I’m taking a break from politics this week.

Now, there, there, don’t get upset. I know how much you really want to hear all about who said what to whom in the latest life or death political crisis. But frankly, I’m already at the point that when I turn on the TV and see politicians arguing yet again I promptly run screaming from the room. God knows what state I’ll be in by March.

No, today I want to write about something I’ve been observing for a long time, which is basically this: what has happened to women? More to the point, where have all the intelligent, liberated women gone? These days, all that seems to matter to females are their looks, as if the fight for women’s lib in the 1970s never happened and the clock has been turned back to pre-Betty Friedan times.

The more I look around me the more I see 13-year-old girls trying to look 30, and 40-year-olds, with their tattoo-ed backsides, trying desperately to look 13. Either way it looks tacky and sad.

You see young, beautiful girls saving their money (or taking out a loan!) for breast implants because hey, being a 36DD is what is really gonna’ get you ahead in life. Showing a hint of cleavage is one thing but fully displaying your wares in a push up bra so that men talk to your chest… I’m sorry but I’ve never been able to fathom what’s so flattering about that.

The fight to stop men from treating women as sexual objects has been turned on its head completely, because it seems to me that these days, women themselves want to be objects of sex. If not, how do you explain such programmes that appear in the US like The Bachelor (which will probably eventually reach our shores in a pale, much inferior imitation)? The premise is that a guy chooses among a group of girls and ultimately proposes to The One. To be chosen (oh, my hero!) the girls have to go through all sorts of ridiculous, humiliating antics, but the programme recently reached rock bottom when The Bachelor told them they had to go down on all fours and bark like a dog.

And the stupid girls did it.

Then they cried because they weren’t chosen.

Gloria Steinman, where are you now?

This is just one example from American television of how women are allowing themselves to be treated in the media (the three bleached blondes in The Girls of the Playboy Mansion, who speak in baby voices while cavorting with 81-year-old Hugh Hefner is another programme I find morbidly fascinating and repulsive at the same time.)

Italian TV, however, is even worse. Sure, sex sells, but watching those long-legged beauties strutting around in G-strings, I always wonder why women think this is the only way to the top. Doesn’t it occur to them that gorgeous “vallette” are a dime a dozen in the Italian entertainment industry and that they are all practically interchangeable?

Maybe it’s because I grew up when the pioneers of women’s lib were always in the news that these issues are never far away from my mind. As for feminists like Germaine Greer, who made it their mission to encourage other women to get ahead using their brains not their looks, they must be looking around at what is happening, throwing their hands up in the air and muttering, “Ehh, I give up.”