NOW I’m no feminist. In fact, from a professional point of view, I’m a sexist.

I write snide and chauvinistic things about women all the time, simply because they constantly write vile stuff about men, but most male journalists are too timid and pussy-whipped to respond in kind.

But the smug glee of the editor of GQ, who was challenged over the airbrushing of Kate Winslet this week and responded by boasting that he mutilates women in his magazine every month, has left me sickened. Then again, I have always been sickened by GQ. Or at least embarrassed. It is a lie from start to finish. Gentleman’s Quarterly, my eye. That’s a double whopper.

If they had a smidge of honesty about them they’d call it Teenage Virgins’ Monthly. But that might make it hard to puff themselves as “Britain’s Biggest-Selling Quality Men’s Magazine”.

GQ is nothing but a fantasy frottage aid for hairless prep school boys who can’t reach the top shelf.

This month’s magazine carries pictures of Winslet looking so thin that I thought at first they were part of a grim post-Christmas guilt campaign to raise money for the sick.

On closer inspection they turn out to be photographs of a beautiful woman which have been slashed to a straight edge at the tummy, bottom and thighs by a ham-fisted design trainee to make her conform to the kind of “youngest legal teens on the net” image. “Various parts have been improved, including her stomach and legs,” admitted GQ’s editor, Dylan Jones. “Almost no picture that appears in GQ has not been digitally altered in some way.”

This is because GQ readers are afraid of real women. They do not yet know that women are wobbly, women are moody, and women smell a bit funny, but it doesn’t stop you wanting to go to bed with them. So GQ keeps them in cartoonland with cheap visual lies.

The shot of Winslet rolling a cigarette is part of a different aesthetic, similar to the revelation that Cameron Diaz enjoys burping competitions: the implication is that, despite having boobs which she might let you touch, she is in fact “one of the blokes” and your sexual ineptitude will not hinder you.

GQ has to make itself accessible to a readership of men who, faced with a beautiful woman, would be able to do nothing more appealing than skin up or belch.

I interviewed the actress Rachel Weisz for Tatler in 1999. In the cuttings I had seen a recent interview in GQ in which pictures of the thoughtful Cambridge graduate from North London were accompanied by such quotes as, “I love larging it up. Having it big time.”

I asked her what that meant. “No idea,” she said. “In the interview I droned on about French philosophers and the theory of drama. I guess they made up that stuff because it sounded sexier.” In the same year, GQ ran a page-sized, faked-up photograph of a naked model who appeared to have been raped and slashed to death, lying in a blood-spattered bath. As an employee (albeit very low-ranking) of Conde Nast, publisher of both GQ and Tatler, I wrote to the managing director of the company to say how sick, puerile and evil I thought it was.

He wrote back asking, “Do you want me to keep this note or pass it on to the editor?”