At what point does a book become unreadable? When the reader can think of quite literally anything – however degrading, however painful – rather than sit down and read it. By the time I reached chapter two, “Let’s Be Careerist, Bitches!”, of Zoe Strimpel’s latest non-fiction offering, Good Slut, I had scrubbed the toilet, cleaned the gutters, submitted to a full-body wax. None of these ordeals proved as punishing as trudging through Strimpel’s hectoring defence of the capitalist logic behind the female sexual revolution, and the lusty argument for greater sexual promiscuity.

For those who look on the bright side of life and are unfamiliar with the columns of the Spectator and Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel is a conservative writer and a historian of dating, gender, intimacy and feminism. Her knowledge of feminist theory is substantial and wide-ranging; Good Slut is peppered with references spanning the feminist spectrum. In her journalism, she more often swings her bat at general grievances with the world, which include – but are far from limited to – the tyranny of modern airports; museum gift shops “promoting the audacious lie that Israel is committing genocide”; Italian cuisine (“revolting”); people who love sharks (“they are truly hideous killers”); Brooklyn Beckham (brat); Emma Watson (banal); Le Creuset (basic); farmers’ markets (cultish); and Germany (“weird, yet dull”). 

But in these so-called “anti-rational times,” Strimpel laments, it is vital to get “hot takes right”: to “make sure the wrong ones don’t just swirl unchallenged around the ether, seeping into sensibilities, discourse, and norms”. In her attempt to do so, Strimpel has produced Good Slut. In this purported antidote to contemporary feminist debates across the West, both ends of the political spectrum have barricaded themselves in, immobilised by fear-mongering and a fixation on victimhood. To summarise it more clearly than Strimpel manages, on the left-hand side of the ring are the MeToo leftists, concerned primarily with the intervention of the state and bureaucracies in women’s lives. They see structural inequalities, such as capitalism and the patriarchy, as the root causes of women’s economic exploitation and the violence perpetrated against them. On the right-hand side are libertarian feminists, who believe they are protecting women from threats reinforced by cultural norms. They seek to strengthen the traditional nuclear family, often resisting multiculturalism, and aim to empower women through entrepreneurship and personal responsibility rather than through systemic reform. What unites them is the idea that women need protection from external forces, which systemically discriminate against them. 

But it has unequivocally never been a better time to be a woman, Strimpel argues. “Women’s pain, injustices, experiences and achievements are taken more seriously now than ever before. What’s more, the opportunities in free societies are endless: whether sexual freedom, bodily autonomy or financial independence, women can, should and will – if they desire – have it all.” This argument, of course, is not her own, but a Lidl-grade dupe of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 self-help guide, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money… Even If You’re Starting With Nothing.

For progressives, as Strimpel outlines in a chapter yuckily titled “Trad femmes and the Menstrual Left”, the “left gale” is now blowing in an “anti-girlboss” direction, rendering ambition no longer “cool, or even acceptable”. These whingeing, wallowing lefties, still nursing the wounds of MeToo and stubbornly insisting that the patriarchy exists, remain unable to move on. They hate catcalling and pervy bosses. Yet what the slim, attractive idiots apparently fail to grasp is that thousands of women – “overweight, older, handicapped, or otherwise deemed sexually invisible” – would simply kill to be ogled by a pervert on the street. One might foolishly suggest that women deemed unattractive are also subjected to sexism – often more insidiously so. But no matter. In this telling, objectification exists only through the narrow prism of privilege.

The central thesis of Good Slut is both simple and confused: toughen up, bitches. It’s time to “grab life by the ovaries”. Preventing sexual assault, in Strimpel’s telling, is not about challenging masculinity but about creating a deterrent. In one of the book’s most absurd passages, she proposes mandatory martial arts training for all women, specifically designed to “disable male genitalia”. This is a dispiriting regurgitation of Camille Paglia’s 1990s theory of “Amazon feminism”, which emphasises female physical prowess as a route to achieving gender equality. But Strimpel’s version pushes the idea beyond the point of being both cuckoo and logistically herculean – it is fabulously insulting. To suggest that all victims of sexual violence could have avoided their fate had they been better at executing crotch-disabling “bites[s] to the groin”, eye pokes, punches and headlocks is a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex ways in which sexual assault occurs. If that were not enough, Strimpel calls for women to be empowered by example of “women in serious combat roles” in the United States and Israeli militaries. Let little girls no longer grow up in fear; let them be inspired. They too, just like the boys, could one day mow down civilians in the street. 

The right, in case you missed it, are advancing a “regressive, illiberal domesticity utopia”, one in which women are expelled from the workforce, compelled into motherhood and deprived of birth control. “There is more respect for mothers in ancient Talmudic Judaism,” Strimpel observes, “than there is in contemporary Texas.” The new feminist right also commits the greatest sin in Strimpel’s view: they think casual sex might not be good for women. Consequently, they regard its fallout – “abortion, the morning-after pill, being ghosted, dumped or otherwise dropped after sex” – with some degree of caution. 

