I WAS looking after my four-year-old niece the other day. We were zonked out after too much ice-cream and scootering in the park.

Weirdly, Barbie was on the television, and we watched it through our sugar haze. After it finished, we decamped to the kitchen and probably had more chocolate. And my niece turned to me and said, “I want to be Barbie”. ‘Emma,’ I thought (although, for my sister’s sake, that is not her real name), ‘you spend your days playing with the dog, riling your little sister and jumping in muddy puddles, like your hero, Peppa Pig.

You are about to start school. Why the hell do you want to be Barbie?’ That’s not what I said, of course, because I didn’t want to start belittling her ambitions yet (or introduce her to swear words).

Instead, I said, “Why?” She squiggled a little and just said: “Becauuuse”, elongating her vowels in her four-year-old way. Evidently, she had seen an example of what she could be, and wanted to be it. (She has never expressed any wish to be Peppa Pig, so she’s not just being imbecilic.) Anyway, this unremarkable Saturday afternoon popped back into my head as I read The Argus on Wednesday. Inside there was a picture of a young woman trying to do good things in the world.

Nothing wrong with that. But darkening this rosy picture was that she came with the tag Miss Brighton and was raising money for the Miss World charity Beauty with a Purpose.

Nothing wrong with all of that either, you might say. But I was worried, now aware of my niece’s impressionable mind. Information takes hold like ink into water. There’s a dangerous message here, I thought, lurking among pageantry and sequins. Like most perils my niece will probably face in her non-Barbie-like life, it is more insidious than dramatic. Doesn’t it say, looks are a way to the top?

This may be partly true in life, but aren’t we meant to design out our prejudices, rather than reinforce them? Doesn’t it also somehow say, that doing good isn’t quite good enough unless you look good doing it?

What impact will this have on my niece and her ilk, I wondered. Would she waste her energy worrying about the wrong things, preening and dieting when she could be doing something more useful?

I’d banish the likes of Miss World pageants and create a new Miss Brighton contest where looks were a long way from the criteria. (Meaning absolutely no criticism of the current Miss Brighton – I am talking about the wider issue). Anyone want to take up the mantle in our fair city?

IT WOULD be silly to disagree with campaigners Carmel Offord and Jessica Woodfall (The Argus, Wednesday) when they criticise the behaviour of the over-excited Charlie and his mates harassing women during a booze-fuelled week in Austria, as witnessed on the TV show Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents.

But isn’t there another villain of this voyeuristic BBC3 reality TV show? In the show, parents spy on their teenage children as they take their first summer holiday abroad, secretly watching everything that unfolds. Watching as they stumble in and out of bars, snog strangers and moan about their parents.

Pretty much like teenagers everywhere.

And as their parents watch, so does the nation, via cameras that seem to be positioned just about everywhere (What are the teenagers told about this, I wonder?).

That kind of exposure, deceit and embarrassment is surely enough to quash even the strongest of spirits. Let alone someone making their first jittery, alcohol-fuelled, bravado-filled foray into independence. There’s plenty of public paranoia at the moment about governments and companies spying on peopleLittle do we think to watch out for those closest to us.

ENGLISH biochemist Tim Hunt told women scientists the “trouble with girls” in science labs is: “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.”

He added he was in favour of single-sex labs so as not to “get in the way” of women scientists. Has he proven without too much fuss that a Nobel prize and a glittering career is no guarantee of basic human understanding?

Or is it a more commonly held view than we’d like to think: I remember one oft-repeated argument for my all-girls school, for example, was that boys and girls tended to distract each other. On another point, Mr Hunt has since resigned. He’s not the first one to do so after making distasteful comments. But what does this mean for the freedom of speech that we hold so dear? It’s a meaningless ideal if in reality saying something others don’t like has such serious personal consequences.