they work out life as mothers, wives, partners, employees, employers, volunteers, daughters, sisters and friends. The idea that women exist in a vacuum is utterly ridiculous and yet seems to pervade current dialogue on this topic. Asking what policies will be good for women as if they are a homogenous group is absolute nonsense. People are inherently interdependent and connected into community. The refusal to buy into divisive single-interest group politics should be one of the things that sets Conservatives apart. Conservatives believe in a small state for good reason, and that must be the starting point of conservative feminism. Let's let families decide for themselves what suits them. Let people keep more of their own money in the first place, and have greater control over vital services like education and healthcare. Let employers and employees negotiate together whatever arrangements they want, without cumbersome regulation that pretends one-size-fits-all. After all, the benefits package that suits the thrusting, ambitious woman beloved of some feminists will be entirely different from the package that suits the woman who is trying to balance domestic and work responsibilities. "Left-wing feminism" cannot reconcile that problem. Getting sucked into the debate on Laurie Penny's terms, so we focus on equal representation, will simply lead to more state intervention - bad for everyone, not just women. Ruth Porter is the communications director for the Institute of Economic Affairs