It is tiresome repeating the nonsense of fools, but vigilance is essential to survival, as she herself says. And so here is the advice to young women from Joanna Lumley, an actor, charity campaigner and former model, delivered in an interview to the Telegraph. It is ostensibly about how to avoid physical assault and rape; I say ostensibly because it is really about misogyny, reactionary ideals of femininity, and, as ever, class.

"Don't look like trash, don't get drunk, don't be sick down your front, don't break your heels and stagger about in the wrong clothes at midnight," she says. "Don't be sick in the gutter … in a silly dress with no money to get a taxi home, because somebody will take advantage of you, either they'll rape you, or they'll knock you on the head or they'll rob you."

Where to begin? It is an old and pernicious taunt to insist that women are responsible for avoiding criminality, and they must therefore not wear pretty clothes that make them feel desirable, or drink for pleasure, or do anything as reckless as to actually leave the house, and seek out men they did not know before. (My colleague Zoe Williams calls this behaviour, with judicious sarcasm, being in a state of "pre-rape".)

Barely any responsibility falls upon the rapist, the perpetrator, in this nightmare: he is a confusing figure whom we do not try to understand, or address. Is he a helpless opportunist, following the totemic tiny skirt like a line of thread into the Minotaur's cave? (I was not actually aware that rapists had an ideal dress sense until Lumley told me. I thought that most women were raped by people known to them; that is, it is the women, not the clothes, that are raped.)

Or is he a semi-fictional bogeyman, because the concept of familiar men raping women is too revolting to process? If this is the case, I suppose there is no point asking the male equivalent of Lumley (Kevin Whately, I suppose, or perhaps Hugh Laurie) to give an interview to the Telegraph, where he will ideally say: men, if you think you might be in danger of raping a woman, don't drink and stay at home. And watch the costumery. Some clothes have psychotic properties, and they will make you rape people even if you never meant to.

Lumley's status as a national treasure mystifies me. National treasures are often fools and worse: dare I say that until last year Jimmy Savile was perhaps the greatest of them all? This week Prince Harry, a man educated at vast expense to patronise people and shoot things, was smiled on for an interview that included the revelation that he believes the dissemination of information, that is, the function of the media, a bad thing, and anyone who seeks the information the media bring should feel "guilty". (He sounded like Joseph Goebbels – if only he had the outfit!)

But they talk, and they are listened to, and the message from Lumley, whom I saw just yesterday in a photograph with her hand down her pants, is clear. (Hypocrisy is always enchanting in professional moralisers.) It echoes through the police force and the judiciary and the culture at large. If you are sexually assaulted, except under very specific circumstances – by a Big Bad Wolf, ideally while wearing a Red Hood, for instance – the responsibility is yours. "Oh, Little Red Riding Hood, what a little skirt you have." "All the better, Big Bad Wolf, to be slut-shamed in …"

I am not even certain about this scenario. I can too easily imagine Red Riding Hood being told by the officers of the Metropolitan police's Sapphire unit, if they had time between falsifying reports and ignoring mounting evidence against prolific rapists, that she shouldn't have walked through the forest in such a very red cape. (Were you drunk, Red Riding Hood? Only a solitary alcopop, you say? Hmm. Shouldn't you have stayed in the village with the other dumb heroines, where all is safe and dull?) This ancient narrative is the reason why rape is the most under-reported violent crime, and the most rarely punished.

Lumley's noise was not only a call for a kind of "nice" femininity that was only ever a polite smile, or desperate shrug, at disempowerment. (Lumley also called for young women "to behave properly, be polite, be on time, dress properly", all of which sounds exhausting, even if you are not growing up in a triple-dip recession.) It is class contempt. The woman Lumley conjures is obviously working class, and here again, as we are learning to do in these Tory times, we hear the distinction between becoming and unbecoming poor. Lumley despises the clothes and the shoes this woman wears, and despises the way she makes herself happy, and the way she sometimes fails. Of course the spewing girls on their backs are a minority, horribly photographed without their permission by the tabloids; Lumley makes them sound like a plague. But why wouldn't she? She found her most famous part, the desperate alcoholic Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, "detestable".

Lumley says she cares about these girls. Perhaps she thinks she does, even as she lays rape at their own doors. But if that were true, there are many things she could have said. She could have spoken of education, of inequality, of the pay gap, of gender segregation, of the under-representation of women in parliament, the professions, the City and the judiciary, and of all the ways in which women feel less important than they should. She could have said that rape is the only crime where the victim is routinely blamed and routinely disbelieved. She could have criticised a country where ambition – and seemingly, pleasure – is now, more than ever, for the wealthy and, to her eyes, tasteful. Instead she turned, with wrinkled nose, to the clothes – a fashion model still.

Twitter: @TanyaGold1