I want to smack these people in the mouth with their statistics. But this one takes the cake: “more than the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink”

from www.guardian.co.uk – Until she was 18, Kat Banyard assumed that struggles for women’s rights were the stuff of history books – of blurry photos of suffragettes, slightly less blurry photos of 1970s protesters.

She had grown up in a close, loving family, attended an all girls’ comprehensive and, when it came to sexual equality, all had seemed right with the world. Then she went to university to study psychology. There, she started noticing odd little incidents: sexist comments, male students using porn, a lecturer illustrating a talk about memory function with pictures of the tennis player Anna Kournikova in a bikini.

“I remember feeling very uncomfortable about those pictures being used by someone who had authority over me,” says Banyard.

“I started wondering, ‘What does he think of me? What does he think of other women?'”

She wasn’t sure why these incidents bothered her so much. But when her mother lent her The Descent of Woman – an anthropological study by British author Elaine Morgan, published in 1972 – this first brush with feminist writing changed her life. “I remember exactly where I was when I was reading it,” she says, “and it was like someone had taken the shades off, everything looked different”.

Banyard was propelled into action, into an extra- ordinary feminist mission that has included organising major conferences, changing the law, denouncing the sex industry and defending the rights of refugee women.

“A generation of girls like me had grown up thinking that discomfort about sexism was their problem, but in that moment I realised it wasn’t just a personal bugbear. It was because these issues are all linked, part of something much bigger, part of structural inequality. I remember feeling really frustrated: why weren’t feminist issues headline news?”

Less than a decade later Banyard, 28, has become the most influential young feminist in the country. I suspect she will hate this title. When I ask personal questions, she wrinkles her nose; when I ask whether she sees herself as a leader in the women’s movement, she quickly says no, before adding that “movements are led by ideas, by ideals”. True, of course, but not the whole story.

In some ways, she is a slightly unlikely feminist figurehead. She is modest, mild mannered, quiet, with just a subtle edge of intensity when she speaks. I ask where her incredible drive comes from – the motivation that has led her to pursue full-time feminist activism, without pay, while many of her peers are (often understandably) forging careers based on the size of their salaries. Is she driven by anger? No again.

“I think I just like seeing the best in humanity. If you believe in the inherent dignity of people, in justice and human rights, then feminism is for you. It says that rape isn’t natural for men, that men aren’t inherently violent, and that women aren’t just naturally insecure about their bodies and other issues. The best of us is to be found in feminism. I find that hugely inspiring.” (It’s no surprise, on some level, when Banyard half-jokingly says that Lisa Simpson is her feminist heroine – she does seem to share a prodigious, thoughtful morality with that small, yellow cartoon character.)

In March, Faber published Banyard’s book, The Equality Illusion, and she decided to sink the money from her deal into activism. In the book, she lays out the issues facing women – including domestic and sexual violence, the pay gap and abortion rights – and sketches out ways to tackle them.

It is a great introduction for anyone who hasn’t followed the women’s movement closely, and while it is faintly familiar territory to those who have, it is still an enormous achievement, packed with eye-popping and fundamentally depressing statistics. Women own just 1% of the world’s land and property; murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US; each year an estimated 5.1 million women worldwide are left permanently disabled or infertile – and 68,000 die – as a result of unsafe abortion.

There are many other details to make you weep. I knew that it is estimated that tens of thousands of women are raped in the UK each year, and I knew that the rape conviction rate stands at 6.5%. I did not know, as Banyard points out, that “a diversity or vulnerability issue is identified in more than 40% of reported rape cases – mental health or learning disabilities being the most frequent.” Not surprisingly, the horrendously low rape conviction rate is even lower in these cases.

Banyard didn’t rest after publication. This spring she launched UKFeminista, an organisation that acts as a hub for women’s groups – its website gives people a space to network, share information about specific campaigns and find out how best to agitate for change. It comes at a time when the UK women’s movement is bursting with energy. As Banyard points out, just five years ago there seemed to be just a handful of fledgling, grassroots women’s groups; she is now aware of 65, 18 of which have started in the last six months. While she is quick to say that these groups have not sprung up as a result of UKFeminista, there is no doubt that the organisation is proving a strong spur.

Banyard’s interests are broad-based. She isn’t content with working on a single issue, but aims to tear down the entire spider’s web of sexual inequality. When I ask what most fires her, what she would concentrate on if she could attack only one issue, she slowly, ardently, argues – true to form – for two. The first is the sex industry. She says that in terms of the basic arguments, people generally accept that rape is bad, and that we need more women in power. But ask people about the sex industry, and the arguments are still ongoing.

There are continued suggestions that prostitution is just another potentially enjoyable career choice, that pornography has no ill effects whatsoever.

“There’s so much misinformation about the reality of the sex industry,” she says, “what it does to the women involved, what it does to consumers, and what it does to all women in society.”

The scale of it only really hit her when she was writing her book; it was then that she spoke to women in prostitution, such as Emma, who saw eight or nine clients a day, so many that she was in serious pain. “I gave longer blowjobs where possible,” Emma told Banyard, “to shorten the time they had intercourse with me.”

Banyard also quotes the work of Kelly Holsopple, who has surveyed women who work in lapdancing clubs, and found that 100% of them have experienced physical abuse at work, including being bitten, slapped, pinched or punched; all of the women had also been sexually abused in the clubs, ranging from “having their breasts grabbed, to men attempting and succeeding to penetrate them vaginally with fingers and bottles”.

Banyard points out in her book that the porn industry is now estimated to be worth $97bn (£63bn) a year, “more than the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink”.

Her concern is that this industry is proliferating unchecked; we have absolutely no idea how a world with so much pornography and prostitution might play out. “We’re currently experiencing a level of sexual exploitation which is industrialised,” she says, “the scale of which is unparalleled in human history. We don’t know exactly what the effects are going to be – we just know that they will be big, and we need to deal with it urgently.”

The other issue that Banyard is most passionate about, she says, “is men”. She bursts out laughing, then elaborates. She says that the future of feminism “depends on men’s engagement – it needs them, and it also helps them . . . Right now, manhood is highly political, it means being in control, often being aggressive, and essentially being dominant over women. Until we change that, we won’t end rape, we won’t end all sorts of violence and mistreatment. And that level of change can’t just be imposed from the outside. Men have to be involved in the process of change.”

Banyard has already presided over some significant changes herself. Last year, while working as campaigns officer at equality organisation The Fawcett Society, she and activists from the group Object successfully lobbied for a change in the law on lapdancing clubs; these had simply been licensed in the same way as cafes but local authorities can now choose to license them as sex establishments. During that campaign, Banyard and one of her colleagues gatecrashed a meeting of the Lap Dancing Association; in the boardroom sat owners and managers of various UK lapdancing clubs (all male, except one). It is incidents such as these that emphasise Banyard’s essential guts. Behind her cool, calm exterior, I suspect there is a character willing to take some profound risks for what she believes in.

There have been criticisms of the current feminist movement, suggestions that leaders such as Banyard aren’t coming up with fundamentally new ideas, fundamentally new ways to tackle endemic problems. The fact is, though, that the feminist issues that need to be addressed now are very similar to those that needed addressing in the 1970s – and, indeed, the 1900s – and, much as we might want quick fixes, they don’t really exist. The answer is, as always, hard work, serious commitment and painstaking campaigning. On all those counts, Banyard doesn’t look likely to let us down.