Baby, wait

Maybe it's because I'm a man, and will never experience the joys of weak bladder control, elasticated waste-bands and the sensation of excreting a living human being out of my extremities, but pregnancy doesn't sound like my idea of a good time. As Rita Rudner once said, "Life's tough enough, without having someone kick you from the inside."

But actually, pregnancy is the easy bit. You get to eat all sorts of crap and blame it on the 'cravings', double your portion size because you're "eating for two" and always get a seat on public transport.

The hard work begins after you've had the baby. But it's not the sleepless nights or interminable conversations about the smell of baby sick that seem to get women down. It's the expectation that they'll snap back into shape like a rubber chew-toy.

It can't help matters that celebrity sprog-droppers manage to drop the weight in less time than it takes to hand the baby over to the nanny and order a car to Mahiki. For many famous mummies, the weight loss is quicker than the labour itself. What nobody ever seems to mention is that many of them book themselves in for an eight-month C-section (before the major weight-gain kicks in) and have the fat sucked out while they're still in the stirrups.

But is this really the healthy way to go? Not according to Julia Llewellyn Smith, who's written a coruscating critique of the trend in today's Mail. She feels "deep unease" at the sight of Denise Van Outen "cavorting on a Dubai beach in a leopardskin bikini" just five months after giving birth. If she thinks that's bad, she's obviously never heard her sing.

She laments the fact that "we’ve had to endure every female celebrity from Nicole Kidman to Myleene Klass flaunting their fabulous figures almost hours after giving birth." And she puts this unhealthy trend down to the celebrities' 'overweening narcissism' - although she's at least grown-up enough to acknowledge that these extra-yummy mummies work "in an industry that judges women on their bodies, and pictures of skinny post-natal celebrities are nothing new."

She's right - they're nothing new. In fact, it seems as though every day brings with it more paparazzi photos of famous faces (and their bodies), just weeks after straining to the point of constipation and screaming for epidurals. And where do those pictures appear? In Julia's paper of course.

Try searching the words 'baby weight' on the Mail's website, and you'll find an astonishing 4930 articles on the subject. 247 pages of them.

You can read all about Tamzin Outhwaite's magic pants, Halle Berry's flat tummy, Colleen Rooney's weight loss, Katie Holmes' slimmer figure, Nicole Richie's diet, Rebecca Loos' bikini, Octomom's trim new shape, Tina Hobley's makeover, Natasha Kaplinksy's work-outs, Javine Hylton's new body, Bethenny Frankel's post-baby look, Myleene Klass' return to modelling, Christina Milian's divorce diet, as well as good old Denise Van Outen's beach adventure.

If Julia wants to know where this unhealthy trend originated, she really needs to inspect the glass house she's throwing stones in.

The Mail seems to have invented an entirely new idiom - it wants to have its cake, eat it, and then purge. Bulimic journalism, it's the way forward...

All the lovers and haters

The Minogue sisters must be Australia's most successful export after soaps with MDF sets, pissy lager and films with ABBA on the soundtrack. And this is a big summer for the toothy twosome as they're both busy lining up the biggest releases of their respective careers.

Dannii is three weeks away from delivering her first child, and Kylie is on the promotion trail ahead of the release of Aphrodite - her 11th album. After the lackluster response to X, she's hoping that Stuart Price's impeccable knob-twiddling credentials will make this CD the hit that her previous long-player should have been.

However, despite the siblings' popularity in the UK, they've clearly done something to upset the editorial team at the Daily Mail. Today, the toxic tabloid features two different stories about the Antipodean sisters that portrayed them in a less than flattering light.

Minogue Sr was slated for her "relentless promotion" of Aphrodite, as though she's the first recording artist to suffer the indignities of a GMTV appearance in order to plug a new album. During her marathon stint on the salmon sofa of doom, she even managed to turn her versatile hand to the weather forecast and helped Richard Arnold deliver his so-camp-it-hurts TV preview.

Obviously La Minogue is no stranger to the gays - she makes Liza Minelli look like Anne Widdecombe. She even chose gay bible Attitude for her big pre-release interview, featuring in a fantastic photoshoot surrounded by a variety of buff men who couldn't have looked more disinterested in her if she'd been dressed as an overweight traffic warden.

Younger sister hasn't fared much better - appearing in her own photoshoot in a voluminous blue maternity outfit that made her resemble Violet Beauregarde after chewing on the three-course-dinner gum.

In its typically taunting tone, the Mail sneers that 'Dannii No-Mates' "happily posed for photographs - but looked rather lonely in the empty surroundings with not a friend in sight". Maybe it didn't occur to them that anyone with any class would get the photos out of the way so she could enjoy a private party afterwards. Perhaps they prefer the Katie Price approach, where the expectant mother hops into a pair of stirrups so the paparazzi can see if the baby starts crowning.

The reader comments posted below the two stories give a depressing insight into the paper's readership - filled with ugly sniping about these two fairly innocuous women. One reader posted "Boob job, botox and clip in hair extensions on show. What a NATURAL beauty!!", whilst another decided to show his knowledge of Kylie's back catalogue by quoting the lyrics to 'I Should Be So Lucky'. Dannii gets a similarly snippy response: "Its obvious her only friends are the photographers ... She just dressed up for the media and publicity! How sad? Please, stop giving reports on this attention seeking nobody!"

There's a strange psychology at work here - people who spend hours poring over the celebrity news pages, only to then dismiss the subject of the articles with a feigned indifference. Just check out how often people make the effort to add a comment, only to say "Who?"

Whether we like it or not, our celebrity culture is here to stay. We can embrace it or ignore it - but we can't have it both ways.