There is a growing breed of brash, noisy, aggressive young women in Britain today who are quite horrible.

They drink too much, swear too much, reveal too much and believe excess is the route to success.

King Lear's loving reflection on his dead daughter Cordelia, in the last scene of the play, that "her voice was ever soft, gentle and low - an excellent thing in woman", puts both Shakespeare and me on another planet compared with these braying women of today.

My thoughts are prompted by an interview given by the British actress Alice Evans to promote her latest film, an 18th Century historical romp called The Abduction Club, which opens shortly.

For the past eight years, Ms Evans has been rattling around Paris where apparently what she really enjoyed was "to sit in the bogs and have a fag and a gossip with the girls".

All of which seems to have given her an informed view on the sexuality of the British male. "The British male," she ventures, "has no interest in women.

"You could get all your clothes off and lie on the sofa and go 'Come and get me, baby,' and they go, 'Wanna cuppa tea?'"

For your information Ms Evans, in the extremely unlikely event of me being involved in such a scenario with you, I too would reach for the teapot or even the whisky bottle and a good book. And I am a man who loves women.

The trouble is, since Alan Jay Lerner wrote Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?, large numbers of women have now taken him literally - in the worst possible way. They drink too much in pubs and clubs, they brawl, they fart, they are loud mouthed and abusive. For them, the concept of femininity, of cherishing the gentle qualities that make them different from men, has gone.

A graphic example of what I mean. There has always been the joke about the sweaty labourer, wearing low-slung jeans, bending over to reveal both the large cheeks of his bottom and the hairy divide between. "Ugh, how gross," genteel young women would remark.

Today, it is the fashion for young women to wear those low-slung jeans, revealing just as much as the labourer but with the unlovely sight of the upper parts of their thongs blatantly displayed.

Whatever happened to subtlety? Whatever happened to glamour? Whatever happened to romance? Whatever happened to the gentle rituals of seduction and being seduced? Whatever happened to the magic?

How sad that a whole generation of cynical young people is growing up without ever experiencing these joys.

If the Alice Evanses of this world think all it takes to get their men is to stretch out naked and shout "Come and get me, baby", I can only surmise that tea drinking among British males is likely to become an even bigger addiction than it already is.