I usually find the first sentence very easy. This part of any article is, 90 per cent of the time, my favourite bit. It’s where you run in shouting: “Guess what?” It’s the attention-seeking part of the column. I usually find it the work of but moments.

Currently, however, the first sentence is proving problematic, and here’s why. This week, I am writing about Jodie Marsh, who is about to star in an MTV series, Totally Jodie Marsh. Despite having a wedding ceremony booked for this summer – which will be broadcast by MTV – Marsh has yet to find a fiancé. She will, therefore, be spending the next two months seeking a husband on a very tight deadline, with televised auditions taking place in a number of rather ironically named nightclubs across the country. On Wednesday, May 30, for instance, she will seek her soulmate at “Demure’s @ No 10 Champagne Bar and Night Club” in Cardiff, from 7pm to 11pm. MTV will document the whole thing, in weekly half hour shows, beginning next month.

The problem with my first sentence is this: most readers of The Times do not know who Jodie Marsh is. Indeed, one of the primary functions of The Times is to keep all knowledge of Marsh from its readers, so that they may carry on running the country for us without being at all distracted by Marsh’s puzzling, unfortunate and philosophically displeasing life. Therefore, where I should have been able to say “Jodie Marsh is televising her hunt for a husband!” and then plunged off into diligent analysis of the sociological import of this event, I must, instead, briefly explain the mystifying significance of Jodie Marsh. Marsh, a petulant, orange-faced woman from Essex, has spent the past four years of her life trying to become famous for “being herself”. She bandies the kind of hotchpotch CV that would cause despair in any Restart officer: sporadic “glamour” photoshoots, appearances on the less high-profile reality shows (Living TV’s Get A Life was axed after two episodes), and that most curious of modern employments, turning up at premieres wearing outfits that reveal primary sexual characteristics. As if there were some great danger that the world might forget what they look like.

As an example of her willingness to be famous, she recently let readers of Bizarre magazine choose what new tattoo she should have. She narrowly avoided “maggots coming out of an open wound on the chest” in favour of the marginally more respectable “devil-tail emerging from the anal cleft” – now a permanent part of her physical appearance. Marsh, you may observe, lives a nugatory existence. She exists in rings of hell that Dante never, ever conceived of.

Bearing all this in mind, then, a show in which she orders her wedding dress before meeting her future husband would, in all probability, make most people sigh, and issue tutting comments on the state of modern womanhood. Self-promoting glamour models, prostituting the very notion of love for a few hours on a little-watched satellite channel? It’s not quite the payback, I suspect, that the suffragettes expected as the horses’ hooves cleaved their skulls.

Frankly, however, for the women, it’s not as bad as you might think. From the female perspective – and bearing in mind that we are speaking within the context of MTV reality shows – Totally Jodie Marsh has a relatively feminist agenda. Despite Ms Marsh launching the show at a press conference in Leicester Square dressed in a small white tutu, with two narrow, white leather belts covering her nipples, Totally Jodie Marsh is quite pro-woman. After all, she will be interviewing hundreds of men, all of whom have declared a willingness to marry her, putting them through a series of self-devised “tests”, then cherry-picking her favourite. Let’s face it: most single women would be overjoyed if the customer service involved when meeting their life partners were so good.

No, what Totally Jodie Marsh signifies is a curious shift in the state of being a man. Obviously it’s no skin off MTV’s nose if no one turns up at the auditions – indeed, it would make brilliant TV – but, presumably, it has reason to believe that many men will audition to be Marsh’s husband. The idea that, in modern Britain, there has been such a sociological shift that we can sustain an inverted bridal market – albeit involving men bewildered enough to want to marry Jodie Marsh – seems amazing. I cannot imagine that, even five years ago, young British men would have been willing to take part in a show in which, after being objectified in a series of doubtlessly humiliating “love tasks”, they then commit to a marriage. With some humourless, stroppy bird who’s been around the block a few times. Surely it goes against everything that is supposed to be intrinsic to being a man?

Of course, while the misogynists will blame women for emasculating our men, and the women will blame Big Brother/I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! culture for making humiliation the currency of fame, I, personally, have another scapegoat. I suspect that, in a consumer age, the lure of the John Lewis wedding list has become too potent for even men to ignore. After all, you can put a Wii on it.

Of little benefit to anyone

The world becomes more inexplicable by the second. Last week there was a “London Benefit Concert for Missing Madeleine”. Celebrities such as the model Kelly Brooke, Radio 1 DJ Dave Pearce and the Cheeky Girls took part in a concert to raise money for Madeleine McCann’s parents. In the audience were “actors, models, lookalikes, and famous business people”.

Some people’s reactions to awful events are intriguing. I don’t know much about the ins and outs of psychology – personally, I medicate any bad feeling with cheese – but I struggle to comprehend how the average human mind could come up with an event whereby an audience gathers to listen to pop songs to “help” a missing child. How will the “famous business people” in the audience have reacted, should the Cheeky Girls have played their biggest hit, Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum)? And how would the Cheeky Girls have found their emotional grounding during the lyrics “Touch my bum/ This is life?”, which they were singing to “help” a kidnapped child?

Sometimes the best way people could “help” is by considering what they represent within our culture and then, in a blinding moment of selflessness and self-awareness, leaving current news events well alone.

Suitors’ site

For those whose interest has been piqued (and I’m sure Anatole Kaletsky is among them), you can apply to be Jodie Marsh’s husband on marryjodiemarsh.com. The questionnaire includes “I want my relationship with my future wife to be . . .”. The answer might be: “Something already being spoken of as a novel combination of prostitution, mental derangement and It’s A Knockout.”

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden