It was recently revealed that the woman in the ‘Kissing Sailor’ picture taken in New York on VJ day was not a willing participant in the smooch.

Ouch. Cue women everywhere tearing down the picture from their bedroom wall, seeing this as definitive truth that romance probably is dead, and has been for some time.

On a comment thread online, one man had thoughtlessly declared that: “To steal a kiss is sexual assault... I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy was a date rapist.”

I don’t understand how he made the leap from the idea of a serviceman forcing a kiss on another person to raping them – no, sorry, to wilfully drugging then raping them. I had to read the comment three times before I believed that the guy was indeed accusing this unknown soldier of “probably” date raping. The story of the unwilling woman does seem to hold true – she gave an interview in which she said that she had never even met the man until his arms were around her.

To make the matter even more complex and the image even less appealing, the man’s actual girlfriend (and wife-to-be) is just out of shot and wondering what the heck is going on.

It certainly ruins the romantic ideal of the picture for most of us, and I imagine that it was an unpleasant experience for the “nurse”, who turned out to be a dental assistant in a nurse-looking outfit.

Just to further prove that reality really is in the eye of the beholder.

But back to the Oh-So-Romantic Kissing Sailor.

I think we should all just calm down, take a step back and chill the heck out before we start labelling him a date rapist.

It seems to me that the people generally so free and easy with the word rape are the people most offended by it.

I don’t like it very much either, but it should be used with caution, and applied where correct. There have been cases recently – one in Oxford where a young woman wilfully and horrendously accused an ex-boyfriend of rape which was later found out to be an absolute lie – in which the stigma of that word has very nearly ruined a man’s life.

In addition, let’s not get our terms confused: touching someone without his or her consent is wrong.

But it’s not always rape. And it's destructive for the cause against rape to keep firing off the word like a warning flare: pretty soon, people will stop reacting to it at all.

 

I have a vivid memory from teenage-hood and it goes like this: my (ex) best friend and I were standing together, looking in her grandmother’s full-length mirror trying on shoes. We had no skirts or trousers on.

My (ex) best friend had fabulously long legs. They were slim, too: she was what my mother described as apple-shaped, which meant no matter what happened up top, her legs would always be fabulous.

I did not have long legs. Or particularly slim legs. I had what my mother referred to as shapely legs, holding up what she called an hourglass figure, which really means that the best stuff happens farther north. Anyway, at the top of her wonderfully long legs, my (ex) best friend even – horror of horrors – had a thigh-gap: that elusive, diamond-shaped piece of daylight between the top of (some) thighs.

This was before I even knew about ‘thigh-gap’, the recent ‘ideal’ trend that’s making every woman without a gap feel positively inferior.

I still to this day don’t recall if I had a thigh-gap aged 13 or not – and I certainly don’t dare to find out if I have yet acquired one.

Because the situation got worse. As we stood together gazing at our own reflections, my (ex) best friend very calmly said: “You don’t have great legs, do you?”

The silent devastation I felt at this moment can never be articulated.

But one thing she taught me is that the moment you begin worrying about little things like thigh-gaps, the length of your legs compared to everybody else and hip to bust ratio is the moment you nervously step down the path named perpetual body dissatisfaction. It doesn’t matter how much I hang upside down, dangling from my feet (I actually did this as a teenager) my legs will never stretch.

If you don’t have wide hips and skinny thighs, you’d have to starve yourself quite substantially to ever achieve The Gap.

If it’s not your body shape, then it’s not. It goes against your natural body to be otherwise. Sorry.

Thank goodness models such as Robyn Lawley are busy banging the drum against The Gap, saying: “‘I want my thighs to be bigger and stronger. I want to run faster and swim longer. I suppose we all just want different things. The last thing I would want for my future daughter would be to starve herself because she thought a thigh gap was necessary to be deemed attractive."

I’m right behind her.

And one thing’s for sure: my (ex) best friend never got to pass any more judgments about my legs, my body or my choice of boyfriends ever again.

I imagine she still has fabulous legs though. The bitch.