“The truth is that the pictures are almost insufferably dull. If you’re a monarchist you’d be better off staying at home, painting a Union flag on your living room wall and watching it dry than venturing out to see this tat. And the principal reason why the images are so banal and uninteresting is because, gasp, nobody – least of all the artists and photographers who confected them – knows the sitter at all well … these snappers and daubers have difficulty with depicting the Queen’s personality, because – gulp! – she’s a perfectly ordinary, rather uncultured, rather sporty, elderly upper-class Englishwoman, who just happens to be a monarch. In two words: she’s boring.”

Read Will Self’s review of The Queen: Art and Image exhibition at the Guardian here.

In his seminal text Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay gave the whole garment-rending subject of religious nuttiness a swerve – and, as a rule, this column has followed his lead. However, once in a while, something comes along like the transvaginal probe that’s so abusively crazy that it demands to be written about.

In the same Newsnight segment, we were treated to a coffee morning of so-called Christians who explained that, for them, the abortions in the US were on a par with genocide: “It is a Holocaust,” one harridan in pastel roll-neck inveighed. (It’s strange how they’re always wearing pastel roll-necks.)

I’ve no idea what Mackay would’ve made of the transvaginal probe but I suspect the general idea of forcing things up women’s vaginas, or subjecting their genitals to abusive “examination”, wouldn’t have been wholly strange to him. The anti-prostitution drive towards the end of the 19th century led to exactly this sort of carry-on, as young, working-class women were plucked from the streets and violated in the cause of hygiene. In order to convince these self-appointed authorities that you weren’t a streetwalker, it was necessary that you be proved to be a virgo intacta. Ritualised sexual assault in the form of “force-feeding” also formed a key part of the patriarchal establishment’s repression of the suffragettes.

And so it goes on: the “virginity tests”, carried out by Hosni Mubarak’s secret police during the Tahrir Square revolution last year, were merely the latest instance of sexual assault being deployed as a political weapon. In the west, we have the arrogance to think that we left this sort of thing behind a long time ago; so we inveigh against the genital mutilation (clitoridectomy, infibulations) of benighted Africans in much the same way as Mrs Jellyby passionately cared for the heathen while neglecting the starvelings in her own home. But once you begin looking, it becomes clear that a barely submerged culture of systematic misogyny continues unabated.

Throughout the 20th century, what were, in effect, state-sanctioned sterilisations of powerless women continued in the west – that they were hidden from view was a function of the way mental asylums and prisons operated as hidden gulags where the state enforced its power over the reproductive rights of women and, by extension, their genitals. The ongoing “debate” about single, working-class mothers who claim benefit is only the perpetuation of this attitude under a guise of social concern. That it has become unexceptional even for the liberal to censure these women is another indication of how this age-old hysteria can camouflage itself as socially acceptable.

Less socially acceptable – but a finger-flick away – is the spectacle of young women inserting transvaginal probes to provide a pornographic spectacle for web voyeurs. That the sight of women pseudo-pleasuring themselves with these cruel instruments should be a staple of the male imagination says a lot about how far we haven’t come towards a healthier notion of eroticism. Possibly we have the hidden hand of the market to blame for this lustful frenzy: in the realm of the collective jerk-off, it seems to maintain a ceaseless blur.

Do I blame Christianity per se for fostering this grotesque state of affairs? No: there are many good Christians who must find the transvaginal probe as disgusting as any feminist secularist. Rowan Williams has a couple of months to go before he sets down his mitre and it would be nice if he took the time to pronounce anathema on the madness and prurience of some of his co-religionists.

I love a noodle bar and often dive over the Euston Road from King’s Cross as soon as I arrive back in town so as to suck up stringiness in the Chop Chop Noodle Bar. Mmm, I exhale, as a mixed seafood noodle soup is set before me, it’s great to be back in the City of Angels – albeit ones with dirty faces and wonky teeth. It could just be me but there’s something very primal about the broth served in these establishments – left long enough, it might generate a new life form. It also has a certain detergent note and a residual flavour verging on the excretory. As I say: this could just be me, because the most significant meal I’ve ever had in a noodle bar came after an adventurous man called Bruno took me down the London sewers.

Arguably a description of a walk through the sewers doesn’t belong in a restaurant column – it’s difficult to picture A A Gill or John Lanchester wading through streams of sewage, although fun to try. But I take the hard-line view that anyone who’s preoccupied by what goes in one end should be prepared to take a serious look at what comes out the other. I met Bruno at the junction of Brixton Water Lane and Dulwich Road and without any ado he produced a pair of wellingtons and some rubber gloves and took out a heavy steel key, with which he opened a manhole cover. Down we went, under the incurious eyes of a shopkeeper.

Steel ladders wreathed in an ancient coralline encrustation of toilet paper were pinioned to the glistening black walls and rushing along the bottom of the culvert was a thick cascade of speedy broth. Still, I could detect no actual turds bumping against my wellingtons, nor could I hear any rodentine cheeping, and as we sloshed our way Bruno pointed out that the concentration of excreta was probably fairly low: after all, the greatest part of what goes down our plugholes consists of water mixed with soap: the waste of all that furious laving, of dishes, of bodies, of clothes. However, the detergent edge to the mephitic atmosphere made it seem more rather than less disgusting and, as we waded on, I gagged and for the first time in my life pitied Harry Lime.

We walked for about 2km. Bruno, an anthropologist by training who plied a cycle rickshaw for cash-in-hand, was the perfect Virgil for this harrowing of the urban Hades – he seemed to find his way unerringly through the colonic irrigation and when we came upon a canyon into which our tunnel’s contents debouched with a roar, I was tempted to suggest that we simply went on over the shitty rapids, latter-day versions of the unnamed narrator in Poe’s “MS Found in a Bottle”. Instead, Bruno led me back up and unscrewed a manhole cover and we emerged blinking into a perfectly workaday early evening in Clapham North, at the junction of Timber Mill Way and Gauden Road.

This being the city, no one paid us any attention as we slopped across the Clapham Road, past the crowds of happy noshers outside the Bierodrome. I wanted to point out to them the secret world that rushed beneath their feet – but instead I walked down to Brixton with Bruno and we went for some supper at Speedy Noodle.

Speedy Noodle, as its name would suggest, is not somewhere you linger: the staff are uninterested, the ambience strained, the lighting on the vomitous side of bright. I love it. Over our soup, I told Bruno about the New Statesman’s investigative reporter Duncan Campbell, who, in the early 1980s, by accident gained entrance to the network of government tunnels underneath London and spent a long night down there, cycling about on a folding bicycle he’d taken down with him. How times have changed. I observed to Bruno: in those days, there probably weren’t any noodle bars in London, while at bottom security was unbelievably lax. The only constant, it seems, is the sewers.

“Years later I don’t really stand by the cufflink classification – I’ve acquired a pair of my own, although they don’t really fit; I do, however, stand by my estimation of Rees-Mogg, who’s made the headlines again this week with another of his egregious slurs against the left, damning us all as ‘socialist Yahoos‘.

“Clearly at whichever charitable foundation of a fee-paying school Rees-Mogg attended, they didn’t give their pupils much of a grounding in Swift’s oeuvre …”

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s egregious slur at Cif here.

Both general readers and specialist critics often complain about my own use of English – not only in my books, but also in my newspaper articles and even in radio talks such as these. “I have to look them up in a dictionary”, they complain – as if this were some kind of torture.

Follow the link for the full transcript of Will Self on A Point Of View: In Defense Of Obscure Words. You can also listen to the radio broadcast through the BBC iPlayer.