The ugly secret about femininity and being female is that the concepts are enmeshed with our obsession with the beauty standard.

In the magazines I read each month there are enough examples of what's supposedly - and impossibly - ``feminine'' to make me feel suicidal.

Open any one of them and you'll find image after image of a high-cheek-boned, full-lipped female face attached to a swanlike neck, large defying-gravity breasts, a wasp waist and long thin legs skewered into a tiny muscular butt.

And it's not just women who are focused on those ideals. Men see such images plastered all over the city and no longer expect just the movie stars to look perfect. They think all women are supposed to look that way too.

Frederique, the popular Victoria's Secret catalog model, can thank her genes for the body type so many of us are haunted by. But she says appearances greatly diminish in value if you don't know who you are inside.

``I know models who look incredibly beautiful, but I see them as ugly - truly ugly - because I know them personally,'' she says. ``I tell you, you don't see their beauty. They've had plastic surgery over and over. They have no self-esteem, no confidence. Women need to start concentrating on the beauty within.''

But somehow between the makes-sense message of Frederique and the body image modeled by the magazines, women of the '90s find the idea of femininity even more troubling than it was for our mothers.

Largely from the legacy of feminism we get the message that a real '90s woman isn't supposed to care - or at least is supposed to pretend she doesn't care - about appearance. That makes a lot of us afraid to associate with the labels feminist or feminism, despite the best efforts of our Ms.-reading mothers.

And yet just as being feminine doesn't mean being weak, meek and wearing white gloves, being a feminist doesn't mean you want to be - or look like - a man.

After hashing out the confusing ideas of femininity, feminism and what females are supposed to be today, several young women and I came up with a fresh definition: If feminism is about taking control of the world around you, femininity is about asserting control internally.

The actress Martha Plimpton, who stars in ``Beautiful Girls,'' a movie which deftly examines our obsession with Barbie-doll beauty, has been concerned with such things for a long time in her private life.

She recalls watching the old TV series ``The Bionic Woman,'' starring Lindsay Wagner, and feeling relief that the starring character was smart, clever and of high morals as well as tough and sexy. Today that's still her definition of feminine.

``Lindsay Wagner - she was my idol,'' Plimpton says, laughing. ``In the '70s she was just the ultimate woman. And she didn't have nearly the body that Farrah Fawcett had. She had a big ass, some wide hips and a flat chest.''

For Plimpton growing up during the '70s, feminism was stressed much more than femininity.

``I was told, `You can do what you want, whenever you want, however you want to do it.' It wasn't saying that you should do everything you want to do. It was saying that you can, and you should be able to.''

By now a lot of us are concentrating on the beauty within. Our inner life is where the word femininity is still useful.

We've come to an age where femininity is about believing in our ability to function, to be attractive, to love and be loved. Because of feminism a woman can look strong and still be feminine. It has little to do with her outward appearance or whether the shoes she's wearing match her purse.

Femininity has become an energy. Young women are meditating. We are reading spiritual texts. We are aware of a feminine energy that pushes us against the edge - whether that's the male power structure in the workplace or the beauty standard chipping away at our self-esteem.

In the '90s femininity no longer has to be looked down upon. Femininity includes its inseparable counterparts: feminism and feminist.

After all, belief in your powerful feminine inner life is necessary before any feminist achievements can take place.

Tabitha Soren is a contributing correspondent for MTV News.