IT WAS Elizabeth Hurley’s raised arms, on the cover of this month’s Vogue that provoked my first feelings of genuine sympathy for a woman who previously has only irritated me. The pose — one hand holding locks of hair blown backwards by a wind machine, the other arm pulled right up over her head — is one traditionally used by glamour models who have reached the age at which gravity starts to pull at the female body (about 23). At 35 Hurley, who is promoting a new film, has clearly chosen to be pictured in this way in order to make her trademark breasts appear as pert and perfect as they were nearly ten years ago when she first popped out of that Versace safety-pin dress.

But it wasn’t just this picture, which — even to the untrained eye — appears retouched, that prompted feelings of compassion in me. Within the magazine, and in interviews with other media, Hurley further exposes her growing physical insecurities. The best thing about not having a boyfriend, she says, is that she can skip dinner and the only thing that she envies in others is a “better metabolic rate than mine”.

Suddenly, my own envy of Liz began to evaporate. As did my envy of a dozen other impossibly, and often artificially, perfect females who have played such an important part in making 60 per cent of real women feel so physically inadequate that they admitted in a recent survey they would resort to plastic surgery. Being famous for being famous is not as easy as it might have seemed. This is a woman who, in order to sustain a public image of perfection, has her bottom sandpapered once a month, works out for hours daily and agonises over every mouthful of food to ensure that she stays under eight stone. She is 5ft 8 in.

Who knows what other tortures and deprivations must be endured by professional models or movie stars in order that they appear, tricked and teased before the camera lens, as great beauties? The waxing, the toning, the cosmetic refinement, the colonic irrigation, the collagen therapy and the laser treatment that, along with the make-up and hair-extensions, are part of the huge price a woman might have to pay in order to achieve cover-girl looks.

Perhaps if we were given a more realistic idea of what being professionally beautiful entailed we would be more accepting of what our mirrors reflect. Maybe if 15 or 16-year-old girls — 60 per cent of whom revealed this week that they thought they needed to lose weight, regardless of the fact that only 13 per cent were clinically overweight — understood the artifice and agony involved in the creation of the Vogue picture of Hurley, they might be less concerned about the shortcomings of their own looks. And know that there is nothing more unnatural than a natural beauty smiling at the world from the cover of a glossy magazine.

• EVEN the most liberated parents (those who just last week were condoning their children’s smoking of exotic cheroots) have problems coming to terms with the idea of their daughters discovering sex. As a result, they are secretly pleased by the Government’s £2 million plan to promote virginity. But however well motivated this new campaign might be, I can’t help but feel that telling girls “it’s OK to be a virgin” is patronising.
  
  The best advice I have heard on this particularly potent subject was delivered to one of my own (needless to say, chaste) daughter’s friends by her father.
  
  “Emily,” he said to her, “the moment you sleep with this guy all your friends will know you have done it.” His daughter, furiously blushing, insisted that her boyfriend was kind, caring and committed, and not the kind to go in for macho bragging.
  
  “No, Emily, believe me, I know.” her father insisted. “The male is genetically programmed, particularly when he’s 16, to tell every one of his friends that he has scored. Within hours — hey, within minutes — every boy you know will think you are up for it and the whole world will know you did it.”
  
  Emily, three months on, still hasn’t done it.