If you’ve seen the advert for the Peugeot 407, a car due on the streets of Britain any day now, you will be relieved to know that “Men are back”. This is the enigmatic headline for a commercial in which the world is shown to be occupied solely by women (beautiful, naturally), stalking hither and thither in high heels.

Then up rolls the shiny new 407 (which, as far as I can see, is as dull as any other four-wheeled penis substitute), and down drop the jaws of the girlies.

Now, I assume that this is your actual postmodern irony, and that there’s a counter-intuitive punchline en route (I predict not a man, but a sexy businesswoman stepping out of the car, perhaps with some metrosexual lapdog trotting at her heels), but whatever the denouement, this ad illustrates rather neatly the tired process by which the media indulges in the vacuous circle of creating and then sniping at stereotypes.

Men are back? They have been away only in the walnut-sized brains of advertising executives who spent the past decade sucking up to the femographic by portraying men as incompetent buffoons. As far as this man is concerned, Peugeot can park its 407 where the sun don’t shine.

The news media is almost as adept at such sexist hypocrisy. Take the tormenting of the “Limp-Dems”. Who would guess that it’s more than two decades since Chris Smith became the first openly gay MP? Exiting the closet didn’t prevent him entering the Cabinet, yet still we are blessed with a media that can’t get over the thrill of outing MPs. Well, male MPs, anyway.

Yes, I know, the ratbags have a stab at dressing it up as concern that if an MP is prepared to lie over something like that, then obviously he can’t be trusted not to launch missiles at Sweden, but we all know that is cant. If Simon Hughes lied it was because he was afraid not of the truth, but of what the media would make of the truth — what the media has, indeed, made of it.

I for one don’t care that Hughes lied to the media. I’d lie to them too if they asked me about my sexual preferences, because they don’t deserve to be entrusted with the “truth” when the only “truth” in which they are truly interested is the private detail of a public individual’s personal life.

Men, naturally, pay the heaviest price for this hypocrisy, whatever their sexuality. Being gay, it seems, is no antidote to all the pre-feminist sins for which men are punished daily. When, for instance, was the last time the News of the World outed a gay female MP? No, I can’t think of one either, and yet the list of named and “shamed” male MPs is so long that if they formed a single party they’d have sufficient clout to make anal sex compulsory for all sleazy hacks (and not only the ones who like it).

Of course, it could be argued that the media’s lack of interest in female sexuality is a reflection of a male-dominated society’s inability to take women seriously at any level, but that was yesterday’s argument. Today it’s men who aren’t taken seriously — often by other men, cravenly happy to bend with the breeze of the new feminocracy — and who are thus fair game for mockery, whether for their supposed inability to multitask or for their sexuality.

I’ve never met Hughes, but he seems a decent bloke who has done a lot of good for his constituents. I’ve never met the journalist who outed him, either, but I know which of them I expect to find behind the wheel of the new 407.

Microwave Man is published by Penguin and available from Times Books First for £7.59, with free p&p, on 0870 1608080.

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