Why are straight men fair game for our scorn?

In The Oxford Book of Obvious Lies, there's a special place reserved for something Emerson is supposed to have said. "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." I don't know what he was thinking of. It sounds sage, and even plausible, but as a description of the way the world works, it's up there with Barbra Streisand's observation that "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world".

Ever since people have been making things and trying to sell them to their neighbours for gain, there's been a need to make a big noise about the product, to tell people what they'd be missing by not buying. Of course, in a rational world advertising would be exclusively about the product. Here is a photograph of some fish fingers. We believe that they taste deliciously of fish. There follows a list of the ingredients.

But it wouldn't be very successful. Advertising works mostly, by a process of irrational association, so that one is asked to believe that the sort of children who clamour for junk food from the freezer are charming, clean and cheekily well-behaved, unlike your own howling ankle-biters. If you buy a particular sort of car rather than another, you will pretty quickly find yourself driving ecstatically down empty cypress-lined avenues in Tuscany more often than getting stuck on the M25. Start shopping at one sort of supermarket rather than another, and look how your family, your kitchen, indeed your entire life may improve.

Of course, it's nonsense, and sometimes rather baffling – I don't think that when bog-roll is sold with the aid of labrador puppies, they really mean us to remember that the one thing puppies infallibly do is crap all over the place. But we all fall for it in a mildly harmless way. The most powerful device in the advertiser's toolbox is, of course, sex; if you drape any product with sex, as they say, it gets results. Whether this can be considered as harmless as other approaches is, however, to be debated.

Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, stooped from the dignity of her office this week with a direct comment on a poster for the Birmingham Motor Show, which advertised itself with a picture of a girl in a bra and the slogan: "The other way to your man's heart is down the M6 and off at Junction 4." Personally, I think this is quite funny, but Ms Hewitt thought otherwise. "I find this poster pathetic. We all know that sex sells, but haven't we got past 'boys with toys?' "

Well, yes. It's not very dignified, but "pathetic" is a bit strong. It seems to me redolent of a widespread attitude that a direct appeal to heterosexual male desire is not just pathetic, but more pathetic than other forms of sexual appeal. For instance, the television series Babyfather is being advertised all over London with a gigantic poster of four naked men in a shower, which is about as direct an appeal to lechery as you could imagine. No one, as far as I know, has complained about that, and I can't imagine any Government minister describing it as "pathetic". But it is really no more dignified, and you can imagine the response to a picture of four nubile young women in a similar situation.

I don't particularly care for any advert that uses sub-pornographic imagery to sell anything, but I do think there is unevenness here. The homoerotic imagery used to sell anything these days is not very agreeable either, but more worrying is the tendency to ridicule and humiliate straight men, their sexual desire and to shout angrily when that desire is fairly harmlessly exploited. Just watch an evening of television, and count the number of times a straight man is made to look ridiculous for fancying a woman, and consider how such behaviour would look towards a woman. It is not just a question of sexism, but of a wide assumption that straight men are somehow "pathetic" or ridiculous, and a more damaging belief is hard to imagine.

The television presenter in trouble for his sexual behaviour provided an interesting example of this. Of course, his behaviour, as described, sounds disgraceful and perhaps even bordered on the criminal, but some recurrent words showed how far we've gone towards demeaning the whole idea of male heterosexuality. He was "creepy" and "sad". I don't get it, and I don't think those terms would be used of a similarly predatory gay man or of – come on, they exist – a straight woman.

I would feel much more comfortable if I had the impression that what we were talking about here was, exclusively, the grotesque and extreme forms of sexual behaviour, but I don't. I have the impression that the object of this constant drip of scorn is quite simply male heterosexuality. In the end, that is going to wreak terrible damage on the minds of a generation.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk