Playboy has relaunched. Apparently it did so last month, but I didn’t know about it until a few days ago when I saw a copy of the new – quarterly, I’m told – magazine, with Cara Delevingne in a latex corset with a hand covering her lower frontage, on a male friend’s coffee table.

I greeted this news with a mixture of weary resignation and utter bafflement. The former element derives from the fact that at this particular time and place in my life and in our dismal history, I have largely given up on the very concept of good news. Of hearing anything that suggests progress, enlightenment, intelligent and/or joined-up thinking (particularly of the governmental kind).

And I feel this especially whenever it comes to women and their rights. Why am I mystified by the decision to relaunch a jazz mag? Well, imagine me gesturing at the internet as I say, “Because of this.”

We live in a world – and I’m back to weary resignation at this point – in which any possible taste in matters of the flesh is catered for. There is nothing men can’t find out there. No desire,........

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