A PRONOUNCED, if little remarked on, paradox of our time is that while feminism has rightly brought women equal status with men, their demeaning role as mere sex objects shows no sign of abating.

Indeed, it is getting worse.

It is still acceptable to promote cars with girl models draped over them. But that is small beer compared with the advance of pornography.

Once confined to top-shelf magazines, porn has now exploded on to the Internet, where it is eagerly lapped up. Pornography seems even to have become respectable. The other day it was revealed that the British censors last month approved more videos showing hardcore sex than in the whole of last year.

They have slackened the guidelines, and a leading porn distributor predicts that this will push up total video sales by 50 per cent. Makers of porn movies and video games also expect a boost from a new Sony PlayStation which, for technical reasons beyond my grasp, offers superior play-back, a key requirement in the porn market.

But the shift of porn out of the closet, so to speak, is most dramatically signalled by an open call from a senior TV chief for pornography to be shown on British television. Addressing an audience at the Edinburgh Festival, Adam Perry, controller of special events on Channel 5, said: "We lag behind the rest of Europe in what we can see on subscription view... The material is encrypted so kids can't see it." Some hope.

And some parents will want to expose their kids to porn.

What matters most is the exploitation and humiliation of women inherent in porn. If we don't want it we should be speaking up loud and clear.

What will be the point of having consigned to history the use of women in mainstream TV entertainment as mere adornments - for instance the scantily-clad magician's assistant handing over props to the male star - if on other channels they are degraded and brutalised?

FROM an already stratospheric base, top-boss pay has risen 16.4 per cent, compared with four per cent for the underlings, and of course that criminal one per cent for pensioners.

Shrugging her shoulders at the big bucks for big cheeses, Ruth Lea, head of the policy unit at the Institute of Directors, says: "It's the way international markets work these days. There's a shortage of these people." Funny, isn't it: when workers were collecting allegedly excessive pay awards they were blamed for pricing Britain out of international markets. Now, to keep us in those same markets, it seems boardroom chiefs have to be showered with riches.

LAUNCHED by Sainsbury, the latest supermarket trolley incorporates a mobile phone holder. And the rise and rise of the mobile doesn't stop there. Showing me her new school bag the other day, an eight-year-old pointed to a zipped pouch at the front: "That's for a mobile."

TREATED as a 'brief' by those newspapers that bothered to report it at all, a check by the Health and Safety Executive revealed that, last month, trains passed red signals on 31 occasions - half the number of a year ago. So that's all right then?

THE Daily Mail might have boobed in using a year-old picture of Prince William, taken on Salisbury Plain, to illustrate its story of the 18-year-old Prince on a training exercise with the Welsh Guards in Belize.

But its report contained a useful reminder that Prince William "downed his first stag at only 14 and Prince Charles bought him a £65,000 pair of Asprey shotguns".

Between them, Charles and William are likely to be monarchs of Britain throughout most of the 21st Century. Whether they will be in tune with most of their subjects is a very different matter.