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Throughout human history women have played the mating game by stealth, using the masks and decorations of makeup and fashion to advertise and enhance their attractiveness to men and to other women.

But they were always real, alive and in their bodies. As a man, I’m attracted to the pretty, the symmetrical and the shapely but I crave the femininity that comes from warmth, from movement and from a woman’s intelligence and humour that arises only out of experience and life. I want an alive woman and a real one, with or without the masks and decorations.

But now we have something else. Magazines are selling ‘idealized’ cartoons of women as the real thing - no truth, no life, not one genuine day lived - just mannequins, their development frozen forever in an uninteresting Barbie world.

Well, I’m not buying and I wonder whether those who do are either very young or have brains as plastic as the images they admire.

I sometimes try to examine society by looking at the trends in our behaviour over the last several years and projecting those trends into the future. To have a world where ever more ‘idealized’ and artificial images pose as real people is something we should seriously want to avoid.

Women are up in arms too, as at Jezebel.com, Women’s Voices for Change, mamaVISION, After Ellen and Back in skinny jeans.

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