Okay, so he’s not that great to look at, but then it’s never just about looks, is it? He’s got everything else. He’s powerful, has status, money and the respect of his peers. He’s clever and complex. Judging by the number of devoted girlfriends and the fact that his long-suffering wife, Carmela, still has the hots for him, we can assume he’s great in bed too. These qualities might turn us on, but theoretically the violence should turn us off again.

Fortunately, Tony possesses two additional characteristics that compel us to adore him. For all this power, he is incredibly vulnerable. For all his crimes, he is extraordinarily ethical. Of course, the ethics of creating a mobster we can’t help liking is another matter. What’s important is that despite the fact that he is a violent, albeit highly successful, criminal, people like Tony because they identify with him.

How can we identify so readily with a murderous, foul-mouthed mafia boss? We start off applying the moral relativism that has become our standard approach to life. Indeed, Pope Benedict has identified moral relativism as a sort of authoritarianism every bit as dangerous as fascism or communism.

There are few absolute right and wrongs left. Instead we seek to understand. We have grown used to placing actions in a context, rather than judging the act in itself. Sure, Tony kills and orders the killing of others, but he sees himself as a soldier in a war. He has no expectation of going to hell or being punished for his crimes. He claims hell is reserved for paedophiles and psychopaths who kill for pleasure, not men like him for whom violence is simply business.

Politicians persuade us they are justified in sending soldiers off to war. As far as we’re concerned, they’re lying to themselves and to us, yet they expect not to be judged. If we are taught not to condemn them, why should we judge Tony for doing the same thing? He’s just doing his job, same as any other professional.

How many of us pause to consider the ethics of our own work and carry on, telling ourselves we’re just doing a job? How often do we do things in our own life that we consider to be morally dubious but necessary in order to be successful?

In one episode, Tony admits to his daughter, Meadow, that although he officially claims to be in “waste management”, his income is derived from illegal gambling. He asks her how she feels about that. She replies that sometimes she wishes he was like the other dads, “like Mr Scangarelo, for example, an advertising executive for big tobacco”. Placed in that context, there’s no competition. Scangarelo’s work is really evil. Tony just kills other gangsters.

In fact, put Tony beside corrupt politicians and executives and he positively shines. The show’s creator, David Chase, emphasises this moral equivalence between corporate and mob activities. In another episode, Tony and Carmela are justifiably angry when they find themselves judged by their allegedly respectable neighbours, even though Carmela has discovered that the wives are engaged in insider trading.

Not only do we forgive his murderous ways, we frequently sympathise with them. Just as we lament the breakdown of traditional moral codes and values in our own society, so too does Tony. Our taoiseach bleats about active citizenship and the lack of voluntary workers. Tony complains that times have changed in the mafia. Young members today “have no room for the penal experience” and keep ratting to the FBI. Tony himself says: “I dunno about morals, but I got rules”.

The primary rule is loyalty to Tony. If you’re snitching to the FBI, well, you’ve got it coming.

One by one we see his criminal associates deceive him. When he is inevitably forced to kill them, we understand his motives and join in his sense of betrayal. If the members of his crime family had his ethics, there would be peace. Really, he’s just another middle-manager squashed between the pressures of his superiors in New York and his inept staff.

So much for the ethics, what about the vulnerability? Poor Tony. When we first meet him he’s attending his first session with a psychoanalyst, Dr Jennifer Melfi. He’s been referred to her by a GP because he’s been suffering panic attacks. After some initial resistance he admits to Melfi that he is depressed. He tells her: “I got the world by the balls and I can’t stop feeling like I’m a f****** loser.” Who in our stupid Celtic tiger world can’t sympathise with this feeling?

On the outside, Tony is a success. He has the wife, the two children, the mistress, the cool cars. Business is good. He’s in charge, if under pressure. But like many others before him, Tony has discovered that material success doesn’t make him happy. In fact Tony’s misery, and his mystification as to why he is so miserable, speaks for us all. He’s lost in an existential crisis where, despite acquiring the trappings of success, life seems to have lost purpose. The universality of his dilemma is one to which we can all relate.

He wants to be a good crime boss and he wants to be a good family man. He believes that the income he earns from his criminal activities helps his family. For example, he is able to make a large donation to Columbia University, which encourages them to accept his daughter. This will create the opportunity for the mafia princess to escape her criminal background.Of course, he cannot see that his criminal life is actually harming his family. His children have no respect for him and his wife is hurt by the procession of “goomahs”, or girlfriends, that are a standard component of the mafia boss’s life. He has discovered the ancient truth that happiness comes from what we do, not from what we have. He’s just like the successful executive who works long hours to earn money to give his family a nice lifestyle, but discovers that he simply becomes isolated instead of fulfilled.

Finally, Tony has that classic tragic flaw of all great antiheroes. Although he believes he can control everyone else, the one person he fails to control is himself. He is driven by a desire for revenge and can’t control his temper when crossed. Often this can be in defence of what he sees as old-fashioned values. For example, he attacks one of his lieutenants, Ralph, for beating his mistress to death. Curiously though, it’s this impulsiveness and lack of control that is the final ingredient in a complex and conflicting personality that makes him so attractive.

In another episode, Melfi is violently raped by a random thug. Although she identifies him, he is freed by police on a technicality. Naturally we are outraged and observe her struggle with the temptation to tell Tony what has happened. She, and we, know that when Tony finds out he would “squash him like a bug”. We are dying for her to tell him. We want the rapist squashed. We want to harness his anger, his desire for revenge and his violent tendencies for our purposes. It was a shouting-at-the-television moment — “Tell him! Tell him”.

