Hot Feminist: the world according to Polly Vernon

Author and columnist Polly Vernon has decided it is time to rip up and re-write the rules of the sisterhood. Her new book, Hot Feminist, promises modern feminism with style - and without judgement. Today's women's movement has been "derailed by doubt", believes Vernon, who says friends and colleagues have become quivering wrecks thanks to FOGIW (the "fear of getting it wrong"). Women today feel guilt for everything from bikini waxes (taking "beauty cues straight from porn") to what they order for lunch ("feminists don't eat salad"), she argues. Others berate themselves for wearing high heels, feel ashamed for getting "a man" to fix their car and are filled with dread at admitting that, in truth, they don't crave the oft peddled nirvana of "having it all".

Feminism is no longer simply a dirty word. Increasingly it feels bogged down by political, social and emotional quagmire. These are murky and confusing waters ... and Vernon, 43, is about to stir them with a big stick.

At the heart of Vernon's philosophy is the belief that no woman should ever be made to feel bad for wanting to look good. "Women are given so many different ideas about the way we look, how we should think about the way we look and how we talk about the way we look," she says. "Some of those are incredibly restrictive and prescriptive, and some of them are coming from quite a traditional notion of feminism. I wanted to make women feel like they had some ownership over their looks rather than thinking that they had to look a certain way to comply with a societal ideal. Traditional feminism would say: 'Who cares what we look like?' but I sort of think we do."

Vernon - a "shavey-leggy, fashion-fixated, wrinkle-averse, weight-conscious kind of feminist" - confronts head-on the assumption that all women should care about every issue affecting their gender. ("It's knackering and I haven't got the energy.") In Hot Feminist, she reels off a long list of things she is not offended by. These include airbrushing in magazines, news commentary on the the clothing choices of female MPs and the continual existence of the Sun's Page Three. She prefers to focus her rage on three main issues: the gender pay gap; rape and sexual assault; and the right to access legal and safe abortion (on which, more later).

Born in Brighton and raised near Exeter, Vernon, the eldest of three daughters, had strong feminist instincts from an early age, thanks, in part, to a mother who "wasn't wild about housework" and a father who, when he caught his daughter watching the Miss World Competition, told her to "turn that sexist crap off".

The prominence of figures such as Madonna and Margaret Thatcher in the public eye during the 1980s helped cement her outlook. "I had no epiphany, no revelation; I just grew up believing I was as self-evidently good as any man, and so were all the chicks I knew," she writes.

Despite this realisation, Vernon didn't glide seamlessly through her formative years. She describes herself as "an anxious, sad, slightly scared little girl" who boys would shout "Ugly Polly" at in the street. Developing a strong, unflinching sense of identity in her teens and adulthood was her way of making a stand against those early soul-sapping taunts and asserting that, if anyone was going to come up with labels, it would be her.

"That is very much what Hot Feminist is," she says. "It is about owning your looks and saying: 'I will tell you if I'm hot or not, I will tell you if I'm ugly or not - it's not for you to judge.' I wanted to be cool and popular and glamorous and all of those things that represented an escape from being 'Ugly Polly' and not feeling particularly like I belonged somewhere."

Vernon, who lives in London with her boyfriend (aka The Man I Keep In My Flat), started her writing career at the now defunct Minx magazine in the late 1990s. She went on to become a Guardian columnist, enjoyed a stint as the Observer's bar-hopping Cocktail Girl and has written for The Times, Vogue and Grazia.

In 2003, she penned an Observer column headlined "Admit it. You hate me because I'm thin", which resulted in an eye-watering outpouring of public vitriol she now refers to as "Skinny-Geddon". There were death threats, hate mail and entire websites devoted to disparaging Vernon, who was also sent an anonymous package of white powder through the post (feared to be anthrax but later identified as custard powder).

When last year, her friend and fellow writer Bryony Gordon wrote an equally polarising column on how much she liked being fat, Gordon suggested to Vernon that the backlash they'd both experienced wasn't about being fat or thin, but rather because each had the "brazen audacity to tell the world we like our bodies".

It is a theory Vernon wholeheartedly subscribes to. "It's such a risky, dodgy position for a woman to maintain publicly," she says. "From a traditional, patriarchal and male perspective, we are not supposed to be happy with how we look because, if we are, it takes so much power away from them. It is their job to tell us when we are sexy and when we are not. If we go: 'Do you know what? I just am, I don't need you to confirm it,' that is a lot of power taken away from them."

Vernon is all too aware of the murmurs about her motives for being thin (and presumed decline into an eating disorder), but is sanguine in her response. "I'm not a particularly emotional eater," she asserts. "I have plenty of self-esteem issues, as I think every human being on the planet does, but it is not related particularly to my body. I have a pragmatic and un-emotional relationship with my weight.

