Tell me about your first book.

I’ve chosen a classic work of feminist cultural criticism, Sexual/Textual Politics by Toril Moi. The work will be familiar to anyone who has studied literary criticism, cultural theory or women’s studies and I’m recommending it because it serves as a crisp and broad introduction to this type of theory (and it also has an excellent bibliography for those who want to know more). It’s very interesting to me as a writer because it’s an extremely acute dissection of the way women's artistic output is either belittled and written out of history, or analysed in a specifically misogynist way. There are two examples: one of an 18th-century painting whose creatorship was left anonymous – the painting was lauded, shown in all the major galleries, analysed by experts, praised, shown to art students as a model for their own technique and auctioned at extremely high prices.

When the painting was discovered to have been by a woman, an extraordinary thing happened: auction prices immediately dropped, and the critical appreciation of it turned 180 degrees. Suddenly the painting was flawed, minor, petty, the kind of thing only a woman – a flawed, minor, petty creature – could make. With amazing transparency the critics, who at the time were all men, could not see beyond their own misogynistic ideas about what a woman is.

That is terribly depressing. I always find it odd that ‘chick lit’ automatically means lightweight and is openly denigrated when the male equivalent, the Nick Hornby-ish ‘bloke lit’ is taken very seriously as amusing social observation.

Exactly. Moi’s second example is of a Scandinavian woman poet who happened to have an androgynous name (like Claude in French or some such). When her collection was published it was deemed to have been by a man, and praised to the skies for its rugged depiction of landscape, grand emotions, human destiny and so forth. When the error was corrected and Claude Whoever pointed out her femaleness, the reviews changed. They were just as positive, but the language about them was different. The same poems were now praised for their small epiphanies, their domestic interiors, their private emotions – the language literally became belittling, diminished... Claude was made into a minor poet, simply because of her sex.  Moi quotes the critics Thorne and Henley: ‘In short, the significance of gestures changes when they are used by men or women; no matter what women do, their behaviour may be taken to symbolise inferiority.’

Sexual/Textual Politics was first published in 1985, with a new afterword added in 2002, and, although things have changed a little since then, they have not changed by much. Men in particular still belittle women in language and perception and stereotypes – but the difference is that women artists, critics, curators and commentators are far more prevalent and, like me, consistently challenge misogynist interpretations of work. Still, the overwhelmingly misogynistic male response to female-centred films like Mamma Mia and Sex and the City, and to female phenomena like J K Rowling and Madonna – and, with an added racist emphasis, Oprah Winfrey – is shocking and obvious in its bile.

So what about your next book, Right-Wing Women?

This is a book by Andrea Dworkin, who really is a pioneering American feminist. She was writing about the regime of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior at the time. But the book is really an analysis of the boys’ club, antifeminism brand of conservatism: the hatred of single mothers, the championing of family values, and so on. It also, quite terrifyingly if you read it now, predicts some of the things that we’ve seen happening to women: the pornification of culture, the increase in trafficked women, the decrease in rape conviction rates and so on. It’s really frightening and Dworkin is an interesting figure because, although everything she’s said has come to pass, she's despised for speaking the truth.

She asks the question:‘Is it possible to be a right-wing woman? Who will right-wing women hate – people who are not in control of themselves, in control of their fertility?’ She pegs it around her feminist activism. There is a wonderful scene where she is frozen out by a group of Republican women and it’s like something in The Midwich Cuckoos where they almost literally push her off a balcony with the force of their hostility.

And what she predicted did all happen – the rise of the Bible Belt, less money for abortion, women being trafficked. Dworkin’s world isn’t hopeful because she sees misogyny as being connected to the status quo and she is not an apologist for the status quo. She doesn’t actually see a direct relationship between the Bible Belt and the trafficking of women, but rather she sees them both as connected to the Republican holy capitalist system. In this system prostituted women are no longer oppressed, it’s all OK if they’ve chosen it for themselves. Republican women’s allegiance to capitalism obscures sympathy for women and, because it’s geared towards big business, there is no money for state-sponsored care and the kinds of things that might help women.

So a very negative view of American society.

Yes. She is a polemicist of the highest order and she resists the temptation to give you consolation at the end. She looks at how bad the situation really is without saying, ‘Look, we have women barristers and politicians.’ It’s not her job to provide solutions like funding for single mothers and their children and the obvious stuff that everyone knows about. She says, ‘Look at the worst aspects of how we treat women.’ She refuses to give in to our tendency to turn a blind eye, which is why people don’t like her.

She also often gets misquoted when people talk about the gender politics of sex and rape. People think she said that all sex is rape but what she actually said is that all sex procured by force is rape, though that force is not always violence. She is misquoted, basically, by people who haven’t read her. She also talks about a fine line in porn between what is erotica and what is the objectification of women.

But women aren’t only objectified in porn.

I know. I wrote a thriller, called Too Fast To Live, specifically to address the sexual tropes of thrillers, where the woman is usually a dead victim, the turf wars operate between men, and the bad girl always gets punished. It’s odd that such standard representations still play in films, plays, books and whatnot, and I wanted to challenge the stereotypes that objectify women. People flinched at the level of violence in my book which they wouldn’t have done if I’d been a man. The book came up for a prize and one of the jurors said, ‘I’m astonished by how violent some women authors can be.’ And yet everyone laps up those SAS books that are true stories in which they kill pregnant women horribly, and yet they get upset if women use ‘the F word.’

Yes, I often find that.

On the other hand, I get a lot of messages from American fans of that book who really love the violence and then I get worried and think, ‘Hey! Don’t hold any schools hostage tonight!’