that the images contributed to men's perceptions of women as sex objects - but they seem unwilling or unable to resist.

The problem is not erotica or what is sensual - it's that the so-called role models, such as Jessica Simpson and the Pussy Cat Dolls, act like airheads from a bygone era when women had only their bodies with which to trade, either in marriage or for sex.

Just when opportunities have never been greater for women, why are we reducing the ideal to a one-dimensional sex doll - devoid of wit, irony, talent or self-respect?

We have, of course, been here before. In Ways of Seeing written by John Berger 30 years ago, he described a woman in Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, a painting by the 15th century artist Hans Memling.

Memling's woman stands brazenly naked, in the middle of a field, (how raunchy is that?) shorn of pubic hair, admiring herself in a mirror. Then, Berger points out, pubic hair was removed by male artists because the men who paid for these paintings wanted women to be submissive, childlike. "Women are

there to feed an appetite - not have one of their own," Berger wrote.

In the 1960s, when Nancy Sinatra sang These Boots Were Made for Walking, it was a song of freedom. Jessica Simpson sings it as a sadomasochistic woman trying to please her master; feeding an appetite not her own.

One teenager in the California poll said, "My parents' generation had women's rights... What do we have? Paris Hilton." Thirty or forty years ago, the girls now hanging burlesque tassels on their nipples would have been out campaigning against rampant sexism and working to remove the female tits and bums that festooned factory calendars and billboards.

Now, the images are back, apparently welcomed most of all by the women themselves - women who are happy to call themselves chicks, birds and bitches. Even more incomprehensible to those of us who fought for women's rights in the Sixties and Seventies is that these girls believe that, in their freedom to behave like slappers, they are being 'emancipated'.

No wonder men are confused and many of the women of the baby boom generation furious.