Men want their ideal women to look a certain way, but we love our men warts and all

Gloria, 19, is into fat men. Nothing under 20 stone will do. Gloria can slip into an eight with the ease of an eel slipping through jelly. Her boyfriend, Gary, is six feet, weighs in at 22 stone and his stomach arrives five minutes before he does. Admittedly, he has nice eyes, is a lovely man and treats Gloria like the little princess she is, but really, what does she see in all that fat?

‘I just love, big, big men. I find them really sexy,’ she says. ‘Gary makes me feel safe and protected when he’s around. I love gentle giants.’Maybe fat men like Gary offer a girl more fun – after all, there’s a lot more to explore and you never know what or who you might find under one of those folds of fat. And a girl like Gloria always likes to be on top – which is just as well, because she’d be flattened into the mattress if not. Or am I just not using my imagination enough?

So, while Gloria spends hours in the gym developing muscle definition and keeping cellulite at bay, Gary works out on the sofa, watching telly and drinking beer. Like most women, Gloria spends a fortune to become the woman we think men want us to be, while men save their money and expect us to accept them as they are.

Gloria does not see the injustice in this. Like the housewives of the ’50s, she feels it is her duty to stay desirable for her man. She also assures me that there are millions of women whose tastes in men go far beyond the George Clooneys of this world. For them, an overhanging belly does what a six-pack does for the rest of us. After all, men don’t have to be slim, young and beautiful to be adored by the opposite sex. We are far more forgiving when it comes to body image.

While men search for Jordan lookalikes, women are falling for the charms of men who should have been put in the skip long ago. In fact, the more men replace hair and muscle with chins and a beer gut, the more women they seem to attract. Take Jack Nicholson. He still fills magazine pages with his belly, balding head and dirty-old-man smile. Yet women continue to adore him and he’s still pulling. I know one gorgeous woman who can only orgasm imagining Jack Nicholson talking dirty to her. She has yet to tell her husband.

Compare Jack to Brigitte Bardot who has bravely scorned the cosmetic scalpel and grown into her crow’s feet and jowls. Except in France, where do you see her featured? Once upon a time, the world couldn’t get enough of her. People tire very easily of beautiful women and toss them aside once they mature and get smart. Men, on the other hand, don’t even have to start off beautiful. Nor do they have to declare war on cellulite and spend a fortune on anti-wrinkle creams. They enter the world with flat feet, acne, skinny legs and a large forehead, and no one cares. Someone, somewhere out there will fall in love with them, or make them famous. Their imperfections will be their charm. Mick Jagger has more lines than Willesden Junction, Sean Connery only has hair round his chin and it’s gray, and Al Pacino looks like someone else’s grandfather. Even Marlon Brando is still pulling and he has tripled in size since his days as one of the sexiest men on the ’50s screen. Even then he had a nose that looked like a squashed pumpkin, but that didn’t put women off. Could Elizabeth Taylor have become so famous if her nose had looked like Marlon’s? No way.

Personally, I am rather partial to short, balding Jewish men like Bob Hoskins and Danny DeVito. They look like they give good cuddle. But, like Gloria, I have no control over the sort of men I fall for. There are other agendas that determine the physical types we are attracted to. For example, Gloria’s father was 19 stone, so it’s not surprising she’s chosen Gary. In my family, there are a lot of short, Jewish balding men who have been wonderful to me.

The fact that men are looking for high-street versions of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Jennifer Lopez might say something about their mothers. But my theory is that there are plenty of beautiful women out there, but not enough good-looking men to go around – so we are forced to settle for second best, ignoring the flabby bellies and stunted growth. In the process, we discover other characteristics that are sexy, such as humour and a twinkle in the eye. The tragedy is, many men refuse to compromise and will spend most of their life replacing one pair of perfect breasts with another. In turn, Hollywood continues to replace one perfect starlet with another. It’s a pity they can’t learn to love us, warts and all.