When I went to university in 1988, feminism was wildly unfashionable; if students of both sexes happily queued around the block to hear Germaine Greer lecture on Aphra Behn, it was considered deeply uncool to own a copy of The Second Sex, let alone to go on about Andrea Dworkin or the Sun’s page three. I guess we thought – even those of us who did call ourselves feminists – that progress was inexorable, an optimism that strikes me as blackly comic now. Sometimes, as I sit at my desk in front of a machine that can, with a single click, provide access to every possible kind of sexual image, no matter how graphic, I suddenly see myself at 19, marching angrily into WH Smith to remove its porn mags (we used to dump them on the pavement outside). Such sweet innocence! How badly I miss it.
