In the latest Jack Black film Year One, probably best described as a Biblical romp, there is a short and mildly humorous segment in which caveman Black is attempting to seduce a sexy cave-lady. Black: “What do I gotta do to make you my woman?” (performs slow pelvic gyrations). Cave-lady, raising an arm to reveal a luxuriously hirsute armpit: “Hmm. I think I have to wash my hair.”

The hairy armpit is one of the most potent — if not the most potent — symbols of a lack of sophistication in a woman. It is also shorthand for a raft of stereotypes, from rabid feminists to German exchange students. A woman can do almost anything (swear like a navvy, get roaring drunk, start a brawl, play in goal) and retain a modicum of feminine allure. Forget to shave your underarms, however, and you may as well give up and cultivate a matching beard.

The importance of rigorous depilation is one of the more tyrannical of the modern beauty myths. Body hair, in all its various incarnations, is now taboo. Just look at poor Susan Boyle, dubbed the Hairy Angel just because she had forgotten to pluck her eyebrows. When she re-emerged a few days later, having been thoroughly shorn and squished through the celebrity sausage machine, the general consensus was not simply that she had undergone a makeover, but gone up a notch in the evolutionary scale.

I’m not denying that there are clear advantages to under-arm shaving, especially during the summer months, but I do wonder whether this desire to subdue nature ruthlessly and rigorously at every turn is the behaviour of an entirely sane society. In the same way that owning 100 Hermès Birkin bags is God’s way of telling Victoria Beckham that she has too much money (not to mention very little sense), dedicating seemingly endless amounts of time and energy to be unnecessarily hair-free is a sure sign of a culture fast losing touch with reality. We now have a situation in which the next generation of young men may well grow up believing that women don’t have any hair on their bodies at all.

Worse still, it’s an obsession that appears to have spread to the opposite sex. I’m no Tom Selleck groupie, but the post-pubescent male without at the very least a light dusting of body hair is a very unattractive specimen indeed. It’s bad enough that the entire England football team looks like a boxful of newborn puppies; now it’s spread to the wider male population.

I was thinking this the other evening as I watched Charlie, one of the contestants in Big Brother, attempting (and failing, quite spectacularly) to formulate a complete sentence in the Diary Room. The brain of a pea, the body of a seal, all shiny and waxed and about as attractive as a block of lard.

Even more bizarre, though, is that while the nation frets about a few perfectly harmless stray hairs, a genuinely disfiguring (as opposed to merely natural) taboo has become not only commonplace but also wildly desirable. I speak, of course, of tattoos.

One of the more striking news stories this week was that of a Belgian teenager who is suing a tattooist for allegedly giving her 56 stars on her face instead of the requested 3. A pity: the poor girl’s only career opportunities now are as a singer in a 1970s glam rock tribute band. But the really astonishing thing about this story is not the number of stars she ended up with, rather the fact that she asked for any kind of tattoo on her face at all.

Cut to a glamorous film premiere somewhere in the West End, and two competing starlets are working the red carpet. Both possess the requisite attributes for modern celebrity success: killer curves, revealing black dresses, raven locks, come-hither expressions — and tattoos: in the case of the American actress Megan Fox, several of the damn things, including a proper, truck-driver style one of Marilyn Monroe on her forearm, plus something more deep and meaningful about butterflies (from King Lear, don’t you know) in fashionable Gothic script on her shoulder blade. Not to be outdone, the British model Danielle Lloyd has some swirly Latin prose on her back. (Lloyd, a student of the classics? Whoever would have thought it.) The list of beautiful and/or famous women with tattoos is endless. Drew Barrymore, Jessica Alba, Lucy Liu, Beyoncé, Peaches Geldof, to name but a few. The queen of the tattooed ladies is, of course, Angelina Jolie, who is positively festooned with inky symbolism — including the longitude and latitude of all her children’s birthplaces, and a tiger rampant at the base of her spine (how very subtle). Because of Jolie’s success, every wannabe starlet from here to Las Vegas finds it necessary to pay a visit to the tattoo parlour, with the result that what used to be the preserve of sailors and obscure religious sects is now a compulsory pitstop on the rocky road to fame and fortune.

Tattoos are traditionally associated with rebelliousness, and that is where the self-styled, former wild child Jolie would have us believe the roots of her habit lie. In truth, however, there is little that is subversive about these daubings. Instead, they are the ultimate expression of a deep narcissism, a vanity so unchecked that it believes itself to be invulnerable. “Look at me,” it says, “covered in graffiti, and still better looking than the rest.”

The celebrity tattoo is not tribal, or spiritual, or risky; it simply introduces an element of imperfection into the equation, one that is intended to emphasise the general gorgeousness of the wearer. They are, if you like, the 21st-century equivalent of the 18th-century beauty spot. If Monroe had been alive today, she would have had her famous mole removed — and replaced with a tattoo. I wonder: what is the Sanskrit for gentlemen prefer blondes?

There was a time when a tattoo on a woman was a genuinely thrilling thing to see. Now it’s as mundane as having your hair highlighted, or wearing mascara. At this rate, there will be only one thing for my daughter to do when she gets to that rebellious age: avoid waxing — and refuse at all costs to get a tattoo.

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