But Melfi’s motivations in life are more consistent than Tony’s. She knows you can’t mix two lives. If she let Tony loose on her rapist, she would have crossed a moral line. So she resists the temptation. Oh, that we possessed such courage.

If it had been me? Bug-squashing, every time.

Any woman who announced that she liked her body and didn’t feel the need to change anything about it runs the risk of being denounced by other women as an arrogant cow. Alternatively, a plain and misshapen woman who insists that she likes her cuddly bits and regards her lack of symmetry as “interesting” would be regarded by other women as self-deluded and in need of a good talking-to.

You can’t win, really, unless we all stand in the town square and shout in chorus, “I hate myself”. Because that seems to be the only publicly acceptable position for the modern woman.

Shops are full of self-help books urging us to love ourselves. Alternative therapists, spiritual gurus and daytime television psychologists advise daily affirmations such as repeating something like “I love and appreciate myself exactly as I am” over and over again. I tried it once and promptly burst into tears. The voice of constant criticism in our head is the one to which we listen. When a new voice tries to get in there with a positive message we can’t cope.

Whitney Houston once warbled that “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all” (look where poor old Whitney is now), but these exhortations to self-love are completely futile for women. None of it works because we have been trained far too effectively to despise ourselves. Every time we look in the mirror the body we see bears absolutely no resemblance to the ones staring back at us from the telly or magazines. The hair isn’t sleek. The skin seems a little tired. The clothes don’t hang.

Of course, in most cases the women in the magazines don’t even recognise themselves. Cindy Crawford once admitted as much, remarking that her pictures were so extensively airbrushed she didn’t know herself. She may be truly beautiful, but the editors don’t think she’s beautiful enough. Kate Winslet was furious when the editors of GQ magazine altered a cover photograph of her in its January 2003 edition. Based on the Polaroid picture the photographer gave her after the shoot, she was able to confirm that the magazine reduced the size of her legs by about a third. So if Cindy and Kate don’t look like themselves, how are we supposed to look like them?

Some magazines choose a different means to achieve the same end. They’ll show photographs of the female celebrity looking bad. Sometimes they’ll put big arrows pointing to a flaw — a saggy belly caught unawares or a bad hair day. A little two-line caption will express outrage at the star’s audacity to look bad. It helps to fine-tune our judging skills. Actress with visible body hair? Eek! The result is pretty effective. If you don’t want to generate the same disgust you’ll get yourself to the beauticians in jig time.

The standard argument against the obsession with judging women in this way is that it encourages anorexia or bulimia. But anorexics, for all their misery, are still a very small proportion of the population. The rest of us are quite normal and haven’t a notion of sticking our fingers down our throat. The sinister aspect of glorifying thinness isn’t about the few who go too far, it’s about the creation of a generation of women for whom self-loathing is normal.

It suits a lot of people to have women wrapped up in this orgy of self-hatred. The cosmetic and dieting industries are only the start of it. You’re hardly going to spend a load of money if you actually like what you see in the mirror. Even those who seem on top of their game know that it’s vital to stay there. The advertising sucks everyone in. But at least the corporate enemy is a tangible one we can see and fight.

There are far more insidious aspects to the culture of self-loathing. If you hate yourself then negotiating a pay rise is going to be tricky. A little hint from your boss that you’re not so great will be extremely effective because you know perfectly well he’s right. If you hate yourself you won’t complain if you are fired when you get pregnant. You’ll be slow to apply for promotion and even slower to seek credit when a project goes well.

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, says that men write to her constantly asking her to read opinion pieces they’ve written. Women never write to her. Why would they? They don’t think their views are important. Strongly held perhaps, but who else would be interested in them? Is this one of the reasons why women don’t tend to get involved in politics? What spare time they might have gets sucked up in shopping and grooming. In whatever time remains, it wouldn’t occur to them that their ideas on the redistribution of wealth are worth sharing with the nation.

It’s a very clever trick, really. You can legally and technically create equal opportunities for women. But if you undermine it all by destroying their self- esteem, you can maintain their salaries below those of their male colleagues, keep them in the sex-trade, in abusive relationships and out of the top positions in government, academia and corporations. As Dowd says, women may not be vacuuming their carpets as much, but they’re paying for liposuction and vacuuming themselves instead.

There are three things we could do as individuals that might contribute to a collective will to change things. First, stop turning on each other and bitchily remarking on the unplucked eyebrow or the obvious belly. Second, start observing that voice in your head and how horribly you talk to yourself. Then ignore it. Finally, sit down and work out how much money and time you spend maintaining yourself. Then take some of that money and some of that time and spend it on something you might enjoy.

Learn to drive; go into therapy; do a night course and improve your career prospects; take a great holiday — the one you think you can’t afford. Take a closer look at your finances and think about investing your savings more cleverly.

If the mere notion of letting your roots show in favour of spending a few hours with a psychologist to figure out why you keep dating unsuitable men seems ludicrous, just think about that. If you believe there is a standard of grooming to be maintained at all costs, one of those costs being your personal development, then at least ask yourself, who set the standard? Then ask, who does it benefit that your resources are sucked up meeting it? Not you, anyway.

Update: for once, I didn’t like the headline today….