Valley of the dolls

Natasha Walter once urged other feminists to stay out of women's sex lives. Now, writes Rosemary Neill, the British author says our hypersexual culture has gone too far

Natasha Walter once urged other feminists to stay out of women's sex lives. Now, writes Rosemary Neill, the British author says our hypersexual culture has gone too far

IN 1998, the young British author and feminist Natasha Walter wrote a book, The New Feminism, which attacked older feminists' censorious approaches to sex and romance, fashion and body image. "The puritanism that was expressed by so many earlier feminists is a hindrance rather than a help," declared the 31-year-old torchbearer for a generation who didn't want to be judged for what they wore or with whom they slept. "Puritanism alienates women because it does not reflect the real, often wickedly enjoyable relationship they have with their clothes and their bodies."

Walter's book - lauded by some, derided by others as a work of "post-political blandness" and "cyclical amnesia" - urged activists to concentrate on political and economic issues and to quit the bedroom. "Now feminism has nothing to bring to women's sexual experiences," she wrote with cast-iron certainty.

Twelve years on, the women's movement has stalled, Walter is in early middle age and has written a new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. Oddly enough, it charges back into the bedroom: its author has discovered that the personal can be intensely political, after all.

In Living Dolls, released here this month, Walter argues that while women today have more opportunities than did previous generations, they are stymied by a culture that idealises an exaggerated femininity among young girls and a porn-star style sexuality, coupled with punishingly narrow physical ideals, among teenagers and young women. "For this generation of young women, being sexy has become an almost constant imperative, seen throughout the advertisements, music, television programs, films and magazines that surround them," she warns.

Moreover, Walter contends that as this "hypersexual" culture became entrenched - aided and abetted by the mainstreaming of porn and sex industry innovations such as G-strings and pole dancing - dissent evaporated: along with many others, feminists failed to speak out. She writes: "We now live in a world in which even many feminists have stopped trying to condemn pornography. This has been a huge turnaround in feminist thought ... the muffling of dissent about porn has coincided with a time in which porn has massively expanded."

As backflips go, Walter's is worthy of an Olympic gymnastics medal. Yet the London-born journalist, author and activist, now 43 and a mother of two young children, cannot be accused of disguising her change of heart. Her recantation is highlighted in shocking pink on the cover of Living Dolls. It says: "I once believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was wrong."

Over the telephone from her home in north London, Walter acknowledges she has taken flak over her about-face in Britain, where Living Dolls has just been published. "I have a bit, but I thought it was important for me to say it," she says serenely. "But a lot of people have recognised what I'm saying ... it's about a generation, really, and how we became a bit complacent and stopped being vigilant [about our highly sexualised culture]. I think a lot of women my age feel that we were too relaxed about this stuff and now we are a bit worried about what is happening to our sons and daughters." Walter recently described herself as "not the raging sort", and she tells Review she is surprised her book turned out to be "as angry as it is about the culture young women are growing up in". When she started writing about this issue, she wasn't convinced pornography was a problem: "I sort of felt, 'Well, we've always had pornography; have things really changed?' " She soon discovered, though, that largely because of the ubiquity of the internet, "this [younger] generation is exposed to porn in ways previous generations weren't, in a different way and earlier, and that is obviously having an impact on the culture. So I was shocked."

As she interviewed high-school girls who felt alienated by their peers' sex-without-love ethos, it dawned on Walter that adults had stopped agitating on behalf of such vulnerable teenagers, who reminded her of her younger self. This, in turn, partly triggered her new book.

"I was startled by what some young women were saying to me about their inability to access dissent; their inability to hear voices that were presenting an alternative," she explains. "That shocked me and made me think, we did go wrong somewhere, the older feminists. We weren't sufficiently out there; we weren't talking enough about the issues that were concerning young women."

