Last week, it was noted in certain quarters that the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton as was) had a few grey hairs in her parting. Cue some faux concern about how pregnancy can sometimes do this to hair, along with a ripple of cooing about how this showed Kate to be "one of us" – too busy and knackered to sort her hair out.

Don't most people get a couple of white hairs by their 30s? I started getting them when I was a 15-year-old wannabe rock chick (I was told by a hairdresser that it was a Celtic thing). By now, I must resemble the Bride of Catweazle beneath all the dye.

Is the Duchess of Cambridge simply not allowed to change and age – does she have to beg for permission to be mortal? Or is this (a faint twinkle of silver) just another example of the relentless grubbing for new territories and battlegrounds in the ongoing micro-inspection of the female?

Of late, I've noticed female hair becoming a thing. Not a big thing, but still a thing. Never mind Kate's grey, mainly it's women being "outed" for losing their hair; women with traction damage from hair extensions (Naomi Campbell); women who are shedding because they are stressed (Kristen Stewart), or just shot from specific angles so that their parting looks a mile wide (Nigella Lawson).

When Jennifer Aniston recently had her hair cut off because of a bad reaction to a Brazilian (keratin) treatment, I empathised (I once did similar and spent several mortifying weeks resembling the Joshua Tree).

However, unlike Aniston, at least no one bullied and humiliated me by zooming a camera right on to my scalp as if my blitzed follicles were of the gravest concern to international security.

This isn't really about hair (shedding, greying, or otherwise), this is about the relentless scramble to find not only new ways to torture women about their appearance, but also new areas to focus on – institutionalised sexism one body part at a time!

While female objectification is eons old, it is also evolving. Most of us will have noticed how increasingly the attack is not directed at a woman's body as a whole, but, rather, just parts of the body.

It's as if a whole female body is so disturbing and overwhelming, it has to be criticised one bit at a time. Muffin tops, fat arses, double chins, no thigh gap, bulging hips, bingo wings, sagging knees, bushy brows, non-designer vaginas and, my personal favourite, overlong toes! These days, The Female Eunuch's cover would not feature a suit of the female torso, rather several chopped-up female body parts, resembling a serial killer's dumping ground.

Now there's hair, preferably thinning in some devastating fashion. Does this matter, beyond celebrities? I'd say so.

What happens to people in the public eye has a trickle-down effect until you come inevitably to a 14-year-old schoolgirl crying alone in her bedroom, wondering which part of her body to despise next, the result of a culture that encourages her to think of herself not as a whole person, but as a series of flesh-and-blood problem zones.

Men endure nothing on the same scale. They get the nasty bald thing, and their demand for plastic surgery is said to be growing, but don't tell me that they're worrying about their cankles (where the calf meets the foot, don't you know?), non-designer testicles or, indeed, overlong toes. They are not encouraged to think of themselves as a series of problematic zones, crudely stitched into a functional flesh onesie.

What a contrast with women, where the only real question is which body part is going to be singled out for sustained hostile critique next.

If you'd asked me even five years ago, I would have confidently declared that we'd definitely run out of new parts to scrutinise and criticise. Now I'm starting to wonder whether we ever will.

I've a bad case of Xmas ad nausea

The John Lewis Christmas advert is leaving my tears defiantly unjerked. If the mere idea of a Keane song doesn't make you want to claw out your own eardrums and dissolve them in acid, Lily Allen's take on Somewhere Only We Knowcorrect is sweet. However, the cartoon stuff with the hare and the bear leaves me as cold as the snow the badly drawn animals are pretending to scamper about in.

Looking at other Christmas ads, Marks & Spencer has Helena Bonham Carter and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in a frankly tedious Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz mash-up.

Morrisons, meanwhile, has paired Ant and Dec with a dancing gingerbread man; the Boots advert, featuring a hoodie with a heart of gold, deserves special mention for its intriguing misuse of Bronksi Beat's atmospheric gay anthem, Smalltown Boy". I'd love to have been in the meeting where someone said: "This song is about the suffering of a young gay man coming out to a hostile world – let's use it to sell bath bombs!"

Why didn't these companies ask me for help? For a mere couple of million, I could have told them the truth – that the British public doesn't want cartoon hares or supermodel boreathons at Christmas.

Instead of retail, think metail. These days, and especially at Christmas, we're all so narcissistic we only react emotionally to adverts that remind us of us. Hence, the tear-jerk reaction to the John Lewis classic that featured a little boy desperate to give his parents presents, to the strains of Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.

That wasn't our child but we wanted it to be. Now that was a classy piece of cynical, corporate, mass-emotional manipulation – is it too much to ask for it to happen again?

Blackadder has a cunning plan to tell us about war

Defence minister – and one-time Royal Navy surgeon commander – Dr Andrew Murrison has complained that film and television comedies have left the British public with little understanding of the First World War. Murrison said that the satirical takes such as those offered by the likes of Richard Curtis and Ben Elton's Blackadder have been in the ascendant for way too long. Which echoes Jeremy Paxman's recent observation that showing schoolchildren Blackadder Goes Forth to teach them about the First World War was "astonishing".

Really? Obviously, there is always room for more in-depth studies of the First World War. However, shouldn't Blackadder be commended for keeping this war fresh in people's minds, especially the minds of younger people? Along with the humour, there was a lot of pathos in Blackadder Goes Forth – the final scene where they go over the top was unforgettable, as was Baldrick's "German Guns" poem ("Boom. Boom. Boom."). If I were a pupil, with little knowledge of the First World War, and these episodes were shown, they would whet my interest rather than warp it. What's so wrong with humour being employed as a learning aid and a gateway to a more thorough understanding?