Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, comfort food … the columnist recalls how she only had five months to write the feminist bestseller about everything

It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. All the visuals were brutal: Amy Winehouse, bleeding, being chased by paps; Britney Spears’s loss of virginity and her breakdown, being chatshow jokes; the “Charlotte Church Countdown Clock” to her 16th birthday, when she would become legally fuckable.

I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? “I’m not feminist, but …” was a common catchphrase, back then, when women tried to talk about inequality, but didn’t want to get dirty feminism all over their shoes.