Joan Smith
THE STATE OF FEMINISM
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism
By Natasha Walter (Virago Press 288pp £12.99)
The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women & Men Today
By Kat Banyard (Faber & Faber 304pp £12.99)

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Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and enviable) success. People are still reading The Second Sex - even my local Waterstone's, which does its best to disguise the fact that it sells any books at all, has a copy on its shelves - and The Female Eunuch remains one of the most famous publications of the twentieth century. Publishers have an uneasy feeling that they might be missing something, and a key text in this state of affairs is The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Wolf sidestepped the fierce intellectualism of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, offering in its place a mass of statistics and a species of autobiographical writing that editors and readers turned out to love. Wolf's genius (in marketing terms, obviously) was to combine feminism with an emerging genre, the misery memoir; she wrote furiously about her adolescent anorexia, while her appearance was an antidote to media calumnies against feminists. Wolf was no Andrea Dworkin, which was good from an editor's point of view but not so good if you like your feminism bold, controversial and uncompromising. I didn't always agree with Dworkin, but she was an original thinker and unafraid of giving offence. She became a byword for scary feminism, and she certainly wasn't lionised like Wolf or her ladylike English successor, Natasha Walter.

In the late 1990s, Walter published a book called The New Feminism, which appeared to go out of its way not to offend anyone. Walter set out to save feminism from its most strident and dishonest critics, assuring young women that it was all right to wear nail polish; this was a version of feminist history in which stylish thinkers and activists like Shere Hite, Caroline Coon and Gloria Steinem had no place. Walter was averse to discussions of sexuality, apparently unaware of the long-established tension between a politics of sexual freedom and the faux-liberation proposed by the commercial sex industry. (I can't imagine why anyone is surprised when Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire, presents himself as a feminist.) Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and others understood decades ago that pornography and prostitution took what they wanted from feminism, shamelessly appropriating its language to defend practices which were degrading to women; the problem for many of us was maintaining our right to pleasure amid the constraining demands of puritans on the one hand and commercial pornographers on the other.

For Walter in 1998, however, all this stuff about female sexuality was out of date: it was time for 'the new feminism' to get on with unpicking 'the tight link that feminism in the Seventies made between our personal and political lives'. This was not so much reforming feminism as ditching a great deal of it, and it's hard to imagine a more egregious intellectual error. It's to Walter's credit that she admits as much in Living Dolls: 'I 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 entirely wrong.' Walter's new book goes back to territory she originally dismissed, examining the impact on self-image of sexist assumptions from the wider culture and a thriving commercial sex industry. Her thesis is that the industry has become more mainstream, expanding to include men's magazines, lap-dancing clubs, prostitution memoirs and pornography: 'The messages and values of this revitalised sex industry have reached deep into the hearts of many young men and women.'

This is how Walter writes, sentimental about victims and unimaginative when it comes to solutions. She is still the same old inoffensive feminist at heart. But she misses what's really changed in the last thirty or forty years: the industry has become much more international, discerning huge commercial opportunities in the mass movements of people in response to wars and poverty. Not long ago, a Moldovan delegate stunned colleagues at the Council of Europe when she claimed that whole villages in her country had next to no young women left because they'd been absorbed into the west European sex industry. This phenomenon, sex slavery in effect, is barely mentioned in Walter's book and I wonder if that's because it undermines one of her key arguments. It's true that there's increasing demand for paid-for sex in the UK, as she states, but the fact that vulnerable foreign women are being imported to meet it suggests that British women are not so easily seduced by the industry's propaganda. The industry has also suffered some major setbacks: Walter mentions OBJECT, which has argued for tougher licensing laws to prevent lap-dancing clubs opening in residential areas, but there have been many other successful campaigns against the sex industry. MPs, journalists and the POPPY Project (which supports women who have been trafficked for prostitution) persuaded the Government to ratify a key Council of Europe convention treating trafficked people as victims of crime; and there has been a significant change in the law, which means it will soon be a criminal offence to pay for sex with anyone subject to 'force, threats ... or any other form of coercion'.

Kat Banyard, author of The Equality Illusion, is involved with OBJECT and her book is tougher in tone than Living Dolls while being addressed primarily to younger women. My problem with both books is that they're journalistic - Walter is forever telling her readers that she talked to someone over coffee, while Banyard's book is tiresomely structured around timed moments in a single day - and they present a picture of the modern world which seems to me unduly pessimistic. This may be the fault of their publishers, who have their own problems with feminism (Faber's press release for Banyard's book says it's considered 'irrelevant, or old-fashioned, or even embarrassing'), but it remains a fact that Western women's lives have improved immeasurably since the Second World War. Sexism never actually went away, but the balance sheet of gains and setbacks is more subtle than either of these books suggests.

Joan Smith has a website under the name Political Blonde: www.politicalblonde.com.