I'm trying to establish just how ­often the feminist writer Natasha Walter gets angry. Is she ever in a rage before breakfast? "Rarely," she says. Does she ever rant at sexist comments on TV? "From time to time." Would she ­describe ­herself as an angry person? ­"Sometimes I think I'm not the raging sort."

I'm on a mission to discover what fires Walter up. She has been one of Britain's foremost feminist voices for more than a decade, a period in which she has written rationally, ­often ­compellingly, on everything from ­prostitution to parental leave and ­pornography to equal pay. They are subjects that can provoke real fury, and yet Walter's approach to them tends to be calm, sane, straightforward.

Which is great, of course, but her sensibility has always intrigued me. It's a hoary old cliche that feminists are intrinsically angry – a cliche that has been used to undermine feminists, to paint us as marauding harpies, steam belching from our ears – but like all cliches it holds a grain of truth. Most strong political arguments do, necessarily, arise from a wellspring of anger. So what makes Walter furious? What drives her?

We have arranged to meet to talk about her new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter ­taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an ­excursion that starts, in faintly ­surreal fashion, at a "Babes on the Bed" ­competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It's difficult to ­imagine anyone more ­incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; ­especially when the DJ starts ­shouting, "This is Cara Brett! She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank." The ­uncomfortable scene grows uglier as a series of young women take to a bed and strip off their bras to "joggle" their breasts before a throng of men.

The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has ­become: "Now," says ­Ellie, "women get told they are prudes if they say they don't want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else's vagina." She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in ­describing her work as a prostitute, says that "basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". And then there's pornography addict Jim, who says that "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."

It's all enraging material, and Walter marshals it well, but there still seems to be an edge of fury amiss. I ask what prompted her to write this first part of the book, and she says that it came about after a short ­newspaper column that she had dashed off. "It was just a little squib about lads' ­magazines. I didn't invest much in it, and it was one of those ­situations where you start ­getting more ­responses than you expected."

One email in particular stuck out, a message from a 17-year-old girl called Carly Whiteley. She said that she was "starting to think it was time to give up and sit in silence while my friends put on a porno and grunted about ­whatever blonde, airbrushed piece of plastic was in Nuts this week. What you said gave me back the will not to give in . . . It's nice to see someone else saying it, makes me feel like less of a prude-type oddball."

The "prude" reference was key. In Living Dolls, Walter takes on the ­notion that, for example, stripping and pole dancing are ­empowering, ­liberating choices; instead, she ­suggests, it has become increasingly difficult for young women to opt out of this culture, to take any path other than that which leads inexorably to fake nails, fake tan and, finally, fake breasts. And, if they do, there are ­serious social penalties.

"I was surprised by the attitudes of the girls I interviewed," she says, "who seemed to feel that they would be mocked if they protested within their peer groups. You know, when I was at university [in the 80s] it was OK to be annoyed about ­sexism, to take it quite seriously – if you argued about it, it didn't make you the ­subject of ­mockery. Even if you didn't ­particularly identify yourself as a feminist, you could choose where you wanted to be on a spectrum, and you could still say, 'I really don't want Page 3 in the ­common room,' or, 'I ­really hate the idea of porn' . . . I was surprised when I was ­interviewing young women that they felt ­uncomfortable engaging in that way. Of course, a lot them would say, 'It's fine, we can choose whether to [interact with the sexist culture] or not,' and then you dig a little deeper, and you realise that it is more ­problematic than that."

The focus on popular culture, on the pervasive web of sexist imagery and behaviour, is a big shift away from Walter's first book, The New Feminism, which came out in 1998. Then she ­argued that feminists should ­concentrate on specific political, ­social and financial aims; in Living Dolls she writes that she felt that, at that time, we could put aside the feminist ­arguments that "centred on private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired . . . I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of the old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong."

Was she more optimistic about the prospect of equality back then, with New Labour just elected, and women such as Mo Mowlam, Clare Short and Harriet Harman riding high in politics? "Totally," she says. "I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again.'"

Walter grew up steeped in politics. She was born in 1967 to Nicolas, an influential anarchist once imprisoned for heckling Harold Wilson, and Ruth, who was also politically active. Her parents had met in the peace ­movement, and Walter's mother went on to become a social worker, and an avid reader of Spare Rib: "She was genuinely ­committed to feminism, in a very true way." Was there a specific moment when Walter herself became a feminist? She shakes her head. "It was just always there."

They lived in the suburbs, and ­Walter went to the exclusive girls' school, North London Collegiate, then on to study English at Cambridge. There followed a stint at Vogue, and writing for various ­newspapers, before the publication of The New Feminism. The book came at an ­interesting, divisive ­period in the feminist movement, an era of ­personal spats between leading feminists, played out in public. In the mid-90s, Germaine Greer said that ­Suzanne Moore had "hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes, and three fat inches of cleavage"; a few years ­before, Julie Burchill and Camille Paglia had conducted a lively argument via fax machine.

