Julie Burchill: The wonder isn't that film stars have no morals – but that they're so virtuous

Very happy new year to all my readers, and may I express my wishes that you all had a wonderful festive time with the ones you love – or, if you failed to swing that, with your families.

Nowhere was my sarky sentiment better illustrated than in those photographs of the almost surreally gorgeous pairing of Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig wandering in a winter wonderland, hand in hand, with their children and former Significant Others several hundred miles away. David Letterman did a very funny routine just before Christmas about how great it was to be a Jew at this time of year (amongst other things, that instead of sitting around watching rubbish TV with relatives who bored you, you could go out to the cinema and watch two super-hot Jewish broads making out in Black Swan) and the Weisz/Craig combo seemed to throw this in our faces, albeit in a very English, wrap-up-warm sort of way.

A few days earlier, Liz Hurley had been snapped taking a keen interest in sport in a darkened doorway while the teen dreams Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens and the pulchritudinous pairing of Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds have also recently thrown in the make-up towel. Cue the usual carping about the shameless sexual merry-go-round of Hollywood from the commentators. But, to me, the wonder is not that film stars are so loose, but that they are so virtuous. Imagine all the chances they get to play away! Yet such a touching number of them settle down, go steady and even marry before they can legally drink in most American states.

When I hear people criticise the sexual conduct of the rich and famous, or of the young, or about too much soft porn on MTV, or too much wriggling around in underwear by young pop starlets on prime-time reality shows, I immediately evaluate the argument by evaluating the speaker's own sexual history. If I know for a fact that they were the very model of carnal continence, then I can easily concede that they have a point. But if they were a bit of a slapper in their youth, I immediately tune out, a bit like Homer Simpson when a figure of authority starts talking. Because if such judgement comes from the desk of our old friend Mr Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Did, it really is a big old can of ocean-going tripe.

As a society we have a morally ambiguous relationship with beauty. We swoon over those who possess it, all the while suspecting that they are up to no good. When we see someone who possessed a great measure of it and is apparently doing nothing to keep hold of it (Brigitte Bardot comes to mind), we react with at first incredulity, then something like rage, before settling a sort of non-person status on the upstart, showing the minimum of images of her, lest women worldwide decide to throw caution, hair dye and diets to the wind and let themselves go en masse in a self-indulgent splurge/spree of Biblical proportions.

Yet when people make overt attempts, through cosmetic surgery, to hold on to the looks that brought them to public attention, we mock them. And it is becoming slightly surprising, to say the least, how public figures in fields which have not traditionally relied on good looks are going down this route. Bookworms are still reeling from the fact that Martin Amis felt the urgent need to have his teeth re-modelled in a manner which once surely affected only gap-toothed teenagers from Tennessee bound for the fleshpots of the San Fernando Valley. And now Gordon Ramsay, to judge from images of him published at the weekend, appears for some reason to be attempting to turn himself into one of those trolls/gonks we used to adore when I was a kiddy, way back in the 1970s. Fair play – I was fiercely protective of mine and held it fast through many a playground scuffle. But even I didn't dream of marrying a life-size male version of it when I reached the age of majority.

At the start of each new year, we look at our vile bodies and find them sadly wanting. Diet plans come flapping at us through the ether like tickertape at homecoming heroes – except that this is a blizzard of self-loathing, not a pat on the back. But the very fact that this happens each and every year implies that despite what we keep saying, we don't actually really want to hold on to our fading beauty. Maybe we're aware of the danger that it poses to what we have and want to hold – that, as Steve McQueen said, there's only so many times you can say no. If Rachel and Daniel had let themselves go, they might right now be snuggled in the bosom of their families. But somehow, something tells me they won't be sobbing into their Weightwatchers soup about it anytime soon.

What being fat really says about a woman

The ever-increasing weight of women in this country is such a ceaseless subject of debate that I was actually shocked to read this week that according to research from Oxford University published in the British Journal of Nutrition, nearly half of all British men are overweight, as opposed to just a third of women. Why is fat viewed as so much more of a moral failing as well as a health hazard when it's female, I wonder?

I'm not an anthropologist, but I have a feeling that the rage certain strange men feel at fat women is down to the fact that fat advertises a woman who doesn't need a man's approval of her in order to survive and thrive – that he isn't of high enough social status for his opinion to matter to her. In sections of society where women set out to attract fantastically wealthy men, those women are uniformly slender and beautiful – and good luck to them, for they have chosen a profession in which the competition for that limited pool of men is cut-throat, and in the course of which they will have to exercise a really mind-blowingly boring level of self-discipline every waking hour.

But unless she is going all out to nab such a man, why on earth should a woman deny herself in order to land a catch who has even more chance of being a lard-bucket than she does? "Kiss my fat ass!" said the supernaturally sexy Tyra Banks when she was accused of packing on the pounds. And therein, perhaps, lies the rub. Every fat female ass you see is telling you exactly what the owner cares for your opinion of it.

My resolution: to grow up and not make resolutions

No sooner has the noise of New Year revellers quit down in the streets than the brittle tinkle of New Year's resolutions hitting the ground takes over. To drink less. To exercise more. To be better informed on world issues.

This is the first year I haven't bothered to make one, and I think it marks the start of my finally growing up. They say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result. So this year I am embracing sanity by not kidding myself that I'll ever be fit, or sober, or that I will ever prefer watching Jeremy Paxman to Jeremy Kyle. Sorted!