The case of the Vogue Brasil Paralympics photoshoot demonstrates how sometimes the road to hell is not only paved with good intentions, but also tarmacked with misfiring empathy. In the shoot, able-bodied actors Cleo Pires and Paulo Vilhena, ambassadors for the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, are shown with limbs digitally removed. Pires has an arm missing while Vilhena has a prosthetic leg. In the vexed ethical domain of cultural appropriation, it’s difficult to know how to classify this (Medical appropriation? Infirmity appropriation?) so perhaps best not to try.

Then there’s the shoot’s message: “We are all paralympians.” Eh? Why are “we” all paralympians – it surely couldn’t be because someone got busy with an airbrush? Thus did Vogue Brasil manage to pull off the remarkable feat of being well-meaning and hopelessly insulting at the same.

Why didn’t they use actual paralympians, or disabled models, in this shoot? Weren’t they considered photogenic enough? Was there a fear that genuine disability might crack the camera lens, melt the lights, or just generally be too much of a “downer”? So much better to draft in a couple of sexy thespians, lob off any surplus extremities and joints (“You won’t be needing that today, honeybun!”). And after the shoot, everyone gets to go home with a lovely warm “inclusive” feeling – perchance to write in their diaries (saintly tears splashing the ink): “I was a very good, kind, thoughtful person today and I hope everyone noticed.” Instead, the entry should have read: “Today, I thoughtlessly diminished and patronised not only paralympians, but also every disabled person on the planet.”

The shoot managed to portray disability as some kind of “fashion quirk”, a trend even, that, given the right lighting and makeup, the hot and able-bodied can pull off – in a “work that infirmity, baby!” kind of way. It implied that evoking the harsh complicated reality of disability is just a matter of rubbing out the malfunctioning body part with a cute computerised eraser, and perhaps adding a prosthesis or two. It propagated the notion that disability has no social, emotional or psychological components; it’s a mere physical (and visual) peculiarity, and one that can be effortlessly faked for the amusement, entertainment, and benefit of the able-bodied world.

This isn’t saying that disability has no place on the pages of a glossy magazine, or in the fashion world. It’s fake disability masquerading as empathy that has no place in any real-world setting. While ordinary disabled people might find such fakery offensive, it’s hard to imagine the reactions of paralympian athletes.

These are people whose fitness and expertise led to them representing their countries in the most high-profile of global sporting arenas. But never mind all that – could they do as good, as photogenic, a job of “looking hot-disabled” as an able-bodied person could? Seemingly without malice (it must be noted), Vogue Brasil blundered into endorsing the idea that, even in the real world, disability is better portrayed, made more palatable and attractive (sanitised, if you will) by “normal’ people. However well-intentioned, this wasn’t being inclusive, or making a genuine attempt to place themselves into the world of the disabled – a world that could only ever be unimaginable to a privileged, able-bodied person.

This was about replacing a disabled person with an “upgrade” – some looker who’s only pretending. It was saying that disability is too important an issue to be left to actual disabled people, who might screw it up by not photographing well. There was also the presumption that disabled people would be grateful for the solidarity and attention, when I suspect that one commodity that disabled people aren’t short of is high-handed condescension. Paralympian or otherwise, it would seem that disabled people already have quite enough to be getting on with in their lives without the able-bodied wanting a piece of the action, too.

This is not a pedigree chum - this is a tyrant

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A maltese. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Last Friday, it was National Dog Day, but it’s always National Dog Day in our house. After years of pleading, I gave in to getting a dog. I’d resisted because I thought it would be akin to having another child. I was right.

Toto the maltese is a fur baby that needs walking, entertaining, cosseting and the rest. Forget bunging over a bit of Winalot, he has us cooking for him as though it were some kind of ongoing upmarket canine dinner party.

I find myself cradling him as though he were the little baby Jesus, which looks even creepier than it sounds.

If I dare to go out without him, I’m given the full Cujo evils when I get home. I carry him when he refuses to walk, once causing an amused builder to shout: “I’m not sure you’re doing that right, love.”

I adore him but look at what I’ve become – a grovelling dog serf, ruled over by a small, furry, white tyrant whose breath frankly isn’t the best.

May what happened to me be a stark warning to all parents being ground down by their cunning progeny. Dogs really are for life. Your life.

A special beer for laydeez? Cheers

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Women seem to manage OK with ordinary beer. Photograph: Juergen Hasenkopf / Rex Features

A new beer has come out in Spain aimed specifically at women. It has a lower alcohol content, comes in a pretty bottle, and it’s called Woman.

At last! I think I can speak for all women who’ve always really fancied a beer but daren’t have one in case it wasn’t specially formulated for our sensitive lady taste-buds and delicate feminine tummies.

It’s not as though we can drink any old beer – we aren’t real people like men. Now that there’s an actual beer called Woman, we can sit in our pretty floral dresses, giggle flirtatiously, and drink our low-alcohol beverage in its special bottle that fits perfectly into our feeble little hands. What a relief!

Woman sounds like the answer to every female beer drinker’s prayer. I only hope that this isn’t a prank, and there aren’t the same kind of question marks that hung over another delicious-sounding lady-beer promised earlier this year. The company, The Order of Yoni, set up a crowdfunding page asking for £118,000 to formulate the beer, Bottled Instinct that mimicked the “essence of a vagina”, more specifically, the “vaginal lactic acid bacteria” of the Czech model who was hired to front the campaign. Sadly, I just checked, and all these months later, the company have only managed to raise £1,345, 1% of its target from only 59 backers.

The Dragons’ Den panel are in for a treat if this lady beer trend catches on. It’s already proving to be a flexible concept. It could be either a beer that mimics a vagina, or one that demonstrates that you’re too weak and girly to drink real beer.

Where beer is concerned, at last women have choice.