FOR MOST WOMEN WRITERS, Jordan is beneath contempt. From on high in Fleet Street, the female columnists happily write off books by women working in any area of the sex trade as misguided thoughts by misguided trash. They want to judge rather than engage with a culture that they still perceive as having “high-brow” and “low-brow” strata, without the peer-reviewed rigour that a real academic must negotiate.

Katie Price’s second autobiography in as many years will garner the usual responses: either that it represents the sacrifice of the feminist ideal to the anything-goes female chauvinist pig attitude (in a left-leaning paper), or that it reveals the rotten core of the malformed female emancipation cause (in a right-leaning one). When the subject is women and what they do with their bodies, there is only a cigarette paper’s width between the two camps. And any purported post-feminist reading of Jordan’s story is utterly to miss the point.

Like God for Voltaire, if Jordan did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her. Her success is a result not of the idealism of a dominant class but of the material structure of society as a whole. Garbo was an idea; Marilyn a failed puppet; Jordan is gloriously, utterly human.

There was some confusion when she appeared sane and normal, not a sex-crazed beast, on reality television. We were permitted to accept her: the party girl image was all an act, right?

But her book makes it clear that Katie and Jordan are the same person. Katie is not a modest lass knitting cardies who puts on the Jordan act simply to ensure a pay cheque. She does not shy away from appearing impatient and bossy. We get the gory details, from hair extensions to drunken club nights and sex in semi-public places. She’s honest, as superficial as Bridget Jones, but with an edge of self-awareness that middle-class heroines would never take on for fear of looking like a shrill fishwife. She wants Dwight Yorke to spend more time with their handicapped son but is sharp enough to acknowledge that her attitude and the child’s difficulties put him off. She needs an alpha male while reviling Peter Andre’s past, despairing of men that she wrapped so easily around her finger and admitting that she could only love an equal.

Screw the batting of eyelashes and gossip in the parlour: this is what women really want. What milquetoast chick-lit heroine would state her needs so straightforwardly, or dare to believe that that was what she wanted?

This is Katie Price’s great achievement — making someone who might be a cartoon character into a human that you could like. The fashion pages sneered at her wedding, but when she glided down the aisle in a dress that could have doubled as a Christo installation, I cheered. It was the fairytale ending for a woman who has achieved a level of fame reserved for minor royals or the wives of sports stars. She does not need to be a courtier or courtesan to lead the glamorous life. Jordan has made it on her own graft.

Katie has a good heart. She loves her family and wants the best for them, even when she can’t decide between a natural birth and a Caesarean. She longs for the spontaneous embraces of her children. She’s pampered but not spoilt: she administers her son Harvey’s medication and changes his nappies. The details of her courtship with Andre are slightly tedious, but completely honest in recounting what it’s like to be dizzily infatuated.

Jordan does not take action based on the past but weighs each moment on its merits and behaves accordingly. She falls in love and does not spend 16 chapters trying to figure out how to tell Peter; she’s popped the question by page 17.

We should remember our collective crush on Katie after she walked out of the I'm a Celebrity . . . jungle two years ago, dignity in one hand and love in the other. She has chutzpah. We love Madonna for having it, because we can’t all be rocket scientists or transcendent beauties, and she is the proof that attitude trumps talent.

Jordan’s credentials are just as solid, she subverts the archetypes just as well — we should love her as much. But while a trend-hopping megastar is an appropriate lifestyle fantasy for women, somehow Jordan is not. “I would never do that,” is the typical female response to saucy glamour models. Katie has implants and married a man who waxes the hair off his balls; this makes it acceptable to deem their love inauthentic. This tendency to draw a difference between women who “respect themselves”, and Katie Price who, presumably, does not, is based on a failure to acknowledge the ways in which an entity can differ from itself. She is a woman. We are women. The category is big enough to take allcomers, even Pete Burns when he returns from his trip on the River Denial.

Is it a good book? It’s adequately written and contains a shocking number of exclamation marks. A friend spotted me reading it at a coffee bar and asked what was the longest word in Jordan’s written vocabulary. As we were in public I couldn’t tell him that it was “dickalicious”. But the book bounds along and does not overstay its welcome; it’s a Sunday afternoon’s read.

Is there anything you haven’t heard before? Of course not. But there’s nothing new under the sun, only people who can make you notice the content afresh. If the sales figures are to be believed, Sharon Osbourne is that person this year. But she will always be someone’s wife first and her children, while tragic in that fame- addled way unique to celebrity offspring, do not tug the heartstrings the way that Katie’s do. You can call Jordan a chav and mock her Bentley-driving pretensions, but if getting her top off means that she can pay for her son to have the finest care available, I say “Go ’head girl, get down.”

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