My reaction to the news of the separation of Katie Price and Peter Andre after nearly four years of marriage rather took me aback: I actually felt sad for them – well, for him, really, because he seems so incredibly sweet.

Andre has a big-hearted capacity for happiness that is quite rare and a puppyish guilelessness that is very endearing. Weirdly, given the context – the minutiae of the couple’s entire married life dished out in public – Andre gives an impression of moral goodness as well, notably but not exclusively in the love he clearly feels for Price’s disabled son Harvey, 6. He also has two young children of his own with her.

Price is another kettle of fish altogether. I interviewed her once and liked her: she says the most appalling things in a sort of flat monotone and with slightly dead eyes and no apparent attempt at self-editing; the results can be highly entertaining. She has been called many things – a fantastic female role model, an abomination, mother of the year, a disgrace to motherhood, a saint, a slut and everything in between.

Men like her because she takes her clothes off (or used to); women like her because she combines motherhood with being hard as nails and hugely successful (they buy her merchandise, from bras to children’s books, in vast numbers: one year, a volume of Price’s ghosted autobiography outsold the entire Booker prize shortlist, which is awful but quite funny).

She knows what she has to do to get what she wants. Such women have always existed, but the particular thing about Price is that she is wholly and fascinatingly charmless. Her stock in trade is the insult, specifically the sexual insult.

Having dissed on record everyone she’s ever gone to bed with, she even used an insult to reel Andre in. The pair met in 2004 on I’m a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here!, the reality show on which C-listers are humiliated in grotesque fashion – bug-eating and so on – for viewers’ pleasure. Andre was a rabbit caught in Price’s headlights. She liked him, too, so she looked in his shorts and told him he had a tiny penis.

They eventually got married, even though she kept on telling him – and a million or so viewers every week – that he still had a tiny penis. I don’t mean once or twice – I mean repeatedly, for years on end. Recently, on The Graham Norton Show, following a complaint from Andre about infrequent sex, Price said he took “too long” (45 minutes, since you ask), and on a recent episode of their reality show she repeatedly trotted out her favourite line about her husband’s “acorn”. He dumped her shortly afterwards, although it is still unclear whether the dumpage will lead to divorce or to a lavishly remunerated reconciliation via the pages of OK! magazine.

Meanwhile, the marvellous Lily Allen has a new single out. Set to a jaunty country tune, it’s about someone who is really bad in bed. “Oh he treats me with respect / He says he loves me all the time / He calls me 15 times a day / He likes to make sure that I’m fine,” it begins. But, alas! “When we go up to bed / You’re just no good / It’s such a shame,” it continues, before delivering the coup de grâce, a line about the man making a ghastly noise and it all being over. “You’re supposed to care, but you never make me scream,” the song concludes. The faux sadness is actually sniggeringly triumphant; if ever a song said “gotcha”, it’s this one.

Allen’s lyrical dexterity is such that the song is funny, as well as catchy. I don’t expect vast numbers of men will be buying it, but women will, because if there’s one thing that cheers us up it’s another woman carrying out a virtuoso, amazingly discourteous but effective bit of emasculation.

There was a YouTube song doing the rounds last year called The Sex Song – the only bit I can quote in a family newspaper is the first line of the chorus: “You’re the worst sex I ever had.” It went downhill from there. The song was rumoured to be one of the two female singers’ revenge on a Hollywood actor; women e-mailed it to each other with glee. The men who saw it didn’t find it especially amusing.

What is interesting about these public critiques of sexual performance is that men never make them. They may make ungallant remarks in private, but they never go into the nitty-gritty: there are no kiss-and-tells by men about how sleeping with such-and-such a starlet was extremely disappointing sexually. Female sexual prowess is arguably more difficult to measure, but still: it would be ludicrous to suggest that all women are the same in bed. And yet, not a peep from men and a veritable torrent of abuse from women.

Someone I know, who has been the victim of a kiss-and-tell more than once, says women can claim pretty much anything they like about him as long as it’s not some awful castrating remark about micro-genitalia – but of course the castrating remark is all that anybody wants to read, and is thus usually the first thing that is proffered. You think you’re famous, it says. You think you’re powerful, but when push comes to shove, as it were, you’re fatally underequipped.

Perhaps women feel this is their only recourse when they have been unfairly treated – perhaps it speaks volumes about female powerlessness in a patriarchy and how you’re forced to take the lowest form of revenge because you feel yourself to be at the bottom of the food chain. That would not really apply to Price or Allen, though, both of whom are at the top of their game.

I think sexual insults are a clever shorthand way of communicating with women and of making them like you. If you’re selling the story of your night of passion with Mr Famous and you claim Mr Famous was amazing in the sack, other women will be jealous. If you make a tart remark about Mr Famous having a teeny peeny, you’ve got them on your side because you’ve made them laugh.

Price was clever enough to know that her fan base, like Allen’s, was mostly female and that they’d like her even more if she threw a knowing wink their way every now and then. Her mistake was that she overdid it: even the sweetest man has his limits when it comes to public humiliation. When women routinely inform us of their sexual disasters, less is definitely more.

+ We had to say grace at school before every meal – I once got told off for saying, “For chips, peas and cod / We thank thee, O God.”

Now students at Newnham College, Cambridge, have decided to come up with an alternative grace to the existing one, which thanks Jesum Christum, dominum nostrum, in traditional fashion and is considered by some to be “too religious”.

Some students went online and found a grace that was more to their taste, in that it didn’t give thanks to any named deity, and translated it into Latin, much to the irritation of the classicist and Newnham fellow Mary Beard, who doesn’t object to the secular grace but rather to its pointless translation, which she considers “an insult” to Latin.

I’m rather bored with all these people all over the place finding tiny little things “too religious”. If it’s not their bag, why can’t they just zone out, as generations have done before them? Grace is a case in point: nobody comes and hits you on the head if you don’t say the words, or if you stare into space or daydream for 30 seconds while somebody goes to the trouble of giving thanks for your supper. Why make a fuss?

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