One of my favourite Hollywood quips came from the perfectly formed lips of a young aspiring screenwriter who, while touting her talent around the rough-and-ready Hollywood of the 1920s, caught the eye of a lecherous studio bigshot.

"Mr X, a girl can bet on heads or tails in this life — and I prefer to bet on heads. They last longer," was the reply.

The slang meaning of "tail" when applied to women has changed a few times over the years but, whether you read it as booty or pootie, the message remains the same; given a hard choice between brains and beauty, go for IQ over T and A any day. This isn’t in any way a "moral" statement, by the way; the distribution of brains is easily as random and unfair as that of beauty, and being beautiful demands far more effort than being clever. When beautiful people behave badly they usually do so from a sheer surfeit of opportunity, whereas many clever people see behaving badly as a sign of superior intelligence.

The woman who decides to live off her wits rather than her tits is making as cool and calculated a decision as any gold-digger; Alzheimer’s may interfere with your equipment eventually, but it’ll arrive a good 30 years later than gravity. In fact, the girl who goes for broke with her looks could actually be seen as a hopeless idealist; to rely on an attribute which goes relentlessly into decline in one’s late twenties is hardly the act of a cold-eyed carpetbagger. No, the professional beauty is an eternal innocent who refuses to learn by the example of the numerous lovelies valued briefly for their freshness and cast aside as soon as the bloom of youth begins to fade.

We have never been so confused about beauty as we are now, and it really is the oddest thing to be confused about. You can understand people not getting quantum physics or being baffled by the offside rule, but even a tiny baby shown a series of mugshots ranging from the grim to the gorgeous will smile at the lookers. Being without jealousy, sexual desire or status anxiety, perhaps only a baby can see beauty for what it is; a wonderful thing, as meaningless and transient as a perfect rose. But once these gatecrashers make their presence felt, beauty stops being simple and becomes all about us. And we all know how peculiar that particular can of worms is.

I’ve always thought that having a love-hate relationship with anything was a sure indicator of profound stupidity — surely you know if you like something or not! — and beauty brings out this cretinous tendency in so many of us. While pursuing it for ourselves and slavering over those who have it, we also — women even more so than men; this is not a feminist issue — mock those who undergo cosmetic surgery or who live off their looks. The tyranny of the sisterhood has made many professionally beautiful women apologetic as never before; Michelle Pfeiffer thinks she looks like "a duck", Uma Thurman is forever pointing out how weird she is, while Keira Knightley claims never to have been chatted up.

Maybe I’m missing something, but for the life of me I can’t understand why such body-dysmorphia (if they really mean it) or sucking-up (if they don’t) should be seen as a sign of being pleasingly modern, normal and nice, and make these starry creatures "one of the girls"; in my book it’s old-fashioned female self-loathing/cultural cringe/lying to keep the peace, and as such it should be discouraged. The shameless, blameless days when Ursula Andress was asked why she stripped off for Playboy and answered simply "because I’m beautiful" are long gone; now we get our kit off in a caring way, to empower ourselves/other women/heal our dysfunctional child inside.

This culture of tits-out self-righteousness is so much the norm these days that when the breath of fresh air that is Jordan comes along, stating plainly and repeatedly that she does it for the money, that she can earn more in a day doing this than she would in a year doing the sort of job generally available to someone of her social class, she is reviled as a moron and a monster, someone not quite human. Just for telling the truth, and for being robust and sensible enough to see her beauty as a thing apart from herself.

Our society has never been so sexually uncensored, and it’s all happened so fast; in the 1980s you couldn’t say "come" in a pop song without being banned, but now you can ho’ and blow till the mother-freaking cows come home and still get on Top of the Pops. The idea of the sexually repressed Brit is as dead as the Empire; all through the capitals of Europe our scrapping, shagging young sick up on streets that their forefathers once marched down.

But you can’t just wipe out all those centuries when we were taught, however hypocritically, that self-control was next to godliness for a true Brit, and that modesty was the same as morality. It takes more than a few Slow Screws on the Beach to evict such deeply ingrained racial memory. Thus, the young girl who has sex on a reality TV show bursts into tears and sobs "I want my Mum!" directly after the deed has been done and Jordan turns out to have slept with not enough men to make up a football team — as opposed to the 1920s flapper Clara Bow, who by the same age had seen to an entire team in the same night, including the substitutes.

Our confusion and contradictions leave us torn, a veritable Pushme-Pullyou of the pleasure principle. On one hand we are determined never to be the sexual wallflowers of the Western world again ("Europeans have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles," wrote some smug old Hungarian); on the other hand we live in a permanent morning-after, both amazed and amused by our own fantastic antics. It’s no coincidence that we are the biggest binge drinkers in Christendom. And unable to reconcile these feelings, we have settled instead for blaming a collective Typhoid Mary for our incontinence; female beauty.