Walter - who has written for London's The Guardian, The Independent and The New Statesman - plunged into the sex industry's underworld to research her book, sometimes straying beyond her comfort zone. She interviewed a lap dancer, a man addicted to porn since childhood and a prostitute called Melanie who says of her job: "Basically, you've consented to being raped sometimes for money." She also meets alpha schoolgirls who equate promiscuity with liberation. One girl is 18 and boasts that she has had 22 sex partners. Walter says of this: "This new culture of shags and threesomes, orgies and stranger f . .ks seems to be replacing the culture in which sex was associated with the flowering of intimacy."

Does this activist who once criticised earlier generations of feminists for their puritanism worry about being caricatured as a joyless wowser? She ponders this for a long time before answering. "I really, really didn't want to sound as though I was criticising women for having many sexual partners." Then she adds philosophically: "I probably would have worried more about it if I was 25."

One of Britain's best-known feminists, Walter is politely accommodating yet coolly businesslike. She often rushes to answer a question before I've finished asking it, but for all her conversational dexterity, she can be withheld, revealing little about her family or personal life. It's startling, therefore, when her earnestness abruptly gives way to an infectious belly laugh as she describes her research trip to a Babes on the Bed competition staged by British lads' mag that goes by the imaginative title Nuts. There, young working-class women with fake tans and big breasts stripped for a throng of drunk, chanting men, while a DJ introduced a professional glamour (that is, topless) model thus: "She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank."

"You can imagine me at the Mayhem club [the Babes venue]," Walter says in her posh Oxbridge accent, dissolving into self-deprecating guffaws again. "I was 40 when I went in there, sort of desperately trying to blend into the background in a club full of 18-year-olds wearing not much more than their bikinis. It wasn't always easy but it was always interesting."

Walter found no shortage of evidence to support her thesis that the values of the sex industry and mainstream sex culture are merging, and being falsely sold to young women as a form of empowerment. Extreme and violent forms of pornography are becoming more common online, she says, while glamour modelling, lap dancing and pole dancing have never been more popular in Britain: in 2007 the Spice Girls, who once traded on girl power, learned how to pole dance for their comeback tour.

She also found internet sites where "reviewing sex for sale is taken as naturally as reviewing books on Amazon", while a mini-genre of prostitution memoirs including Belle de Jour's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl portray sex work as being "close to any liberated woman's sex life".

Even the halls of academe are not immune to what American feminist Ariel Levy has dubbed "raunch culture". Walter is a graduate of Cambridge University and she records how one of its most prestigious colleges marked 21 years of access for women by doing a photoshoot of female undergraduates, in their underpants.

Most disturbing, perhaps, is the effect of this overtly sexualised culture on children. Walter finds that sexual bullying is increasing in schools and she quotes Canadian research that suggests the vast majority of 13 and 14-year-olds had viewed pornography, mostly over the net. "The voyeur's view of sex has been normalised, even for children," she writes, concluding that "this massive colonisation of teenagers' erotic life by commercial pornographic materials is something that it is hard to feel sanguine about." (Last month, many were sickened to learn how Facebook memorials set up to honour two children - one abducted from her home and murdered, the other the victim of a fatal schoolyard stabbing - were sabotaged with images of child pornography and bestiality.)

Walter lives with her partner, who works for a human-rights organisation, and their two children, Clara, 9, and Arthur, 1. Another motivation for writing Living Dolls was her concern about what the hypersexual culture, along with a "new fatalism" about gender stereotypes, means for her kids. "I started really worrying about this new traditionalism that surrounds girls and boys," she says with conviction.

Certainly, Walter did not grow up with a wardrobe stuffed with Disney princess dresses and Fashion Queen Barbies. She was born into a family she has described as "pretty forceful politically"; her father, Nicolas, was an anarchist and humanist writer who was once jailed for heckling former British prime minister Harold Wilson during a Vietnam War protest. Her mother, Ruth, was a social worker and feminist who refused to buy her daughters Barbie dolls and gave them Lego and toy cars instead. A generation on, Walter believed little girls should be free to be fairy princesses if they wanted: "But then I realised, almost without noticing, the walls have closed in."

