Hot News: Miranda Kerr: the face that launched a thousand spats

^{The image of Orlando Bloom posted on Instagram by Justin Bieber (INF)}

Miranda May Kerr, 31, is an Australian model who came to global prominence as one of the Victoria's Secrets 'angels': women paid to train like athletes in order to retain lithe yet curvaceous forms with which to model underwear. Kerr is foremost among this hotly fantasised-over celestial host, not only in looks but in manipulating and marketing said status.

Her face may be a rhombic tribute to Euclidean geometry, her body that svelte, yet strainingly pneumatic form our culture most fetishises. However, it is the way in which she sells herself as an object of desire that remains most compelling. In 2010, an Australian banker was caught gazing at explicit images of our heroine in the background of a television interview. The clip went viral, the banker was suspended, and an internet campaign was launched on his behalf. Kerr cannily gave him her blessing. Not only did he retain his post, the incident prompted a 100 per cent increase in the number of Google searches for her name.

^{Justin Bieber in Ibiza (Rex)}

In more wholesome vein, she markets herself as the dimpled embodiment of girl-next-door vitality, advocating a tree-hugging yoga, kale and coconut oil lifestyle, and has published a self-help book queasily entitled Treasure Yourself.

It is a suggestive phrase. For Kerr has transformed her pulchritude into a source of wealth and power, and the world takes her at her own estimation, as coveted and treasured swag. She is routinely awarded the title 'Sexiest Woman in the World' by the organs that issue such designations. It is an epithet that would once have been rendered 'Most Beautiful Woman in the World', like Homer's Helen, 'the face that launch'd a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium'. Twenty-nine contingents, under 46 captains, making 1,186 ships, all for the sake of Zeus's daughter, ravishing as she was ravished.

^{Miranda Kerr on the catwalk (Getty Images)}

Helen of Troy was the ultimate fought-over woman: a beautiful receptacle for fantasy via which men could compete to define themselves and their relationships. First, they contended over who should win her. Then they united to defend her father's choice. The three goddesses offer Paris their bribes. He can surpass all other men by becoming king of Europe and Asia, by being skilful in war, or by possessing the world's most beautiful woman; this latter asset evidently representing ambition's pinnacle. Paris seizes his prize, indistinguishable as she is from the loot he takes with him. A decade-long war is waged in her name: a rhetorical repository for male tribal honour, geopolitical strife, and the balance of wealth between East and West.

And she knows it: this role as a vessel for rivalry, an excuse for brutality carried out in her name. One of the bitterest lines in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is given to Helen. I saw it at 13 in the RSC's haunting, haunted production, Lindsay Duncan burying her head in Alan Rickman's chest and muttering: 'O Cupid, Cupid, Cupid.'

^{Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy (Rex)}

Homer's Helen may be a vessel, but she is no less a strategist. She berates pretty boy Paris for being the limp milksop he is, insinuating herself with Priam, and making eyes at staunch Hector. Elsewhere, as Menelaus steps forward to slay her, she bares her beautiful breasts to him and his resolve vanishes. If her beauty and her body are to be used as the excuse for male competition, then she - like Kerr - knows how to benefit from it.

The critical model developed to categorise this male-female dynamic issued from the work of academic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, published in 1985, Sedgwick defines homosociality as 'a form of male bonding with a characteristic triangular structure. In this triangle, men have intense but non-sexual bonds with other men, and women serve as the conduits through which those bonds are expressed'. Male subjects are constructed via a female object; in contemporary terms: bromance requires a vehicle.

Examples of homosocial bonding are so ubiquitous in Western culture - in fiction and fact, poems, romances, plays and novels - that they can feel too self-evident to remark upon. It is certainly the foundation of the chivalric tradition, and the myriad forms that feed off it. It is Launcelot loving Arthur the more he pines for Guinevere; Tristan longing for Iseult while seeking to serve Mark. When Elizabethan poets strove to find a language to define themselves, they adapted the mutually competitive Petrarchan model, opining upon their love for Gloriana and her sonnet sisters as a means of advancing their ambitions.

Hollywood is the epicentre of an industry that one might argue is founded on a principle of male bonding via female fantasy figures. Certainly, its films revel in the replication of this model, be it The Philadelphia Story or Star Wars, Casablanca or (the so baroquely homosocial it is positively homerotic) Top Gun.

^{Elizabeth Taylor with Eddie Fisher, left, and Richard Burton (Getty/Rex)}

Small wonder that the dynamic should erupt into stars' private lives. Witness Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton slugging it out with Bulgari baubles to secure the trophy that was Elizabeth Taylor. Leonardo DiCaprio, despite boasting a power paunch, continues to be a 'modeliser', a man who pursues models as an index of his prowess over the rest of mankind.

Rock stars wrangle over rock chicks. Pattie Boyd famously inspired Beatle George Harrison's song Something and Eric Clapton's Layla. Anita Pallenberg was squired by Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, then Keith Richards (albeit the former was now dead, forging a homosocial bond beyond the grave). Even that most derided genre, 'constructed reality', is replete with homosocial rutting. The steroidally muscular denizens of Channel 4's Made in Chelsea and ITV's The Only Way Is Essex exhibit a peacocking rivalry in which women are desired only in terms of what their possession symbolises regarding other men.

Kerr might seem vapid with her selfies and her smoothies, her bendiness-plus-breasts self-publicising. However, in making herself into a beautiful blank slate upon which men can project their desires, she sees the folly of male ways and knows how to work such folly to her advantage. If 21st-century culture is looking for its postmodern Helen - a kitschy cartoonish, but self-knowing simulacrum - in Kerr it has found it. 2010: Orlando Bloom marries Miranda Kerr in secret wedding

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