Men pride themselves on being straightforward. What you see is what you get, they say, while rummaging about in their ear in an enormously attractive fashion.

I have always thought there was at least some truth in this. But I'm beginning to think I might have been wrong all along.

Maybe men are not the loveable, uncomplicated idiots I took them for. Maybe what you see is not what you get, but a front for something way more convoluted whirring and cranking beneath the surface. Maybe, just maybe, men are aliens.

Not all of them of course. Dads are not aliens because they wear carpet slippers and still haven't quite made the tricky transition from betamax to VHS. Des Lynam is not an alien because, if he was, his mysterious powers would have worked on ITV as well as they did on the BBC. And Prince Philip is not an alien because that would make him a foreigner and he would have to give up vital royal duties such as waving and wearing funny hats so he could dedicate more time to insulting himself.

But some of the other chaps banging and crashing about in our lives most definitely are not of this world.

I am thinking particularly of those who buy magazines with Jordan on the cover and which sport succinct headlines such as "Cor!" and "Norks!".

Now I have nothing against this hard-faced, empty-headed human zeppelin per se. I'm sure she's a lovely girl. (And if you believe that I've got some magic beans you might be interested in.) But I do have a problem with the new crop of men's mags to hit the market. My problem being that I just don't understand them.

Granted, they are not aimed at me - I don't have the trouser tackle required to truly appreciate the nipple to bum cleavage ratio. But I am a woman of the world - or so I thought - and I have seen some things in my time that would send Jordan scuttling off to the nearest nunnery. Surely, I couldn't be shocked by a clutch of monosyllabic magazines?

Wrong! To be honest, if I had been any more wrong I would have completed a full circuit of the wrong-o-meter and been right again.

Not only was I shocked, I was bemused, disturbed and not a little fearful for the future of humanity as we know it.

The front covers should have tipped me off. "Exposed! UK Gun Gangs" screamed one, while another yelled "Jackie Chimp! The Amazing Black Belt Monkey" with a more demure strapline simply saying "Exploding Whale".

If only I had turned back then, but I didn't, I blundered on into the mystifying horrors of the inside pages.

The boobs, the gadgets and the balls (usually of the foot variety, but not exclusively so) I was expecting, but the gore, from Shi'ite Muslims slicing their heads open with swords to the aforementioned exploding marine mammal, and the offensive voyeurism posing as "wacky" journalism were too much, even for an iron-stomached lass like me.

Why anyone would want to read a pocket guide to human experimentation from Hitler to the present day - complete with full-colour pictures! - is beyond me. It is a completely alien concept. QED: men who buy this stuff are aliens.

Or, and this is the more likely option, the boys who read this garbage have the intellectual maturity of a single-cell sea creature, and a particularly stupid sea creature at that.

If, in a few years time, I catch my own boy reading this divisive nonsense, I might have to seriously consider locking him in his room until he comes to his senses.

Otherwise, it can only be a matter of time before we find him jostling for position with fellow mad mag readers on the school roof, picking off his school friends with a rifle (turn to pages 2, 3 and 4 for the full-colour pictures).

Updated: 10:01 Monday, February 16, 2004