I love English women. The great love of my life was English. I always thought I would end up with an English girl. But I’m never getting laid in Britain ever again.

I ensured this by writing an article last week in The Times, comparing British and American women and asking why British women don’t spend the time, money and effort on their upkeep that American women do. What started out as a light-hearted, anecdotal account of my impressions of dating women on both sides of the Atlantic has exploded into a national furore.

Granted, my comments were provocative. I described an English girl I was once set up with as “something that would surely have been happier hunting truffles in the forests of central France”. I also said this woman had been described to me as “having the body of a 20-year-old” to which I responded, “maybe she did ... dismembered in her freezer at home. She certainly didn’t have it on her skeleton”.

I didn’t expect to make friends when I wrote that you “don’t exactly need callipers to figure out in which country the women look after themselves more”. But the response has been insane. A large number of comments on The Times’s website might be 20 or 30: my article drew 550. The Sun ran a spread on my story and The Guardian anointed me Sexist of the Year.

I was utterly unprepared for the avalanche, but I stick to my guns: when British women reach the age where looking good is no longer effortless, they seem unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge. And judging by the vitriol of the response, I realise I’ve not only touched a nerve, I’ve reached into the underbelly of a deep, dark insecurity. Nobody gets that defensive about something they don’t care about.

The comments about my piece fall into several categories. The point most made by a long, long way is that I’m a prat (or as Marv writes, “as shallow as a one-inch pool of frozen water”): tough one to argue with, so I’ll leave it well alone.

After that, by far the most common point the humourless drones want to make is that they’d rather be frumpy with wonderful personalities than Barbie dolls with nothing between their ears.

This argument is so patently absurd that I can hardly believe it. It is not binary: you can have a personality and an arse that doesn’t take up two seats on the bus. If you can retain your wonderful, cheerful, sweet, fun personality and be beautiful is that not better? Or, Anna L from Kent, is your sweet personality inextricably tied to your being a size 16 ... like Samson’s strength is to his hair?

I don’t suggest that British women take the money from your education fund and put it towards plastic surgery. Nor do I suggest you take the hours per week dedicated to cultural and intellectual pursuits and use them for beauty treatments. Just take the time you dedicate to sitting on the sofa eating femur-sized Toblerones while watching EastEnders. (Thank you, Lizzy from Harrow, for the insight that I “will have boring children” ... probably not, as I don’t intend to have children with you).

Next is that British women don’t want to be obsessed with beauty regimes. Again, this is not an either/or.

Many women seem to think that doing anything more than their current routine would deem them fixated. At what point, I ask you, does “a healthy interest” turn into “obsession”?

Flossing? Waxing? Skipping pudding once in a while? Or is the moment you hire a trainer the start of an irreversibly slippery slope to waking up one day as Joan Rivers?

And God forbid any woman should be motivated by trying to attract a man. Apparently British women have overcome a billion years of biology.

I also love the large number of people who tell me Keira Knightley, Rachel Weisz and “those birds from the Benny Hill Show” (thank you, Arlene) are examples of beautiful British women. Unfortunately, if you throw a rock in a British city centre, you’re slightly more likely to hit a girl resembling Vicky Pollard than Kate Moss. I’m just pointing it out. Don’t shoot the messenger.

If you don’t want to do anything about it, that’s up to you.

And I can’t help feeling I’ve let British women off lightly. It’s not just the Americans you don’t compare to: British women don’t have the curves of the Italians, the simmering sexuality of the Spanish, the sophistication of the French or the openness of the Scandinavians.

So what do British women have? Top spot in the European obesity table. Top spot in the European teen pregnancy table. And the only spots (besides Denmark) in the chart showing rising alcohol consumption among women in western Europe.

Well done, Britain. If what women are striving for is the ability to get hammered and fall over in the street, Britain is a feminist paradise from coast to coast.

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