If there really is to be a Mamma Mia! sequel, may we expect one or two small parts for feminists? They have surely earned it. After five months in which it has become the most profitable, most sung-along to, most life-enhancing, generally most record-breaking film and DVD event in British history, it would be understandable if the makers of Mamma Mia! considered additional support from some high-profile feminists to be of little moment.

But praise from this unexpected quarter has attracted a fresh audience of the type that never goes to see a critically panned, feel-good musical of surpassing silliness performed, exclusively, by people who can't sing, unless a respected feminist has reported that it made her feel happy for the first time ever.

In this case, Julie Bindel, the prominent anti-prostitution campaigner specified that the happiness induced by Mamma Mia! lasted a good 12 hours, during which she felt 'for once that the world was quite a decent place'. Jeanette Winterson records a similar mood-change brought on by this 'celebration of femaleness', Jenni Murray applauds a 'life-affirming piece of work', while novelist Naomi Alderman elaborates: 'It makes you feel relaxed, as a woman watching.'

But not, one gathers, as a man watching. 'The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years,' wrote critic Anthony Lane in his review for the New Yorker, 'and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate.'

Many male critics have agreed with him. 'They just didn't understand it,' Alderman noted in her tribute, confirming that Mamma Mia! is not so much a film, nor, as its distributors describe it, a 'feel-good cinema event', nor even a global phenomenon the like of which has never been seen, as a key signifier of gender.

If reservations about Mamma Mia! have yet to be formally accepted, in medical circles, as a symptom of female sexual dysfunction, there appear to be few doubts among its millions of supporters about the dodginess of any woman who discovers herself to be immune to its life-affirming effects. Or as the poet once put it: 'Hail to thee blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert ...'

So it's possible that some of the eminent writers and thinkers who have declared their affinity with this squawking make-believe have done so because that is easier than betraying that there is something a bit wrong with you or, worse, advertising a haughty lack of empathy with the film's delighted, all-ages, all-kinds-of-women audiences.

Not, perhaps, since Diana's death has an event brought together so many different types of women in effusive, sentimental, faintly oppressive sisterhood.

Certainly, it's worth being a little cautious before confessing that, though you enjoyed the stage show, you can't quite see what all this fuss is about. Tread softly, because you might be treading on a senior feminist's only experience of happiness.

Of course, a recent succession of woman-pleasing entertainments has regularly whipped up something resembling audience consensus, but even when Vagina Monologues fever was at its preposterous height everyone knew there were plenty of women who would never find anything very life-changing about shouting - as they were dared to do - 'Cunt!'

Similarly, despite the claims made this year for the universality of Sex and the City, the movie, and the amazing way its little cast encapsulated half of humanity, it was always obvious that the world must contain at least one person - Angela Merkel, for instance, if not PD James - who would not find it easy to pick a soulmate out of Carrie, the plain one, the idiot and the slut.

It followed that, on the whole, women might be more complex than was indicated by those four bag-crazy grotesques. But somehow, the creators of Mamma Mia!, by fusing Abba with Vagina-based self-esteem, Carrie's unlikely conquests and Strictly's thunderous prancing, with a little hint of something very real and regional (Julie Walters), have inspired a degree of female identification that has eluded every rival version of triumphant womanhood, including, one can't help noticing, feminism.

Visit the LSE today and the female student body has yet to be entirely convinced after only 40 years or so of women's liberation that it is abject for a young woman to get her breasts measured so as to qualify for the Miss University London beauty pageant.

The participants insist that it's all about personality as well as appearance. Are they not going to be asked, for example, which Sex and the City character they most relate to? Moreover, they say, the event is empowering in that it can't really be demeaning because the subjects have chosen to be demeaned. Same as pole dancing.

With the arguments now so entrenched that some students are demonstrating against the others with placards, it seems high time for a peacemaking trip to Mamma Mia! where these estranged sisters will understand that, when all's said and done, what women really want is to get drunk with other women and live like teenagers for ever. Preferably on a beach. With lots of men on it.

Possibly that is to over-simplify the message of Mamma Mia!, which also emphasises, in a way that the placard-carrying LSE students may well appreciate, that the deep bonds of female friendship are such, fortuitously, as to see them, happily, through their later, men-free, years. Men being, good riddance, a hopeless and emotionally illiterate sex.

And yet, as the contestants in Miss University London plainly understand, bouncing on the bed in your dungarees will not pay the bills. Happily, it is a rich man's world and your feisty, independent Streepalike has only to pick her favourite from a patient queue.

Wherever there are desperate producers, they must be wondering if the mesmerising effect of this nonsense can ever be replicated. Would it have been life-affirming enough without lovely Julie Walters? Was it key to its success that this feel-good cinema event resembled, with its unashamed amateur dramatics, nothing more than a directorial debut by Linda Snell, off The Archers? Would anyone have looked twice had not Meryl Streep, after a lifetime's sober endeavour, suddenly volunteered for gamey raunch and that final, dismaying screech of: 'Do you wanna 'nother one?'

Even for those who are otherwise resistant to its charms, the one redeeming feature of Mamma Mia! is its lack of cynicism. Its creators could not have known, for all the international success of the stage shows, that women would respond with limitless, uncritical enthusiasm to a risible, though potentially rather sad, fantasy about middle-aged female omnipotence. So perhaps it is, as its fans maintain, a work of life-affirming genius.

Alternatively, being a middle-aged woman in Britain might be much, much worse, than anyone had previously imagined.