A lovely, intelligent female acquaintance, roughly my own age, keeps telling me to grow up and date women roughly my own age. And she has a point. If I dated women of my cohort, we could discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall, the genius of the first R.E.M. album, and agree that in those days it was easier to get off a sofa. But life, as always, isn’t simple. As I say to my female friend: “I wish I could. But my loins, when they are functional, have different ideas.”

The awkward truth is that young, slender, fair-skinned women remain an erotic ideal

The awkward truth is that young, slender, fair-skinned women remain an erotic ideal

And I really do wish I fancied women my age. It’s a seller’s market for sane and solvent men with their own hair, or so I am told. Unfortunately, while my knees are almost ready for their pension, my libido still reckons it can get into a nightclub. In other words, I can admire a woman’s intelligence, enjoy her wise and funny stories, and then wish to God I wanted to see her in tight fitting jeans, but I do not.

Which brings us to Sadie Sink. Once a child star in Stranger Things, she is now fronting Calvin Klein’s new jeans campaign: she’s 24, slender, redheaded, and she’s so delicately pale she looks like a Pre-Raphaelite nymph at the end of a Narnian winter. In the ad, a kitchen tap loses control at the sight of her and a slice of toast orgasmically hurls itself into the air. I empathise with the fixtures.

And Sink is just part of an........

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