What a view Dolly Parton must have had from the stage at the O2 earlier this month. Twenty thousand girl disciples — for the audience was almost exclusively women, with a smattering of loyal gay followers — gazing up at the lady like she was Jesus. “Oh, you’re looking so good!” she told her fans in the front row. “You’re so well lit!”

Then Dolly — in the flesh, not unlike Kenny Everett’s Cupid “All in the Best Possible Taste” Stunt alter ego — launched into Islands in the Stream and 9 to 5, and the arena was on its feet. As we streamed out afterwards — via the stand selling pink-fur-trimmed Stetsons — back to our boyfriends, husbands, kids, jobs and normal everyday things, we felt loved, respected, welcome and important, like we were part of something bigger than, and also entirely about, us. The Dolly magic had worked.

Dolly’s roof-raiser was the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film. The gaggles of hatted, stilettoed ladies ricocheting around the races and the tennis. Coleen on her extended hen weekend; Cheryl Cole escaping her husband in Thailand with team Girls Aloud; and that later addition to the ladies-only canon, the baby shower. They constitute a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

Last Friday, I was invited to a friend’s birthday at a private karaoke bar, with 10 thirtysomething professional women. Do I really need this, I thought, picturing a night in on the sofa with my boyfriend and Jonathan Ross. But I went. And it turned out to be one of the most vital, liberating evenings I’d had in ages. We drank, we sang — caterwauled actually — and in the spaces between the songs, there were truths told, real poignant honesties about life, love, work, family, the sort of straight-to-the-heart-of-the-matter stuff that men tend to see as the dog work of married life. The evening only came to a close when a well-known TV news presenter and mother of one failed in her attempt to stop the manager turning off the system by throwing herself bodily against the door.

There are those who would find a pathos-laden oestrogen-fest like this difficult. A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

“We do, among other things, cabaret, apple-bobbing and three-legged races,” says Marisa Brickman, a 29-year-old member of Girlcore, an all-girl collective that runs one of the most queued-for club nights in London. (Demand is such that Girlcore recently began to let in boys.) “We have a dress theme — this time, it’s summer camp. Girls are sillier than dudes. They know that if you’re trying to be cool, you’re not having fun.”

Clothes are important, let’s not pretend otherwise. Dolly does cartoonish embonpoint, candied hair, 6in jewel-encrusted mules and a high camp “it cost me a lot of money to look this cheap” parody of sexy that belongs exclusively to her. Dressing up for girls is a special kind of dressing up — very different from the boy version.

“Girls have an educated eye; they appreciate it in a way that men don’t,” says Emma Lawrenson, 32, a big spender at Cricket in Liverpool, who goes on jaunts with her girlfriends once every three months. “We’ll stay in my flat and we’ll be hanging things up on the rail, saying, ‘Oh my God, what are you wearing?’ And I’m as excited by what they’re wearing as by what I’m wearing.”

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk”. Last year, the art curator Isabella Macpherson held a series of girls’ networking dinners. What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Clearly the best bit about female camaraderie is being jolly, jolly nice to each other. An American craze earlier this year was girl-only “branding parties”, which involved trusted friends being frank with each other about where they could make improvements in their lives. If used wisely, what an extraordinary wealth of information and perspective we have at our fingertips. My friends and I don’t do that, but we do congratulate each other all the time on how exceptionally young we all look.

It’s got to come down to trust. Girls en masse can be scary. I’d rather deal with a group of drunk men in a pub than walk through a gang of teenage girls on a dark night. Whose stomach hasn’t hit the floor at the prospect of a hen weekend at some spa with one close girl mate — the bride — and eight other women you’ve never met? For dolliness to work, it must be based on discretion (or, as Samantha in SATC would say: “In our group, we never kiss’n’tell!”), honesty, inclusiveness. Oh, and obviously competitiveness is out, at least in theory.

“In the same boat with a lotta your friends,” sings Dolly in 9 to 5. “Waiting for the day your ship’ll come in /And the tide’s gonna turn /And it’s all gonna roll your way.”

Dolly knows that whatever your circumstances, life is hard, complicated and tiring. You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with. At that karaoke party, there was a moment when one of our number, a girl who’d been having an extremely complicated time, stood swaying in front of the screen, lost to the world and

I Think We’re Alone Now by Tiffany. Don’t cringe — she looked more at ease with herself than I’d seen her in ages, and long before everything started to go south.

“There’s that feeling when we’re all on the train,” says Lawrenson. “Oh my God, we’re on our way! Then it’s champagne and being inappropriate, and it’s a relief. Afterwards, when you’re home again and you’re putting the kids to bed, you’ll be knackered, but because it only happens now and again, it doesn’t matter. And the next morning, we’ll be on the phone, doing the postmortem, like we’re 22 again.” We all know what Dolly would think of that.

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