As she went shopping with her daughter, Walter was disconcerted by the "new traditionalism": department stores laden with pink girls' clothes and princess outfits, and Bratz dolls aimed at preschoolers but whose fishnets and feathers seem custom-made for clubbing and strutting. She writes: "These dolls are just a fragment of a much wider culture in which young women are encouraged to see their sexual allure as their primary passport to success."

In contrast, Walter was taught that education was her passport to success. She attended an elite, academically rigorous private school, the North London Collegiate, and went on to study English at Cambridge. She won a fellowship to Harvard, and her first job in journalism was at Vogue. She moved on to the London broadsheets, eventually becoming a columnist for the left-leaning The Guardian.

Her heroines include Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and her mum, but it's not as if she followed her mother's example and turned into a heels-spurning, Spare Rib-reading, 70s-style feminist. In a 2002 interview, she said: "I drifted though school and university feeling the struggles of feminism were more or less in the past. Then I went out into the working world and it hit me that there was still such a lot to be done."

Living Dolls builds on other feminist critiques of popular culture's distortions of female sexuality, notably Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs and Australian Emily Maguire's Princesses & Pornstars. Walter says Levy's book inspired hers, but she believes that dissent about the hypersexual culture has yet to infiltrate the mainstream.

Living Dolls might never have been written had Walter not recovered from the dust-up provoked by her earlier book. Germaine Greer was among the feminists who rubbished The New Feminism, dismissing Walter as a "lifestyle feminist" who peddled a "brand of unenlightened complacency". Walter told The Guardian recently that if anyone had said back then that she'd write another feminist tome, she would have replied: "You're kidding, I'm not going to go there again."

She has previously complained that The New Feminism was "wilfully misunderstood"; often interpreted as "some argument for the right to wear lipstick" rather than as a clarion call to feminists to focus on why women are still poorer and less powerful than men. (Nevertheless, it's true that in The New Feminism Walter painted an ecstatic picture of awestruck women "dreaming into the mirrors" as they shopped for clothes and gasped audibly over images in fashion magazines.)

Today, it's Walter who is crash-tackling others' complacency. She has noticed that even among her educated peers, parents are embracing gender stereotypes - girls love ballet, boys love the biff - a reflection, she reckons, of how biological determinism is making a comeback. In the second half of Living Dolls, she documents the resurgence of the view that genes and hormones can explain away everything from gender inequality in science and politics to girls' apparent fascination with pink.

She says she is shocked by the rise of such ideas in the 21st century, even though many are based on old stereotypes rather than sound new science: "I am very uneasy about the way that the media has sort of pounced on biological determinism as the [scientific] consensus, when it isn't."

Although her books have sparked plenty of debate, these days the eloquent feminist splits most of her time between her family and the organisation Women for Refugee Women, which she set up to help female asylum-seekers. In 2008, she devised a verbatim play, Motherland, which told the stories of persecuted women and children in immigration detention in Britain.

The play was performed and directed by the celebrated actress Juliet Stevenson (Bend It Like Beckham, Truly Madly Deeply). Walter, who believes that locking up women and children asylum-seekers is "brutal and pointless" says with quiet force: "It is very concerning. Women who've experienced gender-related persecution like rape and political persecution, or genital mutilation, often face disbelief and trivialisation [in Britain]".

Twelve years ago, a brazenly optimistic Walter felt that "feminism had become part of the very air we breathed". She admits women have not moved as far into the corridors of power as was hoped, and that men have taken too few steps into the home; there is a gender pay gap at all levels of the labour force, and the stay-at-home wife has been newly glorified in the form of Bratz-like celebrity WAGs.

"I think we're at a crossroads. I think things could go either way now," Walter says of the flagging women's revolution. Nevertheless, this child of old-style activists still believes in the power of activism. It's high time, she says, that "small l" liberals voiced their unease over the rise of sexism and raunch culture. As she writes: "This is no time to succumb to inertia or despair ... for our daughters, the escalator doesn't have to stop on the dolls' floor."

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter, Virago, $35, is out on March 25.