"Had a man written my column or Bryony's column, neither of them would have got the same response. It is specifically a woman talking about her weight that lights those fires."

Another aspect of her life Vernon has been vocal about is her decision not to have children. She says this would be fine "if the world didn't consider me a raving nut job on this point", and has become used to people trying to pick apart her reasoning or dismissing her as selfish and slightly odd.

"Something I realised quite recently is that the problem was not that I said I didn't want kids, but that I alerted people to the fact it was a choice," she says. "It wasn't a hard choice for me. It was a decision I made years ago that [having children] just wasn't right for me."

There are elements of Hot Feminist which may not gel with some women (or could be viewed by some feminists to trivialise the bigger issues). A chapter titled How To Be Fancied, imparts pearls of wisdom such as "wear excellent lipstick" and "find yourself a good eyebrow threader". (To be fair, it also includes sage advice such as: "Run with your peculiarities. Never fear appearing a little odd.")

Vernon acknowledges her musings may draw detractors. "I think the whole thing will potentially get people's backs up," she admits. "I didn't want it to be offensive or aggressive, but I did want to deposit some new ideas and theories that weren't out there already. To do that, clearly, you have got to rock some existing notions. The fact is we are humans as well as being feminists."

She is less matter-of-fact when it comes to the "hackle-raisingly offensive" gender pay gap, which sees women earn on average 81p to every male pound: "We are being told that we are worth 19% less on average than a male employee," she says. "When you suddenly become aware that the guy sitting next to you is paid considerably more - quite often for doing considerably less - that does make you angry."

An equally no-holds-barred approach is applied to the other contentious topics in her crosshairs. She speaks candidly about her own experience of being sexually assaulted by a stranger while walking home along a canal path at the age of 18. Her attacker pinned her to the ground and bluntly gave the option: "Rape or murder, your choice."

Vernon fought back and managed to unnerve her assailant enough that he ran off and was later caught by police. The incident, however, has irrevocably shaped her stance. "I remember at the time I didn't feel like a victim," she says. "I feel absolutely no shame and I never did."

But she adds: "I think if I had been raped that would have been a whole other kettle of fish and it would have been harder, nastier and darker. As it stands it was hideous but it didn't destroy me. It didn't even vaguely destroy me. It is a weird, dark memory."

The anger is palpable as Vernon talks about the culture of victim-blaming. "It is as if it is your responsibility to not get raped," she says. "It's like: 'Stay good and unraped, women.' That is also insulting to men. What are they? Rape zombies? We take all responsibility away from them. That is insulting to the huge majority of men who don't rape anyone. The only way we are ever going to stop being raped is when men stop raping us. It's not going to be us keeping ourselves as safe as we possibly can. In my case I wasn't drunk, it wasn't that late at night: I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Vernon is also open about having had three abortions, writing in Hot Feminist that she is railing against having to explain her life choices away with any other line than "because s*** happens".

"I found that far harder to write than I did about rape," she admits. "Part of it, without question, is that I'm scared of pro-life groups and the anti-choice brigade attacking me because they are vocal and aggressive. I am nervous about that.

"I am hesitant too because it is still stigmatised. It's like: 'You silly little girl, what were you doing?' It is sexual and alludes to me sexually. For all those reasons I found it incredibly hard, but I couldn't not have put it in the book.

"I do believe that protecting those rights is extremely important. My life would have been so different if I hadn't had access to safe abortion. I might have had illegal backstreet abortions and died. I might have had children that, hand on heart, I just didn't want."

She has some interesting theories on why modern feminism is creating so much angst. "We are getting anxious about everything - it's not just feminism," says Vernon. "We are riddled by doubt and a sense of being judged. Social media is the best and the worst thing that has happened to feminism.

"It is brilliant in that it has given so many women - and feminist men - a voice and platform. It has provoked conversation, but at the same time it has left us in a place where we feel we need to have opinions all the time which is frankly exhausting. We have to respond to the opinions of other people all the time which is also exhausting.

"We are constantly trembling on the brink of getting something wrong. Above everything else is this feeling that we are going to mess up in some way. And when we do, the whole might of the internet will come down upon us. That is really scary.

"It shuts down conversation and it shuts down creativity. I don't think that is restricted to feminism. That is the fact of social media: it is this incredible but also awful platform."

Ultimately, however, Vernon is keen to stress that she doesn't consider herself as the definitive word on how women should view or define themselves. "I don't feel like I've got all the answers," she says. "I don't even feel like I have any answers, I just feel like I have some ideas."

Hot Feminist by Polly Vernon is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £14.99