This four-minute, hip-hop-influenced pop song has saturated the airwaves since spring, and was No 1 for almost all of September. With the refrain, “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?/ Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?”, the listener untutored in Pussycat Doll ideology might look at the barely clad Dolls doing their raunchy dance routine and think Don’t Cha is about a woman telling a man: “I know you fancy me more than you do your girlfriend. Who wouldn’t prefer me to a boring, clingy girlfriend? I ’d happily share you with her, but she wouldn’t like it.”

One singularly, aggressively, unsisterly, catchy pop song. Right? Wrong, according to the founder of the Dolls, the choreographer Robin Antin: Don’t Cha is not the gorgeous, glossy Pussycat Dolls sneering at the lumpen female proletariat. “It is an anthem for all confident girls,” she says. “I want to help women really accept themselves. I will never give up on putting my message out there for girls and for women.”

And the message is? “Inside every woman is a Pussycat Doll, which makes you feel sexy and empowered. You wake up every day and put on a little bit of gloss, mascara, a little blush, and look cute. It’s about looking after your body, being healthy, eating the best, drinking a lot of water and taking care of your hair. It’s about using the Pussycat Doll mentality in your everyday life and being inspired by the best a woman can be. It’s a religion.”

Right on. But one chick’s religion is another woman’s retrograde postfeminism. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy refers to “the Pig” as a woman who has decided that male objectification of women (as in dressing up really sexy) is kinda cool, and enthusiastically adopts this as a way of feeling like a strong, confident individual. See Jordan, see Paris Hilton, see the Pussycat Dolls.

Yet the audience for these women is not downtrodden twentysomethings in dowdy clothes and dead-end relationships. They are the preteens, and the message they’re taking on board is that sex is all about surface. This is evidenced in 10-year-old girls with Playboy pencil cases; in balloon-breasted Jordan’s new range of jewellery for Argos, which offers such delights as earrings shaped like thongs and bras; in T-shirts with Slapper, Slag or Golddigger emblazoned across the chest.

In a recent survey, girls aged 15-19 were asked which female figures they aspired to emulate: 47% said Abi Titmuss, 33% Jordan, 7% Anita Roddick, 9% JK Rowling and 4% Germaine Greer. When asked their ideal careers, 63% said glamour model, 25% lap dancer, 4% lawyer, 3% doctor, 3% teacher and 2% nurse.

The original Pussycat Dolls became the apex of underground hip, with cabaret performances at Johnny Depp’s former club, the Viper Room, in LA. For six years, off the back of the burlesque scene, the Dolls were the hottest countercultural ticket in town. And women were their biggest fans, as were the A list — Brittany Murphy, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani all performed with them.

It was Stefani who propelled them out of the LA club and onto the international music scene when she introduced them to her record-company boss, Jimmy Iovine. The idea of turning the dance troupe into a girl band had been floating around for a while, but Iovine, unlike several industry bosses before him, “gets it”, says Antin. “The others were confused, because we didn’t fit an existing commercial template.”

Nine years later, they’ve formed a band from existing Pussycat Doll members, and recruited a couple more, including the singer Nicole Scherzinger as front woman. Unlike her bandmates, she displays something of the tortured artist. “At first, being raunchy was hard for me,” she says. “I had a lot of insecurities. I was a small-town Catholic girl. This group helped me be more comfortable with myself.”

Liberation through raunchiness is exactly what Levy would describe as female chauvinism. It is the same thing as lawyers taking stripping lessons and the likes of Sadie Frost doing pole-dancing to keep fit. But if a hard-working career woman wears hot pants at the weekend, does that really make her a bad person? Maybe not, but what works for the knowing, ironic audience of young, successful Hollywood in the Viper Room, or Kate Moss pole-dancing in a White Stripes video, or a thirtysomething barrister on her way home via the Agent Provocateur store, is a mighty sophisticated concept to grasp for the thousands of screaming girls in the audience at the Smash Hits awards on a Sunday afternoon in Wembley. Ranging in age from 6 to 16, they represent the public that will transport the Dolls from underground cool to global pop stardom.

Scherzinger comes off stage and says, “When I saw all those little girls, I changed my moves from sexy [she thrusts her hips] to cheesy, cheesy, cheesy [waves her arms in the air].” Clearly, they didn’t want their message to translate.

Are the Pussycat Dolls feminists, I wonder. “The word feminism has negative connotations for men. Rather, we are wanting to celebrate females and their confidence,” says Scherzinger. “There is no political agenda behind my work. I’m just trying to make music that makes me feel good and confident. We’ve got a cool message.”

Antin believes that to be “cute” and “sexy” is the manifestation of a confident woman, the embodiment of empowerment. Fellow band member Jessica Sutta says, “I know there will be a female president one day.”

Yes, but will she be dressed like a Pussycat Doll? “No, but she’ll be a Pussycat Doll on the inside. There’s something sexy about women in suits.”

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