- Illustration by Mirek Pieprzyk / DigitalJournal.com Love or lust? image:5761:1::0

The irony is that the story broke in the Daily Mail. Britain’s journalistic answer to NASA has even included a few words in among the celebrities. It’s quite touching to see the Mail coping with the confines of the English language. Must be awful for them.

The bit about men thinking about nothing but sex is, of course, true.

We only do the other stuff for relaxation. I manage to spend 29 hours a day thinking about sex, and still have time to eat and do articles.

The Daily Mail:

Three out of four young women think about shopping nearly as often as men think about sex, it is claimed.

Thoughts of buying that new dress or a much sought-after pair of shoes pop into their heads every 60 seconds, according to a survey by the self- styled 'on-line fashion bible' cosmopolitan.co.uk.

Assuming eight hours of sleep a night, that means shopping trips consume their thoughts an astonishing 960 times a day and 6,720 times a week.

Cosmo finding out that women like shopping for clothes is a bit like British Airways discovering that people might conceivably like to buy plane tickets. But taken on its merits, this survey is quite a tea leaf reading.

(We pause at this point in the Daily Mail text for a picture of some of the cast of Sex And The City, now in its five millionth week of saturation media plugs. Duly refreshed, we move on.)

Even the threat of a credit crunch will not stand in the way of a shopping spree, with 62 per cent saying they will put the damage on their credit card and 8 per cent even prepared to use funds saved to pay the rent or mortgage.

Nearly a quarter thought nothing of spending £200 or more on a longed-for item and more than a third would buy it in three or more colours.

On average, those surveyed spent at least 30 per cent of their annual income on clothes.
Perhaps most worryingly for men, half of those surveyed said they preferred shopping to spending time with their partner, and nearly as many confessed to keeping their shopping escapades secret from their partner to hide their level of spending

See what I mean about the Flintstones approach? As a topic for a marketing exercise on spending habits, this ranks as approximately kindergarten level or lower. Ask 100 people where they would fetch a pail of water, and 107 of them would say “Up the Hill.”

The Daily Mail itself isn’t quite immune to the idea of marketing a bit of female self image in its own material. Fascinated, I hit one of the paper’s magazine tabs, called You Magazine. Women everywhere, much information about How To Get That Bikini Body.

The sheer intellectual stimulus became too much for me.

I searched the word “bikini” on the site.

I got 1165 hits, and started to think of upholstering something.

Can’t imagine why.

After recovering (more or less) from this shocking ordeal, I had a look at the ads. Heaps and heaps of shoes, handbags… and more celebrities.

The prosecution rests.