SOME people are bemoaning the demise of the 'ladette'. The death toll was sounded for all beer-guzzling, loud-mouthed women everywhere when we were told that the DJ Sara Cox was to be taken off the prime time morning slot on Radio 1 and relegated to early evening after a drop in listeners. It seems that the world no longer needs a lady telling it rude jokes in a loud voice first thing in the morning.

Her best friend and fellow ladette, Zoe Ball, put her Jack Daniels lifestyle away some time ago. She got married, moved to middle-class Hove and had a baby, after which she stopped being photographed pulling stupid faces with a pint in her hand.

Some would say she grew up. But Sara Cox was the last bastion of ladette culture and personally, I am glad the concept of a woman aspiring to be a lad is on its way out.

In their heyday, it was seen to be liberating for ladettes to drink men under the table, telling the bawdiest jokes in the pub and polishing off the night's activities with a moonie. But I never quite got it.

Why is it that, in an effort to play men at their own game, we sometimes end up apeing them? It happened with Margaret Thatcher and its latest permutation was the ladette. Being equal doesn't mean you have to be the same, a mistake too many of us make in life and at work. The ladette just ended up looking cartoonish in what seemed like a desire to become the female version of Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey in their very own Girls Behaving Badly.

Some say Sara Cox and Zoe Ball helped women see they didn't always have to be 'good little girls' who let men have all the fun, but we knew that anyway, didn't we? I'm just relieved they're gone so I don't feel compromised over ordering a mineral water every once in a while.

IN the spirit of learning a new skill which would help me become a more appealing woman, I decided to pay lots of money to join a dance studio (because expensive gyms are so yesterday). My first class was called Sassy Sensations, which sounded like fun.

An odd-looking woman in a spray-on dress and stilettos walked in and just when I started to snigger at her, thinking her a batty old barmaid who had tripped into the wrong room, she introduced herself as the teacher. She then welcomed us to her 'exotic dance class' (what?) and said it was perfect for 'strippers in training'. I'm in the wrong class, I thought, as she began writhing in front of us. Screaming on the inside, I begrudgingly did the 'snake', the 'belly roll' and the 'bum wiggle'.

The teacher finished off by saying that we should practise the moves on 'someone special'. I shook my tush at a very startled cat that evening.