Zoe Strimpel – author, journalist, academic – has not had an easy few weeks of it. Her book, Good Slut – the cover of which features three artfully arranged chilli peppers, Georgia O’Keeffe-style – has caused an inordinate amount of pearl-clutching. Less so among male critics, who have tended to steer clear, perhaps sensing tricky territory, but more among fellow female commentators, many of whom have been scathing.

For readers unfamiliar with Strimpel, she was born in London to a Jewish family, grew up in Boston, then returned to the UK, reading gender studies at Cambridge before doing a PhD in modern history at Sussex. Now in her early forties, she has forged a career as a writer and thinker on women’s issues, particularly dating and sex, and even wrote a sex column for a few years. She is a fierce defender of the rights of women (and Israel), and has a habit of getting up people’s noses, which one senses she rather relishes.

But even she has been blindsided by the vitriol generated by this latest book of hers, a fierce and spirited defence of what one might term the balls-out Lena Dunham/Candace Bushnell school of feminism.

‘Good Slut is not so much a watertight defence of promiscuity as a scattergun criticism of anyone deemed responsible for holding back sexually active women,’ fumed the Observer; ‘Intellectually dishonest and politically unserious’… a ‘scattershot polemic with its myriad errors and alarming glibness’ (Sarah Ditum in The Spectator); ‘an orgy of contradictions’ (Faye Curran, The New Statesman); ‘save yourself the bother and just watch Mean Girls instead’ (Poppy Sowerby, The Times).

The day we meet, at the Daily Mail offices in Kensington, West London, she is fresh from another pummelling.

A chance encounter with an artist at a gallery in Margate left her feeling shaken and intimidated after she questioned some of the imagery in his show. The works, by pro-Palestinian campaigner Matthew Collings, have been roundly condemned, and feature a variety of Jewish tropes, as well as some frankly unhinged stuff about Israel, much of it pornographic.

Shocked and upset, she confronted Collings, who insulted and belittled her, aided and abetted by his supporters.

But Strimpel, I sense, is a tough cookie, and so here she is anyway, ready to defend her book.

‘I’m a sensitive person, so I haven’t enjoyed the past few days,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve realised now that you poke the feminist bear at your peril.’ She laughs, but she seems a little shaky, vulnerable even. But apologetic? No.

She’s primed for a grilling, but the truth is I don’t hate the book nearly as much as others. For me the main point of contention, really, is her Pollyanna-ish enthusiasm for some of the more questionable aspects of modern life, such as OnlyFans and the likes of porn star Bonnie Blue, which I find baffling. It’s a blind spot. It’s not a deal-breaker.

Her broader thesis – and the one that seems to have upset so many of the ‘sisters’ – is that Western women have never had it so good. Hard to argue with, you will agree (unless you are one of those people who believe that everything went wrong the moment women stepped out of the kitchen and into the workplace, in which case I am very sorry for your loss) – and yet somehow this seems to have irritated the sisterhood. Which in many ways adds weight to Strimpel’s assertion that – despite all the manifest advantages of modern womanhood – too many women, particularly younger women, cling to notions of victimhood and oppression.

Why do so many young women find the prospect of ‘grabbing life by the ovaries’, as Strimpel puts it, so daunting and difficult? Why are we so scared of embracing the hard-won freedoms that previous generations of women longed for but could never attain? Why are we so determined to find fault in what, by the standards of history and of many women in other parts of the world today, is a charmed existence?

Throughout the book, there is a sense of frustration and bafflement. Strimpel is like that Boomer in the coffee queue standing behind some irritating millennial who is holding everyone up because she can’t make up her mind between oat milk and almond.

‘Get on with it, already,’ you can hear her shouting. Stop checking your privilege – and embrace it.

For Strimpel, it’s all about freedom. To work, to have children (or not), to pursue wealth, health and happiness – and to find expression on every level of human experience, including the one area that has always been fraught with difficulty for women: sex.

She herself is not actively advocating ‘slutdom’, as she calls it; merely saying that if that’s what women want – and that is very much a case of ‘if’ – then they should go ahead and do it, in the same way that men do.

The problem, I think, is that in seeking to reassert women’s rights to freedom – sexual, economic, social – Strimpel fails to acknowledge that these things don’t exist in a vacuum. Inevitably, they play out within a wider framework beyond the simple, bald assertion of freedom of choice.

‘Slutdom’, as she puts it, has real-world consequences, and it’s these she fails – in a rather one-dimensional way – to really acknowledge, accept or address. It’s almost as though she thinks women can get away with anything in the name of feminism – something I just don’t buy.

‘I’ve tried to be clear throughout that I’m not saying there aren’t problems, that there aren’t, you know, misogynistic atrocities that happen quite regularly,’ she says. ‘But what I’m trying to do is move us a little bit beyond what I see as this horizon-limiting, victimology and negativity, this idea that women don’t have any agency or autonomy, and that, actually, the reasons they make their decisions – whether it be to sell their image on OnlyFans, or to sleep with hundreds of men – must be because the system is speaking through them.’

‘It’s something that has annoyed me about cultural debate across the board, this idea that nobody’s making decisions or choices based on their capacity to think and act. It’s all to do with “victimisation” and “exploitation”. And when it comes to women, I think that’s what’s complicated,’ she adds.

Her point, and it’s a good one, is that of course there is a long and ignominious history of misogyny in the world, no one is denying that, or that it still exists. But to focus solely on that aspect of womanhood is reductive and limiting.

‘Everyone should clutch history close,’ she says. ‘But to make it the thing that determines how we are in the world is depressing, it is weakening. It is not how I think girls should go out into the world.’

