Survival of the fittest

Helen Walsh has a novel take on feminism - for her it means unlimited lapdancing from a front row seat, respect from prostitutes if she's paying the fee, sympathy for men, the true victims of porn, and a credo that looks matter. She's 26, with a big mind, a fast mouth and a first book coming out. Zoe Williams gets the hang of it

Helen Walsh's first novel, Brass, is an incredibly uplifting experience. I don't mean that in the sense that it is full of redemption, or messages of hope, or helpful life lessons. Not much could be further from the truth; about the most useful lesson it has to offer is that you can drive, and not at all badly, on really strong ecstasy. Besides that, the bad guys win, the good guys come last and everyone else just gets good and drunk. Actually, that's not entirely true - there are no bad guys, only flawed ones, of whom the most blemished (yet charming with it) is Millie, the protagonist. She has a lot of sex, mainly with women, although she does go off-piste with the occasional guy. She has the best - as in the most honestly and evocatively described, not necessarily the highest quality - sex of any contemporary fictitious sex I've read. She is pretty insatiable, except for the bit where she gets herpes and sulks for 30 pages.

A plot outline would tell you very little about Brass. Millie doesn't get up to an awful lot, beyond sex and drugs, the vaguest of brushes with academia, a couple of bus journeys and some classic diatribes about her best friend's girlfriend. My gut feeling is that this heroine will not turn out to be Walsh's defining fictive creation. As a writer, she has a lot of ideas, not all of which can be accommodated by a feckless and beautiful 19-year-old; her I'm-arrived epic is probably a book or two away. Brass isn't perfect, but it is definitely different. It isn't chick lit, as such, but it shares enough of the genes to make you realise how consummately awful chick lit is - full of heroines waiting by phones, snogging the wrong man, taking their educations/careers too seriously/not seriously enough, getting their comeuppance, finding fulfilment in the arms of some milquetoast or other, mistaking shoes for independence of spirit. You forget how rare it is to find a heroine who acts the predator and not the victim, who gets to make the jokes rather than feed lines to the joker, whose character flaws are no less base than the rest of humanity's, and nothing at all to do with eating too much chocolate and letting herself be walked over.

Walsh is 26, seems both older and younger, and from a distance is very perfect and carefree-looking, like a shampoo advert. She has a very impressive-sounding past, bolstered by the fact that she left school at 16 and went, for no reason that she has handy, to live on her own in Barcelona. "I just needed to get out of the area," she says gnomically, like a character in the Sopranos. Still, it was fair enough; she was getting death threats from coke dealers.

Walsh grew up in Warrington, near Liverpool, with her Malaysian mother, a district nurse, and her father, who drove a fork-lift truck and wanted to be a musician. At 11 she got a scholarship to a posh girls' school. "And I was the only kid there that was from a working-class background. My parents really struggled with the coach trips and travel, they really worked overtime. I always had this sense of letting them down, and it made me work hard till I was about 13, and I got into pills. And, you know, I was just so isolated, because it was such a posh environment." Walsh loves ecstasy - or rather, she loves ecstasy as it was when she first took it, in 1990. "Even by 1991, the following year, and that's actually not long enough to build up intolerance, the Es were rubbish. It's so sad. It all happened at the same time, the tablets went shite, the music got fragmented and went shite, and all of a sudden it was happy, glow-stick, shite. So sad ... " It's very funny; she has this sincere, Radio 4 tone when she says this, as if she's talking about the city taking over the countryside, or the demise of the tawny owl.

After messing up her GCSEs, Walsh left school as soon as she could. She is fairly guarded talking about this period, since she's realised lately the dangers of claiming to be working class, even when you are. "It's very strange, journalists put so much pressure on you to authenticate. You know, prove you're the real thing ... how many lard butties have you eaten in your life? How poor was your early nutrition?"

