Coming of age in the mid-2000s, in the aftermath of the character Samantha’s (Kim Cattrall) epoch-defining romps in Sex and the City, my peers and I assumed that female liberty came down to two things: the freedoms to have sex and be brazenly glamorous.
Feminism was not a word we used, or even thought about much. When it was mentioned, it was usually to assert that one was not a feminist, a person assumed to be a man-hating, anti-sex, authoritarian fun void.
In this we were, of course, merely reflecting our culture. The feminist author Natasha Walter noted with despair in her 2010 book Living Dolls that all young women seemed to think or care about was pole dancing, sex and looking as glamorous...