There has always been a soft-porn dimension to women’s tennis, but with the progression of Maria Sharapova, Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Jankovic and Daniela Hantuchova to the semi-finals of the Australian Open, this has been taken into the realms of adolescent (and non-adolescent) male fantasy.

It is often said that the new generation of women professionals could pass for catwalk models, but these Amazonian goddesses, with their lithe and assertive athleticism, have taken the female form into areas never dreamt of in the editorial suites of Fashion TV.

Do not take my word for it: take a look at their websites. These are women in the vanguard of post-feminist realism, “hip chicks” with an unabashed and unflustered awareness of the power of their bodies. Jankovic’s homepage has a photo of the player sitting on a chair, bronzed legs folded, stilettos unsheathed, wearing a body-hugging cocktail dress with the hemline just a few inches below the waist.

Hantuchova’s homepage has her in a short-cut combat dress, high heels, a hipster belt and with hair ruffled forward in a way that Jackie Collins would describe as coquettish. Ivanovic, unconventionally, has opted for a tennis photo, albeit with her back to camera while wearing a blue sports dress and with a ponytail cascading from beneath her cap.

By the time I got to Sharapova’s website I half-expected to see a re-enactment of the Athena poster.

That these athletes are willing to make explicit reference to the powerful undercurrents of sexuality that exist within sport will make some feel uneasy. After all, these are young women who have reached the apex of their profession and deserve more than to be commandeered into the fantasies of ageing men with nothing better to do than watch Eurosport until the early hours, even if – perhaps, particularly if – they are complicit in the commandeering.

But this is precisely the kind of reaction that is so insulting to male fans and the sportswomen who (if you will allow me to paraphrase the e-mails about to arrive in my inbox) “dehumanise themselves by indulging male sexuality”.

Is it not time to acknowledge that women in the public eye (sporting or otherwise) who parade their sexuality are not, by implication, betraying their gender by slavishly following a male-defined agenda, but may enjoy, may feel empowered by, may even – horror of horrors – get turned on by the act of hitching up their hemlines?

These questions are particularly pertinent, what with the Six Nations Championship starting next week. Those of us who live near Twickenham in southwest London are bracing ourselves for the familiar invasion of female rugby union fans whose unabashed drooling over the square-jawed hunks in the England team is regarded, not as something sinister, but as a revelatory aspect of female liberation. It is a strange incongruity. Women get turned on by scantily-clad men running around a sporting arena and all is right with the world; men get turned on by scantily-clad female sports stars and it is time for a fresh dissertation on the subjugation of women.

This kind of hypocrisy is everywhere. The prohibition on anything other than bikinis in women’s beach volleyball has been condemned for its political incorrectness, but how many people have berated the Aussie Rules brigade for insisting that players wear sleeveless, bicep-revealing tops and shorts so tight that you fear for their fertility? And why have the rising hemlines in women’s tennis been the subject of academic critique, while so few have bothered to analyse the sociological implications of Rafael Nadal’s T-shirts? The only man whose sexuality has been on the receiving end of any kind of serious examination is David Beckham, as much because of his homoerotic as his conventional sex appeal.

None of this is to say that we play sport to titillate or watch sport to be titillated; the emotions are more powerful and more textured than that. But that we have not, as a society, reached a place where heterosexual men can acknowledge the occasionally erotic dimension of watching women’s sport without being dismissed as deviant tells us everything we need to know about contemporary sexual neuroses and how far we need to go before we can proclaim genuine sexual maturity.