19 Quotes by Natasha Walter

This equation of empowerment and liberation with sexual objectification is now seen everywhere, and is having a real effect on the ambitions of young women. [...]When we talked about empowerment in the past, it was not a young woman in a thong gyrating around a pole that would spring to mind, but the attempts by women to gain real political and economic equality.

But the revitalisation of glamour modelling has become the symptom of a wider change in our culture, in which the images and attitudes of soft pornography now come flooding in at young women from every side of the media: monthly magazines, weekly magazines, tabloid newspapers, music videos, reality television, and almost every aspect of the internet, from social networking sites to individual blogs.

The mainstreaming of the sex industry has coincided with a point in history when there is much less social mobility than in previous generations. No wonder, then, if the ideal that the sex industry pushes – that status can be won by any woman if she is prepared to flaunt her body – is now finding fertile ground among many young women who, as Phil Hilton says, would never imagine a career in, say, politics.

Many young women now seem to believe that sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having, and that sexual confidence can only be gained if a young woman is ready to conform to the soft-porn image of a tanned, waxed young girl with large breasts ready to strip and pole-dance. Whether sexual confidence can be found in other ways, and whether other kinds of confidence are worth seeking, are themes that this hypersexual culture cannot address.

What Angela finds most horrifying about her experiences, though, is not the physical violence but the psychological effect, the way that working as a prostitute forces her to dissociate her feelings from her body. 'Even when they are violent, and you are scared, or when you are just repulsed, or just not into it – you have to act as though you are enjoying it. How can that not damage you? How can that not eat away at your psyche?

I get the feeling that the ideal of liberated sex in the 1960s was about really loving and valuing your body and being proud of it. Now there is a toxic mix, for young girls, of feeling they have to be sexually active but also feeling very critical of their bodies. So they will have lots of sex, but without pleasure or pride.

The experiences of a prostitute may be discounted by many women as untypical of normal experience, but there is a resonance to Angela's words as she looks at a society that has successfully told many women that there can be something liberating about working in the sex industry.

I got chatting to a guy on the train the other day – it was an amazing conversation, we talked about everything, you know, we were talking about life and death. Then I mentioned I was looking for a job, and he said, oh, you should be a Trash Society girl. Like that was a compliment: you should get your boobs out. Is there nothing else that a girl is allowed to do?

Looking at Winifred there, so confident and contained in the sunlight, she thinks that perhaps this is the secret to Winifred’s happiness; that she can pack each thing into its proper pace, she can retain boundaries at each point of contact, can go on learning and growing, without losing herself in pursuit of a grander dream.