Sarah Vine, sexist champion of public sickness

After being married to a Daily Mail reader for over 40 years it isn't often that I'm shocked by its editorial content. But I was last week.

I caught sight of a swimming cossie-clad female form over C's shoulder so, with a biologist's natural curiosity, I retrieved the paper before it went out with the recycling. It turned out to be a still from this year's 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' featuring one Jorgle Porter taking a shower in the camp's shower. What I saw was a normal female human body, but apparently the journalist, Sarah Vine saw something else.

She describes Ms Porter as "the pretty, sexy, young one" and goes on to compare her moment in the shower with that of Mylene Klass a few years ago. (Klass's bikini moment famously re-launched her career.) Thus:

"...the swept back wet hair, the mouth dripping with water, the half-closed eyes. And then... the legs. And there all similarities with Mylene Klass end. Ah there is a God after all!"

Sarah Vine is entitled to her opinions, of course. But to be so rude in a national newspaper! You expect it from internet trolls, but not in a newspaper that thinks it's respectable. To me these remarks are both rude and also something that would not be applied to the opposite sex ...which makes then sexist in my book.

Plus Vine's reckless expression of her opinions has wider impact than on just one person. Has she not heard of anorexia, body dysmorphism, bulimia? Of the way the media promote illness by creating an unrealistic ideal body shape and of the misery it causes in young men and women? Of size 6 models being told they need to lose weight? What we read here is Vine promoting the opposite of public health. I've struggled to find a phrase to describe this. The title of this blog will have to do.