A man I once knew called Malcolm had an interesting line in bedroom etiquette when with his girlfriend.

Before any activity could begin she would have to take all her clothes off and stand on the bathroom scales while he solemnly weighed her.

If she was over nine stones then that would be the end of it there and then – nothing further would be happening in the bedroom with Malcolm.

I thought of this strange vignette when the journalist Polly Vernon was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme the other morning regarding her book Hot Feminist.

As she wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “The problem of how women are supposed to think and feel and – crucially – talk about their bodies, never bother men. Men are allowed to be dispassionate and unemotional about their bodies.”

This is true.

Having morphed from a puny teenager into comfortable middle age rotundity I have never given my weight or size a second thought.

And as for fashion I have always worn whatever I felt like. Mr Smug – that’s me!

But for women fat is undoubtedly a feminist issue in ways men must find hard to imagine.

And not just weight and diets.

Take high heel shoes. I’ve never tried to wear one but I’ve seen the damage they do to women’s feet and God knows how uncomfortable it must be to actually totter around in them.

No man, apart from a cross-dresser perhaps, would dream of wearing them and yet no self-respecting woman would be without at least half a dozen pairs in her wardrobe.

And you can see how central weight, diets, body image, fashion are to many women’s lives by the huge number of magazines devoted to these topics. While men buy magazines about fly fishing, cars and gadgets women’s magazines zone in on guilt.

The controversial, recent ad: Are you Beach Body Ready? worked because so many women are sucked into endlessly fretting that they might not be.

And the bizarre thing is that, despite Malcolm’s strange tic, most men couldn’t care less.