Laurie Penny is a columnist for New Statesman and the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism. Her new book, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution is published by Bloomsbury.

In this wide-ranging interview, she discusses pornography, online abuse and the many different strands of contemporary feminism.

The feminism you articulate in this book seeks to speak for and liberate the marginalised, the ‘other’ in capitalist society. How did you come to this conception of feminism?

Well I wouldn’t say the kind of feminism that represents women who aren’t necessarily wealthy, white and living in Western countries was my idea. There’s a long history of socialist and anti-capitalist feminism which is one of the reasons why some of the themes – though I talk about the internet, online dating for example – and some of the ideas in it might seem quite retro. It's harking back to a slightly older form of feminism from the 1970s, '80s and even beyond. I look back on the work of Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai, women who believed that women needed to rise together as a class rather than as individuals within the capitalist system.