With a claimed subscription-based circulation of 70,000, it has entered its second year clutching the best birthday present of all — shelf room at WH Smith. This, for any mag, is a triumph, but for Britain’s first “sex lifestyle” magazine for women it’s a PhD-inspiring breakthrough.

What’s in it? Well, it might look like one of those mags you flick through at the supermarket till, but on closer inspection the masthead boasts “Fit men, frank sex tips and filthy confessions” and, sealed up in a special section at the centre of the mag, several pages of “cliterature”. Here we find the obligatory sapphic action (“She wanted the job almost as much as she wanted the interviewer”), and the parade of usual objects: “

Breasts like over-ripe melons” (I thought that was a man thing?), panties that are, always and inevitably, flimsy (ditto) and the odd raging penis.

Read between the lines, however, and Scarlet, “The magazine that turns women on” (although, in my experience, that accolade belongs to Country Life), also comes as something of a relief to modern man. In “Five-man plan: date your way to Mr Right”, who comes out on top? The bloke who makes them laugh? Mr Fat Wallet? Mr Intelligent? Nope. Good old “Mr Good-in-Bed”. Ha.

Scarlet’s editor, Sarah Hedley, knows about these things. In her exhausting career she’s road-tested no fewer than 200 sex toys. Her conclusion? You can’t beat the real thing. “OK,” declares an editorial, “you can get huge ones and they can turn you on at the touch of a button, but that’s not the same as a good seeing-to.” (Plus, it makes you blind: Hedley is wearing a patch. Perhaps she poked herself in the eye.) Her all-time favourite? The one she’s just tested, shortly in an Ann Summers catalogue party near you. And guess what? Instead of rotating, gently vibrating or reciting whole chunks of Pride and Prejudice — tricks that men have been failing to emulate for years — the piston-driven Thruster, rather like your average bloke, does what it says on the box. It thrusts. In and out, relentlessly.

So much for the Kinsey generation, lost in the hopeless search for the G spot, and so much for Shere Hite. Perhaps female sexuality is, after all, no more than “just the logical counterpart of male sexuality”. Perhaps all she needed, after all, was just a good seeing-to.

microwaveman@hotmail.co.uk

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