Anorexia and obesity arrived at the same time as feminism and possibly on the same train

I am a heterosexual man of a certain age, which obviously means one thing: I do not frequent shopping centres or shopping malls. The single exception I allow, because it is both open air and near to my home, is my annual trip to the Kildare Village.

I spent a happy hour there a year ago, most of it in the women's underwear shop, Wolford, watching a video of German models on a catwalk, sporting not very much. And the really lovely thing about these models was the antediluvian amplitude of their bodies: breasts you would have ordered by the truckloads, large helpings of bottoms that would cause healthy men to yodel with joy, and jolly bellies that you would have happily commissioned a seamstress to make them into a very large mattress, and taken home.

That was 2008. 2009, and in my most recent visit to Wolford -- my last -- the buxom Teutonic mannequins were gone, and in their stead was a video of the usual gaunt skeletons tottering down the catwalk. A healthy and joyous celebration of female sexual carnality had been replaced by a death walk. Meanwhile, outside the shop, waddling down paths and gorging in the restaurants, were the new generation of Irish women: prosperous, upper middle-class and, for fully one quarter of them, massively obese. Not fat. Not overweight. Not corpulent. But massively obese. From their arms swing great folds of fat, like huge water-filled balloons. Their bellies are so vast that their owners could not have seen even their toes in years. And their bottoms constitute such an orotund object, with such a colossal circumference, that an entire school of carpentry is going to have to be invented to cope with their seating requirements.