Women are cruel judges of what beauty looks like There is a video currently doing the rounds on Twitter, in which Dustin Hoffman weeps for the plight of women. In the clip, taken from an interview he gave last year, the actor describes how he prepared for the lead role in Tootsie, his 1982 movie about a struggling actor who pretends to be a woman in order to get more parts. Before he signed up for the film, says Hoffman, he laid down a condition. He would only do it if the make-up department could make him look convincingly like a woman, rather than a man in drag. So they did a make-up test. When Hoffman looked in the mirror, he did indeed see a woman - but an ugly one. He asked them to make him more beautiful, but "they said to me, 'That's as good as it gets" ." It's at this point in the video that Hoffman begins to cry - for the ugly woman he might have been, and for all the men too stupid to appreciate her. He realised then, he snuffles, that if he had met his Tootsie character at a party he wouldn't have talked to her, because of the way she looked. "There are too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life," he mourns, "because I have been brainwashed." Here's the most depressing thing about this anecdote. If Hoffman's female alter-ego went to a party today, her dance card would be just as empty. Emptier, in fact. More than three decades on, life for the unbeautiful woman is harder than ever. As evidence, let me draw your attention to a woman who is not ugly at all. Marion Bartoli, this year's Wimbledon champion, is young, fresh-faced and pretty. She has a glorious smile, and scrubs up well in a mini-dress. Yet so insanely exalted are modern standards of beauty that her victory in the final seems to have provoked panic and fury among Britain's menfolk. The BBC commentator John Inverdale has since apologised for opining, on air, that Bartoli "was never going to be a looker." But that was positively gallant compared with the misogynistic bile that poured on to Twitter. The things they wrote don't bear repeating. But judging from their profile pictures, the men on the internet making the appalling remarks are all young and clean cut, with no obvious signs of psychopathy. How did they come to be thinking such terrible thoughts, let alone saying them - as it were - out loud? When I was growing up, in the Seventies and Eighties, I never once heard a woman described so insultingly. The atmosphere was still thick with feminist solidarity - as well as old-school chivalry. If you weren't too enlightened to cast judgment on a woman's appearance, you were probably too polite. Moreover, expectations of female beauty were far more forgiving than they are now. The internet had yet to be invented, and porn was still safely relegated to the top shelf. Plastic surgery was only for burn victims. The bikini wax had yet to be invented. The female flesh we saw in the media - even "stunners" like Sam Fox or the Benny Hill girls - looked recognisably human. They had soft bodies and imperfect teeth. And of course, the woman we saw most of was Mrs Thatcher - a global icon who made a virtue of looking like a disapproving suburban housewife. Today's young women - and men - have not been so lucky. They have grown up with a woefully narrow, airbrushed ideal of female beauty. It has made them cruel judges of themselves and others. A survey published this week found that 40 per cent of women have digitally-altered photographs of themselves, so unhappy are they with the way they look. Hatred, and self-hatred: that's what Tootsie would be about now.