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

“I was surprised by the attitudes of the girls I interviewed,” she says, “who seemed to feel that they would be mocked if they protested within their peer groups. You know, when I was at university [in the 80s] it was OK to be annoyed about ­sexism, to take it quite seriously – if you argued about it, it didn’t make you the ­subject of ­mockery. Even if you didn’t ­particularly identify yourself as a feminist, you could choose where you wanted to be on a spectrum, and you could still say, ‘I really don’t want Page 3 in the ­common room,’ or, ‘I ­really hate the idea of porn’ … I was surprised when I was ­interviewing young women that they felt ­uncomfortable engaging in that way. Of course, a lot them would say, ‘It’s fine, we can choose whether to [interact with the sexist culture] or not,’ and then you dig a little deeper, and you realise that it is more ­problematic than that.”