The Diana inquest drags on and drags up all sorts of questions. Among them: what on earth has happened to women’s bodies since the Queen of Hearts died in that tunnel?

Here is the Princess, athletic, womanly, the absolute picture of female pulchritude and sexuality, the remnants of two pregnancies still lightly garlanded about her waist. Yesterday five of her lovers were named in the paper. And honestly, is there a man alive who would have kicked her out of bed? Neurotic and screwed up as she was, “thick” and calculating as she was, women wanted to be her, remember that?

Ten years on and who have we got as our female pin-ups? Whose world-famous limbs do women have in mind when they come home despondent from Gap, having failed yet again to squeeze into a pair of skinny jeans? Well, lately, it seems as if the entire female population has accidentally slipped into some sort of gigantic communal form of gender dysmorphia, because the women we have decided that we admire most in the world don’t seem to be women at all. From the back, at least, you could mistake most of them for teenage boys.

Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie. It says something about your weight when your most prominent features are your nipples. The bottom is two ping-pong balls, the lips, neck and breasts are paeons to the pornography industry and advances in plastic surgery.

When I look at these women I think of car commercials: leaner, zingier, and now with better suspension. Never curvy, God help us. These martyrs to weight-loss hate curves. Jolie complained recently that her part in the film Beowulftook the edge off her angular frame – she risked looking too sexual in front of her children. Are they women at all, I sometimes ask myself, peering more closely at my copy of Grazia. Will there come a day when it will be revealed to the world that this is a huge practical joke? Will the world’s most supposedly enviable women turn out to be escapees from a Pat Pong transsexual club?

Diana was anorexic? I’ll show you anorexic. Come back to life in 2007, Diana and you’ll get quite a shock. If she materialised today she’d be in the plus-size bracket, humbly peddling rice cakes. Something about her in that swimsuit is too vital for our modern tastes. We like our women lifeless these days. Sensuality makes us recoil.

I think it was Tom Wolfe who originally used the term “boys with breasts”. This was in 1998, in his novel A Man in Full, in which the main character, a property dealer, leaves his wife for one of these self-assembled creatures. In the 1990s the “boy with breasts” was still a comic device. But, in 2007, would any of our humourless size6 pin-ups understand the joke?

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