It’s not that she’s trying to downplay the struggles women face – just that, as she puts it: ‘In 2026 Britain, is the system really so rigged against us?’

The answer, of course, is no. In fact, there are many who would argue that things have gone too far, that the system is too rigged in our favour, at the expense of the opposite sex. Certainly, that is what the so-called ‘manosphere’ thinks, led by individuals such as Andrew Tate and his ilk.

And there are also some women who appear to feel this way, as evidenced by the rise of ‘trad wife’ influencers and commentators like Louise Perry, whose book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution broadly argues the opposite case to Strimpel’s.

Feminism, as my generation understood it at least, is facing something of a backlash.

One thing Strimpel has managed very adeptly in this book is to annoy everyone across the entire political spectrum, both on the ‘progressive’ Left and the more reactionary Right.

‘On the Left, I think what’s happened is that people have clutched close victimhood as a key form of leverage. It’s like, if you don’t have that, what do you have? So many of the responses to my book have been young women who are enraged that someone might be suggesting that their trauma, their collective trauma, isn’t being fully appreciated here. So that’s one thing.

‘On the Right there’s this idea that, oh, actually, sexual freedom was bad, promiscuity was bad: let’s go back to the kitchen sink, because that’s what biology tells us to do.’

In particular, her comments about the likes of Bonnie Blue (and her porn mini-me Lily Phillips) have riled pretty much everyone.

My own view of Blue is that she is essentially a female Andrew Tate, a rage-baiting attention-seeker who clearly has a sociopathic streak as long as the queues of men who line up outside her tawdry sex stunts.

She is the personification of an online porn culture that for years has been allowed to pollute and distort the desires of young people to the point where sex has become increasingly disassociated from all forms of love or respect and reduced to little more than a bodily function.

She is also part and parcel of a culture that demeans women and legitimises male sexual violence. Because what else is having sex with 1,000 men in one day, as she claims to have done, if not the ultimate gang rape fantasy?

That is one thing if you are getting paid millions and it’s your choice, like Blue – but if you are a woman (or child) in Sudan or the Congo, gang rape is not a lifestyle choice. These things are done to you, not for you.

And it’s possible to argue, I think, that hypersexualised Western women like Bonnie Blue contribute to the (erroneous) notion entertained by certain men from certain cultures and with certain ideas that, if she is up for it, then we are all up for it.

It’s that old, ‘oh come on, you want it really’ thing that we have all, as women, experienced at one time or another.

This is how rape culture works, and Strimpel, as an intelligent woman, must know this. So it feels somewhat disingenuous that she should seek to frame Blue as the ultimate expression of a healthy society’s attitude to women’s freedom.

‘She shows what a truly robust liberal society looks like,’ she writes. ‘We can squawk and condemn, shake our heads and troll her but... Bonnie Blue is the worst of times and best of times rolled into one.’

Blue, she is saying, is feminism on steroids – distasteful, yes, but nevertheless necessary and ultimately preferable to the alternative. ‘Failure to be at political and moral peace with women’s right to promiscuity,’ she writes, ‘can only degrade a society.’ Perhaps. But so can having sex with 1,000 men for clicks.

There is nothing healthy about Bonnie Blue, I say, and Strimpel is vigorous in her agreement. ‘But if you chip away at the kinds of sexual freedoms that we have because of the costs of those freedoms, you end up on a slippery slope that makes everything much worse,’ she counters.

‘I don’t even watch porn. I find the whole thing disturbing, gross – and actually un-sexual. I would never go into bat defending the porn industry. That’s just not a hill I would die on. And I don’t think it’s in itself, as a thing, liberating.

‘But what I do pay attention to is when I hear women on OnlyFans, making a fortune, and saying they feel like it’s their true expression of themselves. I react against the assumption that they don’t know what they’re talking about. For me it’s part of believing in women.’

I get that; but that’s also a bit like saying that if an alcoholic tells you she really enjoys getting blind drunk, then you must let them get on with it because ‘it’s a true expression of themselves’.

The point about society is that it imposes certain norms and rules for a reason, which is that most people need boundaries. Remove those boundaries, and it’s not just the individuals who go off the rails who suffer the consequences, but others around them or like them.

With freedom comes great responsibility, as Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving first lady who did much to advance the cause of women, once said. That applies as much to women’s rights and freedoms as it does to everyone else’s.

The irony of Strimpel’s position is that while criticising victim culture among some women, she is excusing unacceptable and arguably harmful behaviour in others such as Blue. The truth is they are both as damaging as each other.

But ultimately this paradox illustrates the most interesting point about this book and the response to it: women still don’t know how to handle their (relatively) newfound freedoms. For the male of the species, self-determination has never been in question. For women it remains in many ways uncharted territory. You can’t strip away thousands of years of conditioning and just expect everything to fall into place. We are still figuring it out.

In breaking free of the stereotypes we have opened up whole new vistas of opportunity, and there are moments when it can feel very daunting. Hence why some women take refuge in more traditional roles, romanticising a more simple, less complicated way of life, while others continue to push the boundaries. And also, why some men and certain societies are running scared.

Strimpel’s point that the mark of a healthy society is one that is able to embrace the worst excesses of women’s freedoms is an important one. For at the end of the day, what is worse? Women like Bonnie Blue – or being a woman in Afghanistan, barred from work, from education, from all forms of meaningful and fulfilling existence?

To my mind, it’s the latter. The rise and proliferation of violent misogyny throughout the world – and its sinister encroachment on our own society – is more of a threat to women than a thousand Bonnie Blues. That should be the focus of Western feminists – not tearing each other to shreds from our ivory towers.