Simple fools. As Strimpel repeatedly makes clear, in a tract that could more honestly have been titled Everyone Else Is Wrong Except Me, none of these things could possibly be harmful to other women, because they are not harmful to her. Sexual promiscuity is, at base, good – because she enjoys it (this is made very, very clear, with paeans to “riding the cock carousel” aplenty). That being ghosted might make another woman hate herself, that multiple partners can lead to UTIs, or that abortions can be traumatising? Irrelevant. There is no middle-ground argument, no acknowledgment that yes, it can be positive for women in the West to explore their sexuality and have access to a full range of contraception, while also recognising that some women are perfectly content with one partner for life, happy to stay at home, and uninterested in becoming a “Good Slut.”

If only these women – on both left and right – would prostrate themselves before capitalism, “the most dynamic, promising system the world has ever known”. Perhaps then they might finally recognise how enviably cushioned their lives are. The left’s hostility to neoliberalism, in Strimpel’s telling, casts women as “fundamentally objectified and preyed upon, due to the operation of the ‘system’ in its many guises, especially capitalism and patriarchy”. They believe, apparently, that every sexual and moral problem is systemic, capitalist in origin, and that “enslavement to a demonic market has perverted us with the idea that motherhood is comparable with careerism.”

The real problem with neoliberalism is that it parades “choice” and “empowerment” for the privileged few while ignoring the structural barriers that constrain the majority, reducing collective liberation to little more than personal advancement. But any attentive reader of Good Slut will quickly discover that working class women – and any women outside the “cock carousels” of the metropolitan West – do not figure nearly as prominently in Strimpel’s concern as the city-dwelling girlbosses climbing the ranks at Goldman Sachs. That capitalism enriches already wealthy women while leaving poorer women further behind; that increased industrial production can wreck the quality of life of factory workers outside the West, many of whom are women and girls; and that unchecked capitalist expansion accelerates climate change – all of this goes unmentioned.

One of the solutions Strimpel offers for women in the depths of poverty – when she finally remembers to acknowledge them, some 170 pages in – is liberation by OnlyFans. In one particularly gross-out section, she cites a statistic claiming that “nearly half a million people per year in England alone say they consider suicide because of financial stress.” Her proposed solution? “A DIY subscription model for explicit material [which] offers considerable financial relief that could potentially be literally life-saving.” That Strimpel cannot see the glaring flaw in this hyper-capitalist prescription is… astounding. The notion that women sliding toward suicide might be rescued by uploading pictures of their boobs for a £2-a-month subscription is a dystopian offering. Feeling empowered yet?

This Good Slut, then, is a confused and unhappy creature. It cannot decide whether it wants to be a serious, academic study or a wet papier-mâché combo of leftover columns. The cover – three chillies sidled together to suggest a vagina (vegetables artfully arranged to resemble genitalia; another retro throwback, Georgia O’Keeffe was doing this a long time ago) – rather unsubtly signals that this is, fundamentally, a book about having lots of sex as often as possible. Miraculously, though, Good Slut manages to be both boring and outrageous at the same time. 

And who, exactly, is it for? The ideal reader of Good Slut would need to be staunchly individualistic, concerned primarily with her own enjoyment, pleasure, and upward mobility, serenely untroubled by whatever – or whomever – might bear the consequences of that trajectory. She would also need to be able to poke out men’s eyes, while also placing their seduction at the altar of her entire life. (She would, come to think of it, be a lot like Zoe Strimpel.) Perhaps she is Kemi Badenoch, who described the book as a “challenge to the culture of victimhood and pessimism around young women”, which is “well made and worth serious thought”. But in the fractured, divided feminist landscape of 2026, it is striking to encounter a text so furiously sure that it is modern, while being in reality curiously out of step with contemporary debate. This book is devoted to a preoccupation that few feminists seem especially animated by, not thoroughly chewing down on hot topics such as the trans debate, surrogacy, grooming gangs, religious oppression or abortion access. 

But these feminist tendencies didn’t come from nowhere to oppress women, as Strimpel seems to imply. These are semi-rational responses to the problems women see around them, and they won’t be wished away by telling women how grateful they should be to be free. They’re not asking for freedom. In their imperfect way, they’re advocating for political and cultural changes to improve women’s lives. While this may technically be the best time to be a woman in the West, that’s like saying it is the best time in history to have a vital limb amputated. You may survive; you may even adapt. But you would be forgiven for wishing it did not have to be this way. 

In Strimpel’s supposed utopia, the United Kingdom, police in Northern Ireland attend a domestic abuse incident roughly every 17 minutes. In 2024, Unison reported that violence in the workplace, rape, violent assault, honour killings and forced pregnancy were all rising in England and Wales. In the end, Good Slut feels less like a manifesto, or even an autobiography, than a monologue. In this promised land, it is hardly surprising that feminists remain troubled – still preoccupied not with the “cock carousel” or girlbossing, but with violence, power, and the stubborn endurance of harm. To suggest that money, sex, and individual power might solve this is naive and shallow. If freedom – narrowly defined as choice, consumption and upward mobility – had been the answer all along, why do the fundamental injustices that animate feminism persist, mutate, and, in some cases, intensify? And if those problems mutate, so does feminist thought, well beyond the ladette absolutism of Zoe Strimpel, yet another aspect of Nineties politics that is well beyond its sell-by date.

Good Slut: How Money, Sex and Power Set Women Free
Zoe Strimpel
Constable, 256pp, £22

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[Further reading: Gisèle Pelicot is not your hero]

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