Various bits of various London universities, including the London School of Economics (LSE) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), are taking part in a beauty contest, Miss University London. There are more than 400 applicants for the competition, which has no links to the actual University of London. It has been organised by a firm called 121 Entertainment; the company has been sending out scouts to invite the best-looking girls to take part. Its founder is the 22-year-old Christian Emile, who called the contest “empowering”. He would, wouldn’t he? I bet he’s the chief scout as well.

Universities often feature clever young men with ingenious ways of tracking down totty; in my day, a fellow student hit on the idea of taking photographs of topless female undergraduates as an ad campaign for a local boxer-shorts firm. Being a talented sort, he was persuasive. We were hand-painted – I was Yves Klein blue, if memory serves – and naked as worms except for a pair of Sloaney underpants.

My friend Sharon and I were pleased to be chosen for this special photo session, on the grounds that what we were doing was art, not smut. We weren’t entirely wrong – the artist is now a household name – but the fact remains, we were topless save for some pants. Being photographed in our pants was not an ambition either of us had cherished. It wasn’t empowering, just cold and slightly sticky. Naturally, the artist got a girlfriend out of his photo session and the opportunity to shortlist her successors. The women just stood there, chests out.

The media consensus regarding Miss University London seems to be that it is a bit of fun; that, in this enlightened post-feminist age, there is nothing wrong with celebrating the combination of beauty and brains; and that to find the idea of the contest objectionable immediately marks you as some sad old femmo throwback with dungarees and armpit hair.

I beg to differ. Ruby Buckley, women’s officer at the LSE, said last week: “We come to university to be judged on academic ability and not on external characteristics. The LSE is an academic institution and should not have its name tarnished by an event with the single function of the objectification of women.” Elly James, women’s officer at Soas, said: “It’s like a cattle market. One of the things was that the contestants had to have their waists and breasts measured. I come from quite a rural area and that’s what they do to animals.”

Miss LSE, meanwhile, a 19-year-old accountancy student called Keelin Gavaghan, said: “Nowadays I believe that we are post-feminism. Not so long ago women couldn’t receive firsts at university just because they were women, but we have come a long way since.” Come a long way, yes – and then straight back again. Well done!

Neither Buckley nor James is a throwback: they are merely intelligent young women. And clever women, in 2008, do not stand around having their breasts measured – even if it’s with an ironic wink; even if the contest is a knowing nod to those 1970s Miss World-type events; even if every one of them is in on the joke.

The joke’s on them. If you are not a glamour model and someone is measuring your breasts in order to assess your physical attractiveness, you are the punchline. End of story – and never mind if you think that, by objectifying yourself, you’re the one in control. That doesn’t really wash any more. You’re still a victim – the difference is, you’re a willing victim, self-volunteered. I don’t understand how this is either clever or evolved.

The idea that bright female students may be grateful for this kind of attention is peculiar, as is the notion that, having been judged satisfactory in the torso department, your reward is to parade around sashed and with a cheap tiara on your head. No matter what anybody says – and no matter how many television programmes try to reinvent the beauty queen formula, as Gok Wan, the stylist, recently attempted on Channel 4 – a young girl being stared at, judged and picked apart while she stands there, anxious in her underwear (or her outerwear, for that matter), is not a good thing.

There’s a weird polarisation of women going on at the moment. On the one hand you have the 400-plus wannabe student beauty queens, for whom being clever is not enough: they want their attractiveness to be publicly acknowledged (there’s also the old bluestocking anxiety at play here). I’m sure these women are very pleased to be at the LSE or Soas or wherever, but they also long to prove that they’re not giant domed heads crammed with brains. Women still fear being seen as merely clever: they want to be seen as cute to boot.

On the other hand you have the continuing eradication of intelligent, experienced older women from our television screens: Carol Vorderman has been squeezed out of Countdown and replaced with a younger model; Selina Scott, 57, whose age discrimination case against Five, the broadcaster, was settled out of court last week, was unceremoniously dumped and it can’t be because of lack of experience. Nicky Hambleton-Jones, the admittedly hard-to-love presenter of Ten Years Younger, has been replaced by Myleene Klass, seven years her junior. Klass is a former music scholar, so why is she presenting a programme that glorifies cosmetic surgery?

Never mind feminism or postfeminism or any variants thereof. The question is whether it is right to split female students, who have gained entry into their various places of learning on academic merit, into the attractive lot and the plain lot.

Kate Carter, 19, a nursing student at King’s College London, said of the contest: “Young women today have a reputation for binge drinking and loutish behaviour. And I think that taking part in an event that celebrates not just beauty but intelligence and elegance too is as necessary to modern women as campaigning for equal rights was when my mum was our age.”

Just one tiny point, Kate: equal rights – your right to being paid the same as a male colleague when you leave university, say – aren’t exactly in the bag. Lipstick may be “necessary” for some “modern women”, but you may grow up to find that equal rights take precedence once you are out in the real world.

+ Speaking of universities: an academic named Sally Adams, 50, is appealing for an egg donor to help her to conceive. There’s only one requirement: the donor must have gone to Oxbridge. The egg must be bright. The egg must know its quads.

“Oxford is a very good catchment area,” she said last week. “I studied at Oxford University. Oxford and Cambridge are the seats of people who are both academic and intellectual and often very altruistic. An egg donor needs to be under 32 years old and I am looking for someone who is educated, intellectual and possibly has a connection with the colleges.”

Meanwhile, the friend of a friend has finally become pregnant, aged 46. Tests have shown that the baby will have Down’s syndrome. The mother is absolutely delighted: she has been trying to conceive for 20 years and says she will love her baby come what may “because my baby is my baby”.

One of these stories is cheering, the other really not. Does nobody else find these egg stipulations rather creepy or is it just me?

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