One of my favourite one-I-made-earlier aphorisms is ‘Men are the sum of their parts; women are some of their parts.’ But now I’m wondering if it’s a bit out of date. When I thought it up, women were the only ones who bothered with ‘tweakments’ and cosmetic surgery and generally turning themselves into living dolls, hoping to hook what in the common parlance is known as ‘a live one’. But now, with transplants for receding hairlines and male film stars no longer looking like their passport photos, I don’t think this is true anymore.

Becoming a ‘lad’ once meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go

Becoming a ‘lad’ once meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go

Where there is still a gap in male and female attitudes to looks is in dieting. For both sexes, the rise of semaglutides has rendered the dreary business of calorie-counting somewhat superfluous, but for those who don’t want to take them on principle or are medically unsuited to them, the difference in attitudes towards starving oneself is striking, as a new study by Anglia Ruskin University, published in the journal PLOS One, sets out.

For girls, dieting was always a bonding mechanism, a secret society which meant you’d become a woman. And what a grim view of being a woman it was, depriving yourself in order to appeal to men – and not even straight men at that, who always leered at the thought of ‘something to get hold of’, but to gay male fashion designers, who you’d then have to pay for........

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