Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman and a regular political commentator on the BBC. She currently holds an Honorary Writing Fellowship at Oxford University. Her new book, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 9 Fights is scheduled for release with Jonathan Cape in 2020. In this interview, we talked about sex, economics and feminism ahead of Helen's appearance at HowTheLightGetsIn 2019.

Do we live in a sexualised culture?

I think we do comparative to anyone within living memory. But things are better than they were in recent history as well.

In advertising this is probably most obvious; a huge theme of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s was the fact that advertisers would just drape a woman over a car to sell it. That assumes men have the spending power.

If men have the money and power, it makes sense to sell things to women that purport to make them more appealing to the opposite sex. When selling make up and cosmetics advertisers can say ‘buy this and people will want to have sex with you.’