Along came The New ­Feminism, and many ­established feminists took the title as an insult. Why was a new ­feminism ­necessary? The book ­itself was variously ­described as a work of "post-political blandness", "just not serious", the product of ­"cyclical amnesia", an ­uninvigorating read "with none of the impact, inspirational or irritating, of a seminal ­feminist work", a book that "tends towards the banal. New ­Feminism desperately wants not to be a threat to men's egos or women's sex appeal." Germaine Greer said that "lifestyle feminists" were one of the reasons that she had decided to write The Whole Woman, her follow up to The Female Eunuch; "I thought, this isn't what it is about at all," she said of Walter's work.

Walter was described as "the ­embodiment of sweet reason and non-aggression", much reference was made to her good looks (not meant as a compliment), and as the response unfolded, you couldn't help feeling sympathetic towards her, caught, as she was, in the jaws of a generational shift. I ask how she felt at the time, and she says that she was "disappointed. What really pissed me off was that ­people kept referring to it as some argument for the right to wear lipstick. That just was not what the book was about. I wanted people to talk about, 'Well, why are women poorer than men? Why don't we earn as much?' It really ­infuriated me that people weren't ­prepared to engage with that debate."

The experience seems to have shaken her confidence. "Certainly, after I published The New Feminism I took a back seat – if you had told me a year after that that I'd be writing ­another [feminist] book, I'd say, 'You're kidding, I'm not going to go there again." People started saying personal things about me and the way I looked. I hated all that . . . There was a slightly bitter tone that crept in. ­Territorial, I suppose."

I wonder if she ever lost faith in the women's movement, and she says that "if I'm being really, really honest, I did . . . There was a patch after The New Feminism where I felt as though other feminists weren't being very sisterly, I suppose." Her faith was ­revived when she set up the campaign group Women for Refugee Women in 2006, a cause she is clearly ­passionate about, and which has inspired some of her best journalism. "That reconnected me to that basic human rights agenda of the women's movement, which was ­fantastic. Over the last few years there's been so much, well, sisterhood. That's an overused word, but it's real, and it's hugely sustaining."

Walter and her partner have two ­children, Clara, nine, and Arthur, one, and it was becoming a mother that partly inspired the second half of ­Living Dolls. In this section, Walter looks at the way that arguments for biological determinism have suddenly multiplied in recent years. She ­delivers a ­convincing critique of the studies that have been used to imply that children are biologically programmed to fit social stereotypes – that boys have a natural love of blue and cars and guns, and that girls have a natural love of pink and prams and dolls.

When Walter first had her daughter, she says, "I was hit by this deluge of pink. Then, at friends' houses, you'd walk into a boy's bedroom, and it would just be blue and navy, and full of cars and Action Men. I found that when I raised this – even with really liberal parents – they would say, 'But boys and girls are just different. She just LOVES pink.' Or, 'It's such a pity that he doesn't play with dolls, but he just doesn't get it.' They would be ­saying this, sort of bemoaning it, but ­endlessly reinforcing [gender] ­stereotypes in an almost unconscious way . . . I'd hear things like, 'Well, he wanted to do ballet, but he'd be the only boy in the class, so obviously he couldn't do it,' and you'd think, 'Why obviously?'."

The two halves of Living Dolls ­provide an anatomy of regression, of a culture that has responded to the ascent of women with a reassertion of sexist values: the objectification of young women, the suggestion that men and women are simply programmed to behave in certain ways, and that inequality is therefore inevitable. However successful the book is, it's a welcome addition to the feminist bookshelf, and comes at the start of a year that will see two more British feminist books published – Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion, and Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune's Reclaiming the F Word: The New ­Feminist Movement.

Walter says that she is excited by the amount of feminist writing and ­activism that has sprung up recently – at the end of her book she briefly ­profiles some of the key organisations and activists of the last 10 years. "When I wrote The New Feminism, I went and talked to various organisations about their work and, to be honest, I felt I was slightly spinning them [in the book], because I wanted them to be doing well. Now I think I can be much more wholehearted. Young women come up at the end of events and say, 'What can I do, can I come and volunteer?' And they're so excited and idealistic. It's wonderful."

We return to the ­subject of anger. Walter admits that she's not a font of fury, and that "sometimes what you need in this debate are the people who will be enraged, and who will ­really shout. And maybe in this generation we don't quite have someone like that. Of course, a lot of feminist books come out of a personal anger, from that sense of, 'I have suffered, and I'm going to tell you about that.' I don't write those books because I haven't suffered in that way. I just haven't. I don't have the personal weight of rage that some inspirational feminists have. And I'm not going to pretend that I do. It's maddening when you feel a comfortable, middle-class feminist trying to take the weight of the world's sorrows on her shoulders."

Instead, she says, what she does is "to put the argument in place and think about it", to act as a conduit for the stories of women who have suffered, whether it's a rape victim seeking refuge, or a young lap dancer in London. In some ways, her lack of intrinsic rage makes Walter's writing even more admirable, ­particularly ­considering the opprobrium she's faced. She does it out of social ­conscience, "out of solidarity", she says. What ­better reason is there?

Kira Cochrane is the Guardian's women's editor. Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism is published by Virago Press on 4 February, price £12.99