Oh Mickey, what a pity

There's always been something of a double standard when it comes to gender issues. Sexually aggressive women are all too easily dismissed as sluts, whereas men are proud to declare their propensity for promiscuity.

So give it up for Mickey Rourke, whose Lazarus-like comeback continues, with the announcement that his superstar virility saw him bed 14 different women in a single night.

Despite the fact that his ill-advised foray into boxing and a hunger for reinvention have resulted in him resembling a partially defrosted meatloaf, Mickey knows how to attract the ladies, and has a voracious appetite for the 'nasty' that would put Caligula to shame.

Just let those numbers sink in for a minute. 14 women - one night. Chances are, they were lined up outside his hotel room, like supermarket customers proudly brandishing their deli-service tickets.

I'm prepared to bet that it wasn't quite the night to remember for most of them. In the words of Evelyn Waugh, the last few to be serviced by the Kwik-Fit of sexing would be lucky to end up with a 'handful of dust'.

There was a time when Mickey Rourke was a thing of beauty, with a dark, brooding sensuality that practically leapt off the screen. But a self-destructive streak that made Robert Downey Jr look like Chris Martin got the better of him and he spent the best part of a decade making direct-to-video movies, hitting his lowest point in a TV movie about Shergar.

Thankfully, directors like Robert Rodriguez and Darren Aronovsky saw past the bloated face and stretched features that made Mickey look like a bad Sky News reconstruction of himself. Now he's riding high on a different kind of reinvention, having bagged a plum role as the lead villain in Iron Man 2.

Although Mickey may have the constitution of an ox, and the genitals of the Duracell Bunny, even his appeal has its limits. It turns out that glamour model and, erm, I'm not sure what else to describe her as, Abi Titmuss, found that the word "no" was in her vocabulary, when she rejected the lumpen-faced lothario's advances.

Still, let's just be glad that there's currently no Mrs Rourke. Because, as Mickey himself recently admitted, even "WAGs get an easy time - they should try living with Hollywood hellraisers." Cheryl and Toni, let that be a lesson to you.

Girls just wanna claw each other's eyes out

If the papers are to be believed (note to self: never believe the papers), there's trouble brewing on the set of Iron Man 2. According to reports, which amount to little more than tip-offs from anonymous sources keen to make a quick buck, Gwyneth Paltrow hasn't exactly rolled out the yoga mat for franchise newcomer Scarlett Johansson.

Having played improbably-named love interest Pepper Potts in the first film, Paltrow was probably expecting a beefed-up role in the sequel. Instead, it seems that Gwyneth is seeing red about Scarlett, who's onboard to play Black Widow, a Russian spy, in the big-budget follow-up.

Speculative stories have been hitting the web for a couple of months now, suggesting that Paltrow and Johansson are at loggerheads. Strangely, one report even went so far as to suggest that Gwyneth was trying to physically 'deflate' Scarlett by sharing her personal trainer and doing daily workouts together. Sharing and togetherness - hardly the first signs of a woman gripped with insane jealousy.

In typically nonsensical style, the Daily Mail once again manages to state 'fact' and then negate it within a couple of paragraphs, by saying that Gwyneth is planning to boycott a promotion in San Diego later this month, only to then quote a spokesman who rubbishes the entire story.

But there's no smoke without fire, or so says conventional wisdom. The problem is, stories like this tend to emerge whenever successful women come together.

There was the rivalry between Sharon Osbourne and Dannii Minogue on The X-Factor, and then, when the Wicked Witch of the West (coast) left, the rivalry passed on to new judge Cheryl Cole. The Sex and the City movie was almost a no-go due to the supposed in-fighting between Kim Catrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, and even when the movie was finished the rumours persisted, over ridiculous details like who stood where on a photoshoot. And who can forget the time when All Saints broke up over a jacket that Shaznay and Natalie both wanted to wear at a Capital FM Christmas concert?

The funny thing is, these exposés never seem to surface about male stars. Were the papers full of made-up stories about George Clooney and Brad Pitt battling over who stood where on the Ocean's 11 poster, or punch-ups between Shane and Kian in Westlife?

There's a fundamental misogyny at the heart of all this, that weakens the position of every one of these women each time these rumours are presented as fact. And once again, it means that they have to work twice as hard, and keep their noses twice as clean, just to be treated as equals.

Weirdly enough, Gwyneth herself may have put her finger on it when talking about the clash between Pepper Potts and the Black Widow in the plot of Iron Man 2: "The men want it to be, like, 'Ooh, the girls are fighting over Tony,' but it's not as standard as that. There's a weird male catfight fantasy."