Women from The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade to Katie Price should think about whether they really do

Women from The Sun’s editor Rebekah Wade to Katie Price should think about whether they really do want to be part of this horrible edifice that causes suffering to women less empowered by “glamour” than they are.¿ The hoodie debate rages on, with Tony Blair – keen at the moment to be seen entering all debates – intervening to sanctify the Bluewater shopping centre’s decision to ban the hoodie – except from its shops. Even women who don’t need the money – from Catherine Zeta Jones to Cameron Diaz – sometimes find themselves promoting something or other by flashing some tasteful flesh in a men’s magazine. Which, in another neatly completed circle, is where “second wave” feminism came in, exhorting women to burn their bras and refrain from assisting in their own objectification.The awful truth is that these magazines deliver to men a hateful image of women that women themselves seem happy enough to collude in. Second, sadly, you can learn quite a lot about women, too, from looking through these same men’s magazines.

Who are the women who decide that they wish to be objectified by confused men – often young – whose consumption of this material may or may not have a bearing on how eventually they will be able to relate to actual women? The answer is, surely, confused women – almost always young – who are in the same position.We hear a lot these days about how women from Abi Titmuss to Heidi Klum are merely supplying a demand, and making enough cash to last them a lifetime. But it is also important to remember two other things.First, you can learn just as much about men from riffling through their endless fishing magazines, or computer magazines or music magazines. Then Loaded magazine launched, with a, shall we say, more “irreverent” attitude to women, and the whole men’s magazine market started its gradual ascent back to the same top shelf it had so recently tried to escape from.Now, it is depressing for a woman to look at these magazines, full as they are of images of women as despicable, cumbersome but bafflingly unimprovable receptacles for the collection of semen, because they really do suggest that men’s hatred of, and contempt for, women is boundless and unquenchable. These magazines courted advertisers who didn’t want to be seen in “todd books” and used to put pictures of celebrity men on their covers, and run features on such things as “the Filofax” and other necessary info for the burgeoning yuppie generation.

Others could be forgiven for seeing it merely as an indication that what goes around comes around. In the early 1980s, it was considered one of life’s great mysteries that, despite the proliferation of women’s magazines, there were no general interest titles in this country aimed at men, except for such examples as Playboy, Penthouse and so on (which men quite often said they bought only for the articles). Some may consider it a sign of escalating misogyny that men’s magazines are on the move to the top shelf because of their explicit sexual content. If we can choose how the world will end, I put it to you that the whimper is preferable to the bang
More from Howard Jacobson. But I see nothing in this process, wherever one stands on Iraq or any other contentious issue, to be pleased about.

It looks like the exercise of dogma to me, and what’s dogma but feeling become doctrinal.Better to feel nothing. And on the matter of who or what it is we vote for? Never mind. The whole point of democracy is that we vote full stop.So is it better, then, to cast a vote for the British National Party than not to cast a vote at all?It would seem that we fear apathy and indifference more than we fear folly. Charles Kennedy completes the third of the party reshuffles this weekend, reformulating his Shadow Cabinet. He is shuffling a Liberal pack which is bigger than at any point since 1923. Only four years ago, at the 2001 election, most pundits expected the Liberal Democrats to lose MPs compared to the Ashdown-led breakthrough in 1997.