Paul Thomas: Say what you like, but be prepared for the backlash

If you were to compile a list of people who epitomise everything that's obnoxious about celebrity culture, Katie Price aka Jordan would be right up there. As in top 10.

A former page 3 girl and glamour model, Price has embraced a fundamental principle of celebrity culture - that notoriety plus exposure equals lots of money - as fervently as anyone. Now 31, she's reportedly worth more than $100 million.

She has been a constant presence in the British tabloids for more than a decade by, firstly, being prepared to say or do something outrageous whenever there's a camera pointed at her. For instance, she recently vowed to encourage her daughter Princess Tiaamii, now 2, to have cosmetic surgery and become a page 3 girl: "I'll go, 'Yeah, get 'em out for the lads'."

Secondly, she's turned her hectic and hysterical sex life involving a succession of footballers, pop stars, and cage fighters into a long-running reality show. Thirdly, she's rarely missed an opportunity to flaunt her breasts.

Admittedly, they're not your average breasts. In fact, they're not even your average surgically enhanced breasts. Put it this way: if Price ever has a car accident, air bags will be surplus to requirements.

So it seems strange that writer Martin Amis should be accused of sexism for describing her as "two bags of silicone". Cruel perhaps, but sexist?

One of the more curious paradoxes of our paradoxical times is that there's no shortage of young women eager to display their physical assets in a titillating manner, but to be titillated or, conversely, to criticise them for conforming to a demeaning stereotype is to invite the charge of sexism.

Thus the grease monkey who puts a pin-up on the garage wall is sexist; the model, who has been paid to take off her clothes, is either being exploited or is making some kind of post-feminist gesture of empowerment.

Either way she's off the hook.

This is part of a wider paradox which is that society's growing awareness of sexism and resistance to the objectification of women has coincided with the transformation of pornography from a furtive cottage industry into the mighty engine it is today.

Are we to believe that all these so-called porn stars have been forced or tricked into doing what they do?

No doubt some do it to fund a drug habit, like the streetwalking dead who haunt Kings Cross and, presumably, our own netherworld. Others, particularly those from Asia and Eastern Europe, are taking the shortest route out of poverty.

That still leaves plenty - probably the majority - who do it through choice.

It's not surprising that feminists have a problem with women who choose to be sex objects, but assailing men who point it out is doctrinaire.

Fat is a feminist issue; cosmetic surgery to become a cartoon sex bomb isn't.

As always with Amis, his views have an added punch because of the potency of his language: if he'd just called Price "vulgar" (but not, of course, "common"), there wouldn't have been such a fuss.

Having led with the "silicone" jab, he followed up with this roundhouse right: "Snobbery has to start somewhere, and if you can't be snobbish about Katie Price, it's the end of the world."

That, of course, was a joke, as was his recent eruption on the subject of the elderly: "There'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops."

His solution: euthanasia booths on every street corner where oldies would receive a martini, a medal, and briskly administered oblivion.

This was the prelude to some interesting remarks about ageing and euthanasia informed by the drawn-out and undignified deaths of his stepfather and friend and fellow novelist Iris Murdoch.

They were ignored by the itching-to-be-outraged brigade, notably author Joan Brady who began her denunciation thus: "As an award-winning writer in my 70s, I find Amis's attack on 'worthless' old people as vile as any racism."

As self-portraits go, this is a triumph of economy: in 21 words Brady presented herself as a humourless, self-important, politically correct prig.

She then embarked on a piece of pulverising literalness informed by the drawn-out and undignified death of her husband.

Brady knows enough about Amis to be aware that he admires 76-year-old Phillip Roth, and it's well known that his literary hero is Saul Bellow who was still writing fiction in his 80s.

Strangely, though, she doesn't seem to be aware that irony and black humour are Amis's stock in trade.

Or perhaps, being American, she wouldn't recognise them if they got up her nose.