The unfortunate side-effect of what Jordan does is that her persona is elevated to iconic status. The worst brand of celebrity magazine presents her and people like her as a representative of modern woman . . . and the vulnerable, and perhaps the young, buy into it.

However, the wider British media do not present what Jordan is as an aspiration or ideal for all women.

She is broadly seen for what she is by most responsible publications and there is a distinct separation between someone who takes their clothes off for money and someone who should have social influence.

Here at home, we have a comparable example in model and celebrity Katy French, but the lines between model and moral authority have become dangerously blurred. Katy is everywhere, most product launches want her as their public face because her picture gets in the paper. She is in high demand as one of the most recognisable faces in Irish media.

That Katy French is sought-after as a model is no harm.

Good for her that she is busy . . . take the work as it lands in your lap, Katy, and charge them top-dollar for the privilege.

More worrying is the recent development which has seen Katy's opinion held up almost as the voice of a generation. Her admission that abortion would be a better option than sacrificing her career for a baby and her vulgar honesty in relation to her sex life recently became frontpage, broadsheet news. The credibility this exposure gives to the musings of a model means Katy French now speaks for Irish women as a whole.

It is not necessarily what Katy says that is offensive, but that a responsible society gives her such a loud voice.

Katy French is a model who gets paid for posing in her underwear in the tabloids when the Dublin football team is playing in a big GAA match.

She should not be portrayed as a new feminist whose flagrant flaunting of her sexuality equals sexual maturity.

Most intelligent women are not, as she recently claimed, 'threatened by her sexuality' but instead cringe when her pronouncements are presented as being a bell-weather indicator of what women think or want.

Even the most venerable in our society have fallen into the trap of using Katy as a role model. The aid organisation Goal recently sent Katy French, the model, to Calcutta, where aid workers strive to alleviate poverty and rescue child prostitutes from the sex industry.

Do you really want to hear a model talking about her sex toys and sexual exploits one week and telling you about the plight of the Third World the next?

The use of Katy French by Goal to garner some cheap publicity could be seen as compromising and it does devalue the real and valid work of the organisation. But perhaps modern society encourages such stunts because we want to hear how the trip affected the celebrity rather than the real issues behind the ongoing and dire poverty they experience.

Katy French is a free woman in a democratic country and her views are as valid as those of the next person. I'd imagine most of what she says is done with tongue firmly in cheek in order to elicit reaction. But if her crass pronouncements are read as an indicator of wider female opinion, it becomes damaging. Katy French is a female Irish model, not a model Irish female and should be treated by the media and others as such.