Spoilt for choice | 27 February 2010

It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement.

It is more than ten years since Natasha Walter published The New Feminism, a can-do look at the ‘uniquely happy story’ of the women’s movement. Then she urged the sisterhood to cast aside the puritanical fixations of yesterday and instead concentrate on politics, pay and the right to work part-time for a year or two without being left behind. At the time I was one of the several crosspatch hoodies who said ‘steady on: patchwork careers are all very well, but what about the uses and abuses of pornography?’ It’s good to see that Walter has now changed her tune. I got it wrong, she proclaims at the beginning of Living Dolls, arguing that the hypersexual culture in which we live is a sign not of equality but its opposite.

As a moral pamphleteer Walter is a vivid chronicler of the culture she deplores. Here is her description of a ‘babes on the bed’ competition organised by Nuts magazine at a club in Southend in the spring of 2007. ‘The first woman to get on the platform was a confident girl with long, fair hair, in high-heeled boots and hotpants, holding a microphone.’ She is introduced by the DJ — ‘This is Cara Brett! She’s on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.’ The introduction is completed and Cara takes over. Walter watches:

In the pages which follow, Walter talks to Cara, who comes to the interview with her best friend beside her. Cara earns a living as a ‘glamour model’; the best friend is a law student at university, but fully supportive: ‘It’s in a magazine that people choose to buy — you don’t have to buy it’.