OMG, you have to check out the catfight between Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. It all started when Ange told The New York Times that she had fallen in love with Brad Pitt on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith in 2004, when he was supposed to be totally married to Jen. So now Aniston’s gone for Jolie’s jugular and the latest is: Brad’s so annoyed that he called his ex and chewed her out.

Yes, I know that it all sounds very Jerry Springer but it may be useful at this point to recall the actual words that Aniston used to cause this headline-grabbing three-way stropathon.

What Aniston said was: “There was stuff printed there that was definitely from a time when I was unaware that it was happening. I felt those details were a little inappropriate to discuss. That stuff about how she couldn’t wait to get to work every day? That was really uncool.”

Well, here’s the outrage, in my humble opinion. A woman six years younger with huge pouty lips takes your man, because she can, leaving you to face 40 alone and childless . . . and “a little inappropriate” and “uncool” is the best you can come up with, Jen? Oh dear.

I would have said that the situation called for some full-fat, industrial strength, venti-sized bitching. What you gave it was small, skinny and decaff, and that got me really worried that maybe - my voice drops to a concerned whisper - you’re not really that okay after all.

For as I know from the work of wimmin such as Kate Figes, Germaine Greer, Julie Burchill, who’ve all hymned their song of praise to the bitch, from Joan Crawford to Joan Collins via Jean Harlow (that’s Harlow with a T), the strongest and funniest and best women are just that: bitches who say it loud and proud.

It’s when women stop being bitches that the trouble starts. Not being one is a sign of drippy weakness, of craven conformity to the crushing man-made convention that women don’t speak out in case they’re thought ball-breakingly aggressive and unattractively unfeminine. And Jen? Bad news. Not bitching is now also a sign of age.

Scientists last week established a link between high oestrogen levels and cattiness: a link that most of us might have worked out from our viewing of every reality TV show from Big Brother to the bikini-clad, talons-sharpened I’m a Celebrity.

A hundred women between the ages of 40 and 64 were shown pictures of faces that were digitally altered, some to look more masculine and some more feminine. The survey showed that the older the women were, the more prepared they were to rate other women attractive. Boffins speculated that this was because young women were fighting each other about men, but older women were over that rat race. “Postmenopausal women have shifted away from this mating-oriented psychology to one focusing on family and community,” the Royal Society said. The newspaper headlines were rather more succinct. “Women become less bitchy as they get older,” they crowed.

And yes, on the face of it, I can see this sounds nice and cosy. It raises the placid prospect that in lateish middle-age, life’s suddenly going to get like The Archers, with everyone offering each other cups of tea and volunteering for the church flower rota, and women gratefully closing the door on their years of slagging off their friends behind their backs and passing on chlamydia to their best friend’s boyfriend.

Now we can all see the point of that. None of us like women who slate other women because they feel insecure and competitive themselves, but as I think you realise, this isn’t really what I’m talking about.

No, like the aforementioned women writers - Greer, Burchill and co - I’m all in favour of strong, funny women telling it how they see it. We already live in a mimsy, cowed surveillance society where everyone takes offence at whatever is said (you should see my postbag), particularly if a woman is saying it.

As Figes, author of The Big Fat Bitch Book for Girls, points out: “Now, men tend to call women bitches when they do not get what they want from them. So if a woman turns a man down for a date, she is a bitch. If she climbs the career ladder faster than him, she is a bitch. If she becomes his boss and turns down one of his ideas, she is - you guessed it - a bitch.”

When the word is understood in that sense, I don’t think it’s just a woman’s right to be a bitch: it’s her duty. Which means that being called a bitch is a badge of honour. As Madonna said: “I’m tough, ambitious and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”

So nope, I’m not planning on becoming a sweet little old lady, knitting in a corner and not saying boo to a goose. Whatever the old hormones are doing, we must carry on bitching - in a good, strong, brave way, of course, rather than a vicious, weak, cowardly one. After all, as the late Bette Davis said: “When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.”

All fine by me.

- Obviously great news about the post office U-turn and good to hear that Lord Mandelson realises that the network can “rebuild itself into a widely accessible, trusted provider of a broader range of financial services”. I take it this is an acknowledgment that after the financial meltdown, consumers have only about three high-street, state-subsidised mono-banks to choose from and so post offices have at last come into their own.

I also hope this is a sign that the government is secretly planning to claim as its own work the genius proposals for a “people’s bank” based on the post office network, launched by the New Economics Foundation. If it does, then I promise we shall say no more about the years of cost and chaos that ended in the awarding last week of the post office card account to the, er, Post Office.

But we can’t draw a line under the episode. There are still 2,500 post offices, many in rural areas, facing the axe. So we can’t shut up until Lord M reverses the closure programme and realises that when it comes to post offices, the all-purpose slogan of “change” (doublespeak for “mass closures”) won’t wash.

We don’t want change. We want post offices to stay the same.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

Times Recommends

• Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers
• Dave’n’George: there may be trouble ahead
• I do not accept that £64,000 a year for politicians is peanuts