Natasha Walter: 'I believed sexism in our culture would wither away. I was entirely wrong'

I'm trying to establish just how ­often the feminist writer Natasha Walter gets angry. Is she ever in a rage before breakfast? "Rarely," she says. Does she ever rant at sexist comments on TV? "From time to time." Would she ­describe ­herself as an angry person? ­"Sometimes I think I'm not the raging sort."

I'm on a mission to discover what fires Walter up. She has been one of Britain's foremost feminist voices for more than a decade, a period in which she has written rationally, ­often ­compellingly, on everything from ­prostitution to parental leave and ­pornography to equal pay. They are subjects that can provoke real fury, and yet Walter's approach to them tends to be calm, sane, straightforward.

Which is great, of course, but her sensibility has always intrigued me. It's a hoary old cliche that feminists are intrinsically angry – a cliche that has been used to undermine feminists, to paint us as marauding harpies, steam belching from our ears – but like all cliches it holds a grain of truth. Most strong political arguments do, necessarily, arise from a wellspring of anger. So what makes Walter furious? What drives her?

We have arranged to meet to talk about her new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter ­taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an ­excursion that starts, in faintly ­surreal fashion, at a "Babes on the Bed" ­competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It's difficult to ­imagine anyone more ­incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; ­especially when the DJ starts ­shouting, "This is Cara Brett! She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank." The ­uncomfortable scene grows uglier as a series of young women take to a bed and strip off their bras to "joggle" their breasts before a throng of men.

The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has ­become: "Now," says ­Ellie, "women get told they are prudes if they say they don't want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else's vagina." She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in ­describing her work as a prostitute, says that "basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". And then there's pornography addict Jim, who says that "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."

It's all enraging material, and Walter marshals it well, but there still seems to be an edge of fury amiss. I ask what prompted her to write this first part of the book, and she says that it came about after a short ­newspaper column that she had dashed off. "It was just a little squib about lads' ­magazines. I didn't invest much in it, and it was one of those ­situations where you start ­getting more ­responses than you expected..."

Continue reading

@'The Guardian'