There has been a lot of hoo-hah this week about a new internet game aimed at girls aged 9 to 16. It's called Miss Bimbo, and players proceed through levels that offer options for buying their virtual characters plastic surgery or diet pills.

It sounds appalling but I believe its (male) inventors when they say it never occurred to them that it could act as a bad influence on highly suggestible pre-teen and teenage girls. The fact is that girls today need no encouragement to try to be as slim and perfect as possible: from the brainiest down, they are all at worst obsessed and at best painfully aware that to be thin and beautiful is the overriding demand of our times upon women.

And not just young women, either. It has been obvious for some time that middle age is no longer an opportunity to have your cake and eat it, too. You will not have cake (or any other carbohydrate, come to that) if you want to cut it in today's world as a middle-aged woman. By fair means or foul, you will get rid of that middle-aged spread.

A winner will do it by running the marathon, a loser by hauling herself into the most brutal Spandex garment that she can afford. Either way, thou shalt not be even so much as a teensy bit overweight - and don't think that collecting your pension will absolve you, either: in today's weightobsessed society, you will damn well stay thin whatever your age.

In our affluent Western world, where food is plentiful and still (the recent rise in the cost of living notwithstanding) relatively cheap, it is perhaps not surprising that we value thinness above almost everything else. We prize it precisely because it is so difficult to achieve in our well-fed, celebrity-chef culture. No bimbo website is necessary to communicate that to young girls, who are the savviest, most sophisticated image analysts around.

Look at the girls going into almost any secondary school these days and you will see that they are unfeasibly beautiful: the most well-nourished babies ever, they are tall and strong and groomed to whatever their version of perfection is.

For some that will mean straightened hair, false eyelashes and the shortest skirt that they can get away with; for others it will mean artfully tousled, just-out-of-bed hair and “no make-up” make-up.

In some ways, of course, it was ever thus. Young women through the centuries have been at pains to make themselves look as attractive as possible according to the mores of the time, because their survival was dependent on winning the best available man. With no prospect even of a room of one's own, let alone an income, career or home, it was a sensible strategy.

How depressing, then, to realise that today, for many young women it is still the strategy into which they choose to put most of their energies. What is the point of 30 years of feminism when the result is that if you're a working-class girl you aspire to be a footballer's wife or a pop singer, and if you're the next class up you merely raise your sights to snare a banker or a lawyer?

If you want to be a WAG or a singer then of course you must follow the rules, which state that everything must be tanned, toned, lifted and stretched. You are permitted hair only on your head and wrinkles only on your elbows.

The living embodiment of this is Victoria Beckham, both a footballer's wife and a singer, whose latest photograph, which appeared in a newspaper at the weekend, makes her look like a Dickensian starving waif. Her wasted arms clutch a Marc Jacobs bag that looks wider than her pathetically emaciated hips; the effect is tragic beyond measure. She is worth, of course, many millions, but how much of that is due to her singing talents and how much to the fact that she is married to the world's most iconic footballer?

Meanwhile, the middle classes cannot afford to be smug. There are many women who, married to high-earning husbands, have given up careers to concentrate on running their homes and their children. A scary proportion of them are very, very thin: they know that their husbands, working long hours in the City, are surrounded by younger, slimmer, single women and that they must not get complacent. They may meet each other for lunch but they don't eat it: they work out every day and are diligent at denial.

Recently I had lunch with one such woman. She ordered grilled fish with steamed vegetables, of which she ate less than half. She confessed that she never had breakfast and often didn't eat lunch. In her mind she equated the idea of not being able to wear a bikini with divorce - a sort of superstition, partly born of the fact that, although she saw little of her husband in the week, they did take frequent family holidays, always to an exotic location, and he would always remark on her ability still to look good in a skimpy two-piece.

Wallis Simpson famously said that a woman can never be too rich or too thin. You have only to look at poor Posh to disagree - but just the other day I read an interview with the actress Honor Blackman who said that she couldn't understand how anyone could bear to be fat “with their thighs clanking together”, and added tartly “there is such a thing as willpower”.

There is, there is. And there is also such a thing as independence. Even if we ban the Miss Bimbo internet game and all its kind, such prohibition will not make up for the current lack of teenage girls' ambition. In the meantime, I suppose we could do worse than to make the Posh ad for the Marc Jacobs bag a poster in every teenage girl's home. If nothing else, it may at least encourage their mothers to eat.

Sarkozy: short and saccharine

Apparently Carla Bruni has taken to wearing only flat shoes so as not to overshadow her new husband, who at 5ft5in is more than 4in shorter than the willowy former model. There are plenty of women who won't date a man shorter than them, as it involves looking down when you kiss and even walking in the road to give him the advantage of the few extra inches of pavement.

It's possible that none of this bothers Bruni, who towered over tiny Mick Jagger, but after listening to the interview with Nicolas Sarkozy on the Today programme yesterday, I began to understand what she sees in him (besides the fact that he is one of the most powerful men in the world). He can flirt for France, and that's saying something. His flattery of Britain was shameless as he crooned about our economic reform, our vitality, our books, plays and music. It was a long time since we had been at war, he pointed out, and it was time we moved on from being merely cordial to being best friends. We are so used to the French looking down their noses at us that hearing this was quite a shock. It was a clever tactic; will Gordon Brown, a Puritan if ever there was, purse his lips and cross his legs? Or clasp his Gallic suitor to his bosom? Ooh la la!

Done bunnying

Regular readers will know that, due to the total lack of interest shown by the children, I had resigned myself to feeding and mucking out our rabbits, against the advice of many who suggested that I dump them in a bunny refuge. Instead I took what I like to think was the higher moral course, feeling that to abandon them for convenience's sake would set a bad example. And now I have been rewarded. A friend-of-a-friend's daughter begged us to let her have them. And so, while the rest of Britain played host to the Easter bunny, I am thrilled to report that my own was made by waving the wretched rabbits goodbye.

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