I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed.

This objective attitude to my own appearance reminds me of a funny story from the infant days of the internet. Imagine my surprise one morning to receive a message from an unknown recipient informing me that they had film of me masturbating to online pornography which they would make available to a wider audience should I fail to pay a ransom. (Don’t judge – I was young-ish and frisky and it was all so new – I soon grew out of it.) After considering this dilemma briefly, I wrote back: ‘Could you please, as objectively as is possible, tell me if I look attractive or unattractive in this footage? If the former, please go ahead and make it more widely available – if the latter, could you please tell me how much bribery you would be thinking in the ballpark of?’ Yes, I know that contradicts my opening paragraph about building one’s self esteem on looks, but I was using poetic licence to make a cheeky point and thus see off the varlets. And I never heard from them again – result!

I thought of this on reading of the recent Grok brouhaha, in which the AI chatbot integrated into Elon Musk’s X caused consternation by granting users’ requests to create sexualised images of real people. Would I feel violated by this outlandish threat to my bodily integrity, even if I wasn’t a disabled pensioner who nobody fancies, if........

© The Spectator