I feel guilty for ogling girls in mini-skirts. Yet no one would call my wife a dirty old woman for fancying a handsome cricketer



A middle-aged man's unwelcome appreciation of a nubile woman can indeed be seen as an invasive threat, in a way that a woman's of a virile man cannot

One thing a chap can’t help noticing in this heat is the quantity of female flesh on display, much of it easy on the eye. Everywhere you look in London — on the streets, in the parks and on the Underground — young women in the minutest of miniskirts and hot-pants are flaunting their golden limbs.



But for many summers now, I’ve noticed something less pleasing: when these gilded girls suspect a man of my age of glancing at their legs (and old habits die hard, even at 59), a look of affronted modesty crosses their faces.



Instinctively, they tug down the hems of their microskirts, in a vain attempt to cover up a fraction of a millimetre of thigh.



I don’t know at precisely what age we cease to be regular blokes with an eye for a pretty woman and become leering, dirty old men, but clearly I passed it long ago.



Listen, girls, I’m sorry. I try, like so many of us, to concentrate on my crossword or stare at the pavement.



But if you will walk around a teeming metropolis with practically nothing on, you really can’t expect to pick and choose whose appreciative glances you attract. Or perhaps all men my age should be compelled to wear blinkers in public places.



Strangely enough, no such general disapproval seems to attach to middle-aged women who display an interest in handsome youths.



Strapping



Old biddies can sit on the Tube, nudging each other and tittering, positively twinkling with admiration of a strapping young backpacker in shorts. Yet they never attract the slightest censure — least of all from the backpacker himself. No coy covering up of washboard abdomens or tugging down of the hems of shorts.



Indeed, nobody would dream of calling my wife a dirty old woman for fancying the cricketer Stuart Broad (in an only semi-maternal way). But I’ve learned to keep very quiet about my similar, only semi-paternal feelings for an actress I could name. But won’t.



Only yesterday, when I outlined my thoughts for this column, a 25-year-old colleague told me that her mother had taken her aside at a party the other night and said of her male guests: ‘Some of your friends are very attractive.’ As my colleague told me, she would have felt much queasier if her father had said the same of her girlfriends.

Dear old John Humphrys (left) found himself in hot water once again, after describing Mishal Husain (right) as a 'very good-looking woman'



But did I say it was strange that different rules appear to apply, according to our sex? On the contrary, it’s the most natural thing in the world, since it springs from the animal nature of homo sapiens and the separate reproductive roles of men and women.



A middle-aged man’s unwelcome appreciation of a nubile woman can indeed be seen as an invasive threat, in a way that a woman’s of a virile man cannot.



So this sudden surge of modesty, which makes the most immodestly dressed of twentysomethings fidget to cover herself up, is an instinct as old as our species. She is saying more attractive mating material may admire me — but not you.



But I’m blundering straight into a minefield. For if this week has one lesson to teach us, it is that men who comment on women’s physical appearance in this modern age do so at their utmost peril — and no matter that most of us are biologically programmed to notice and think about such matters every day of our lives.

John Inverdale, the sports presenter, is in trouble for the opposite offence of suggesting that the Wimbledon singles champion, Marion Bartoli, may be less than a cracker to look at

First, dear old John Humphrys found himself in hot water once again, after Mishal Husain’s appointment as one of his co-presenters of the Radio 4 Today programme alerted everyone to how he described her on an edition of Celebrity Mastermind in 2010.



His crime was to introduce her as a ‘newsreader and a very good-looking woman’, which he went on to compound by asking: ‘Are you doing your job only because you are good looking?’



And now John Inverdale, the sports presenter, is in even deeper trouble for what has been taken as the opposite offence of suggesting that the Wimbledon singles champion, Marion Bartoli, may be less than a cracker to look at.



‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘if her dad did say to her when she was 12, 13, 14 maybe: “Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you’re never going to be somebody with long legs, so you have to compensate for that. You are going to have to be the most dogged, determined fighter that anyone has ever seen, on the tennis court if you are going to make it.” And she kind of is.’



Offended



Both publicly and privately, Inverdale has apologised to Bartoli, who seems not to have been offended by his remarks. But so angry is Maria Miller, who as well as being the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is the Minister for Women and Equalities, that she appears to be demanding that he should be sacked, if not boiled in oil.



Various thoughts spring to mind. One is that Mrs Miller will want me boiled in oil, too, when I say I’ve long thought her a pleasant-looking woman.



Another is that I’m not sure it’s constitutionally healthy for a Cabinet minister — and particularly one with departmental responsibility for broadcasting — to appear to be putting pressure on the BBC to sack a journalist.

No amount of legislation will stop most men from thinking that Maria Sharapova (right) is a degree more pleasing to look at than Marion Bartoli (left), though the latter may be better at tennis

But most of all, I think she may have misunderstood what Inverdale was trying to say. In perhaps a clumsy way, he was attempting to make an anti-sexist, anti-lookist point — very similar, as it happens, to the one John Humphrys was making when he suggested it was wrong for newsreaders to be chosen for their looks (though in his case, it came out sounding downright rude to Ms Husain, who may be as clever as she is tasty, for all I know).



As any father would surely understand, Inverdale was offering encouragement to young women everywhere who may worry about their physical appearance. This is a very unfair world, he was trying to say, in which women blessed with cover-girl looks get an easy ride — and that’s bad. But you, Bartoli, have shown that you are better than the lot of them. Good on yer.



Was that offensive? Not in my book. But even those who think it was uncalled-for surely cannot deny that, shallow creatures as we are, most men pay a great deal of attention to women’s looks.



Maddening



Always have done, always will. And no amount of legislation, or threats of sackings, will change that fundamental fact about human nature — or stop most men from thinking that Maria Sharapova is a degree more pleasing to look at than Marion Bartoli, though the latter may be better at tennis

By coincidence, this week also saw the ultimate attempt to legislate against the grain of man’s animal nature, when the Queen gave her Royal Assent to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act.



This was greeted by the gay rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, with only a qualified welcome. For he complains that there are six ‘discriminatory aspects’ in which the new legislation differs from the separate Marriage Act 1949, which governs heterosexual unions.



‘Separate and different are not equal,’ he says.



Indeed, I’m beginning to feel sorry for Mr Tatchell. It must be maddening for him that the Government keeps capitulating to his demands — first civil partnerships, now gay marriage — because this means he constantly has to think up new grievances to keep his anger alive.



Topping his list this week is the complaint: ‘Rightly or wrongly, the existing grounds for the annulment of a marriage — non-consummation and adultery — do not apply in the case of same-sex marriages.’



But as he is well aware, the best brains in Whitehall tried desperately to come up with a legal definition of the consummation of a marriage between two women. And they simply couldn’t.