Anyway, if the weight of parental expectation (and assorted other Warrington pressures) was enough to send Walsh to Spain at 16, it was also enough to get her to university when she came back. She arrived at Liverpool to study sociology, determined to get a first, and to be able to quote Foucault on demand. She was interested in social theory, and Marxism brought her out in a violent, if metaphorical, rash. "I just had it in my head that this is what students did, all of a sudden they'd become socialists. And at the time that kind of thing really aggravated me, not for any reason related to Marxism itself, just because it was students doing it." Her antipathy to the rest of the student population was reciprocated. Someone wrote "Helen Walsh is a vain and obnoxious cow" in the loos. Not very catchy, but unambiguous and precise.

After her first year, she concentrated on deviance and crime. "For the last two years I just studied sex. I was getting away with murder, getting a degree just studying filth, watching porno back to back and then writing about it in a really obnoxious academic way." Her dissertation makes me smile just describing it, which is not something you could say about many undergraduate extended essays. It was all about porn, but taken from the position that, if it's meant to be so damaging to women, surely it must be damaging to men as well? "I did it on behalf of men, since male academics are too frightened to take this stuff on. So I did the whole thing about how most men in porn are white, have a certain body type, how it can make men who don't fit that description insecure, that whole thing ... you know" - she smiles, here, in a way that I can only describe as coy - "the pounding ... that isn't how sex is for most men. Porn fosters feelings of inadequacy far more in men than it does in women. Women get that kind of thing from Elle and Vogue and Hello!, but they don't watch porn and go, 'I wish I had a tighter pussy.' And, you know, porn is bound to make men much more insecure than it does women - there's the whole thing about being a stud, where the whore just has to lie there being insatiable, and the stud has to be ready to go go go go go all the time." This is a very typical Walsh approach - she will investigate a subject rather rigorously according to principles of logic without prejudice, and reverse expectation not for the hell of being revisionist, but because expectation is wrong, and needs to be reversed. When she finished her degree, armed with the first she annoyed everyone so much with by so obviously wanting, she moved to London, looking vaguely for a job in documentary film-making. "I wanted to make a film about the sex industry."

What about it, in particular?

"Well, you know, these hookers in Liverpool were getting too big for their own boots. They'd think they were celebrities. It was a real Divine Brown syndrome. You want to go, 'How dare you be so rude to me? I'm paying for a service!'" In Brass, Millie hires a teenage prostitute and has sex with her in a graveyard, but I never got a straight answer out of Walsh as to whether or not she has paid for sex herself. Sometimes, as here, she will imply yes, loads; other times, it's a bit more ambiguous, and anyone who shows an interest in the subject is regressive and prudish. She recently told one interviewer that she had tried to hire a prostitute while she was a student, but was turned down.

The issue of prostitution is a recurring theme for Walsh; she rejects out of hand the notion that sex industry workers are victims by definition. In Barcelona, she worked in a transvestite bar, fixing up prostitutes with clients. She is kiddishly impressed by the San Francisco scene, where, she says, "there's loads of bored married housewives, and they call up an agency and a butch dyke will come out dressed as a mechanic or gardener, and knock on the door and say, 'I've come to fix your garden', and pin them down and, you know, rape them. How cool is that? You've sent your kids off to school, and you're just drumming your fingers going, 'I wonder if I've got a bust sprocket.'" She takes this very pragmatic, ungendered view, which is that some people want to buy sex and some people are prepared to sell it - which, if you take Walsh's line that women are just as likely to be buying as selling, is ultimately as feminist as you can get. But for all that, this doesn't go down well in feminist circles. "When I was first taught about feminism, it was all about parity with men. But you're given a really hard time, you're really beaten up by feminists, if you do consider yourself equal with men, and act in the same predatory way. And I don't understand that at all, it's just hypocrisy."

Still less does she tessellate neatly with gay circles, since she rejects the term in the first place. "I never really identified with being either straight or gay, and I hate the word bisexual. I'm not going to call myself anything that restricts what I can and can't do. This is volatile territory, but I have so many friends who've started off bisexual, gone into a relationship with a woman, come down on the lesbian side and had to have a massive shift in their lifestyle of what they could do, and where they could go, and what they could say. And if they have latent impulses to sleep with men, they can't do it, it goes against protocol." According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, she is going out with the novelist Kevin Sampson.

