It's enough to make you say '!*@*!'

Cilla Black is a has-been in TV terms, so fuck her. (I am quoting the Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing and The Guardian here, so bear with me for a moment.) The debate in the paper, since it published its tabloid section with a cover bearing the puzzling legend "Fuck Cilla Black" on Tuesday, has centred on two questions: does the cover count as art, and what about the impact on children?

In answer to outraged parents who complained to the paper, it has been pointed out that the f-word is not exactly unknown in school playgrounds. What no one has explained is why Cilla Black was selected for this treatment. Has she, in between recording episodes of Blind Date, been torturing unsuccessful contestants with cattle prods? Or secretly assembling weapons of mass destruction backstage? If she has, Hans Blix has yet to provide the evidence. Yet Black apparently merits the kind of denunciation that might more understandably be directed towards Saddam Hussein or that deranged war-monger George Bush.

The Guardian chose to publish its puerile Wearing cover in a week when people were wringing their hands over a supposed link between the rise in gun crime and the lyrics of black rap artists. I have been complaining about the misogyny, homophobia and aggression of rap music for years, and one of the worst offenders is Eminem – the white, working-class pin-up of many white, middle-class boys and girls. Eminem and Wearing have more in common than might at first seem to be the case, for both are lionised by people who desperately want to look cool.

Wearing's assault on Cilla Black, like Eminem's lyrics, is evidence of the way in which aggression has become a standard feature of popular and middle-brow culture – a development that worries me far more than the macho posturing of So Solid Crew. We live at a moment when bullying and personal attacks have been not just legitimised but turned, in the form of "reality" television, into the dominant form of entertainment. See the washed-up TV presenter collapse in tears! Split your sides over Jade, who is too stupid to recognise the depths of her own ignorance!

And "fuck Cilla Black", whose TV programme used to be required Saturday-night viewing for the slumming middle-classes, until a crueller breed of producers forced her into a not-very-successful attempt to emulate their nastiness. You do not have to be unusually empathetic to recognise that Black might be distressed by this unprovoked verbal assault, but then people's sensibilities no longer matter these days. Everyone is fair game for sarcasm or a full-scale public demolition.

You do not even have to commit the massive offences of being uncool and over the age of 50 to discover that you have failed to meet the media's exacting standards. The film star Kate Winslet is 27, blonde and prepared to take off her clothes for a men's magazine, which should be sufficient to protect her from the culture's self-appointed arbiters. But even she isn't in good enough shape for the staff of GQ, who have radically altered her body for the magazine's front cover.

The editor, Dylan Jones, described last week how he interviewed Winslet for the magazine: "She was, of course, fully clothed, but it was obvious that she had changed a lot. I could tell she had fabulous legs and a great body." Not fabulous enough for GQ, which lengthened her legs, flattened her stomach and generally slimmed her down to make her more appealing to its readers; Jones even appeared to suggest that he had done Winslet a favour by turning her into a skinny, bog-standard wet dream. (Sadly, history does not record whether Jones was fully clothed during their encounter, or Winslet's assessment of whether his body might benefit from digital enhancement.)

Whether Winslet approves of the changes is neither here nor there. GQ's manipulation of her image and Wearing's attack on Cilla Black represent a wilful appropriation of other people for their own purposes. On this occasion the victims are celebrities, a category for whom many of us have little sympathy. But it is the very fact that the targets are so random and inoffensive that should act as a warning. In our harsh emotional climate, it is not just rap stars whose message to the world seems to be "fuck you".