Five years ago, when she was at college, Walsh had a serious lapdancing habit. "The first student loan I got, I blew in two weekends on lapdancing. Because it's so manipulative, it's so addictive. The girls are really clever. They'll tease you, and each dance they'll give you a tiny bit more, and you really, really do think at the end that you're gonna be going home with her. And I always left with fuck all. I used to have a girlfriend I went with, but she saw the light and said, 'You're as daft as every bloke in here.' So I'd go in on my own, pretending to be a record executive, or a scout for a glamour-modelling agency. A Playboy casting agency. 'You could be the next big thing, girl. Shake that booty a little harder.' And now, women just aren't allowed in lapdancing clubs."

Walsh's honesty is admirable and funny - she has no time for ill-conceived notions of equality that whitewash the inevitable fact that some people are higher up the food chain than others. Her writing puts an almost Mills & Boon emphasis on the outrageous beauty of the beautiful: everyone is whip-thin this, waifish that, cheekbones the other - I suppose I balk at this slightly, since it conjures up a very magaziney, conformist portrait of human attractiveness and attraction - but, as it turns out, I'm being unrealistic and PC; these are the sad facts of life. Some people are better looking than others, and in consequence will have more fun and get away with more. "It's quite dangerous territory, especially for a feminist to be saying it," Walsh says, "but I think that's how it is. It goes back to that really crude basic thing of survival of the fittest ... "

What, does she think Darwin meant "fit" in its modern sense?

"Well, yeah. There are always going to be hierarchies where there's sex involved, you're going to have to distance yourself from the crowd to make yourself appealing to that partner, and if it's not going to be on material grounds, it's going to be by looking different, by looking thinner or, you know, better." Occasionally, I feel that Walsh's boldness segues into wilful provocation, and that her emphasis on the importance of queer theory is a smoke screen for old-fashioned, almost colonialist moral relativism. You know, you can go to hookers, and lapdancing clubs (this is definitely true), and it can be part of your parity with straight men. But if you're lying to strippers about being a talent scout and making them think they're going to be the next Playboy cover girl, whichever way you cut it, it's the behaviour of a scumbag.

Walsh also had a new spin on issues like female circumcision - who are we westerners to say that Somalian girls want to keep their clitorises? And prostitution in the developing world - who are we to call Thai prostitutes exploited when maybe they don't see it that way? "Maybe they have a different relationship with their bodies."

Ultimately, I find this pretty bogus. You might just as well ask, "Who are we westerners to say Thai mothers want to see their children live through puberty?" If you ascribe any consistent and meaningful importance to female sexuality, you have to extend that to all women, and not just western ones who "see it that way".

But Walsh is a creative writer, whose work isn't didactic or schematic, and is highly engaging and readable. Yes, there are cracks in her world-view, but I think they'll shift, and that's just the way it goes when you're 26 and you have a big mind and a fast mouth. She won't talk about her second book, incidentally, for fear that she'll jinx it. She was also convinced until she saw the uncorrected proof of Brass in front of her that Jamie Byng, head of huge-small publisher Canongate, was going to call her up and say, "I don't know what came over me, this is absolute shite and I'm dropping it right now." I said that apparently the most arrogant man on TV still gets that, waking up at 4am expecting everyone to have realised he's a fraud. She seems curiously unimpressed by this information, and I wish I hadn't said it.

Beyond parity between the genders, and a new era of openness that allows no crude labelling or fixed notions of lifestyle to come between people and their ever-evolving preferences, Walsh's needs are simple. She just wants to make enough not to have to work in a call centre, and to pay off her parents' mortgage. I guess she wants England to go back to being the kind of place where women are allowed into lapdancing clubs, but she didn't exhibit any evangelical zeal on this score. She wants to finish her second book, and then write a third. She has this natural, easy-going courage that comes from being original without having to try.

You wouldn't say the future of mainstream fiction was exactly safe in her hands, but it'll certainly be more adult, more comic, more eventful

· Brass, by Helen Walsh, is published on March 29 by Canongate, priced £9.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, call 0870 066 7979.