What did you most enjoy about this year’s Oscars? Seeing all the great and good of the acting world honoured for their skills and expertise? Having a little giggle at Jennifer Lawrence taking a tumble up the stairs but marveling at how she brushed it off and at how nice and down to earth she was when she accepted the best actress award? Or seeing Seth McFarlane open the show with a song called We’ve Seen Your Boobs? The boobs, to be precise, of many of the women sat before him, including Charlize Theron and Anne Hathaway.

You may well have enjoyed MacFarlane’s hosting, and in particular his opening number. But if you did, the chances are you were in the minority.

Because that “boob” song has (rightly, in my opinion) upset quite a lot of people – men and women alike – for its apparent disregard of the talent these women have. For the fact MacFarlane, in a few minutes, completely undermined their skill in a tasteless, juvenile and pathetic way.

Of course, some will say you should expect this type of humour from the man who created shows such as Family Guy. Maybe.

But his We Saw Your Boobs song was so widely off the mark for a number of reasons, not least because he performed it on the biggest night of the year for the performers he named. Actors at the top of their game. Actors who, in one fell swoop, were reduced to nothing more than an appearance of their breasts.

It’s interesting to note that MacFarlane couldn’t have written a We Saw Your Penis song if he’d wanted to. Because, unless you’re watching porn, men’s private parts aren’t generally shown on screen

But while there is a lot of anger towards MacFarlane, perhaps it is not him we should be directing our anger at. Perhaps his song represents everything that is wrong with the television and film industry today.

An industry in which women are still fighting for equal roles – with a survey finding in 2009 that for every female character on TV there are two male ones.

An industry where roles for older women are still scarce, despite the fact a massive chunk of the audience is older (and female) and would like to see themselves represented on screen.

And it’s interesting to note that MacFarlane couldn’t have written a We Saw Your Penis song if he’d wanted to. Because, unless you’re watching porn, men’s private parts aren’t generally shown on screen.

So why are women’s breasts so prominent? I am sure there are a number of reasons why an actress might show their breasts on screen. Is it for “artistic reasons”?. Or is it that there is a pressure on them (that we don’t know about) from the predominantly male directors making films for them to do so?

Whatever the reason, it’s clearly not seen as a problem to sexualise women on screen. To objectify them.

And how comfortable are performers with this, really? I heard only recently that a young actress was required to show her breasts for a scene in a TV comedy, and that she had to think long and hard about whether or not she was prepared to do so. In the end, she decided she would, but it was not easy, or necessarily comfortable, for her. And now, when you Google her name, the first thing that comes up is a picture of the scene in question, showing her naked breasts.Isn’t that tragic? A young, talented performer has quickly become a picture for men to lust over. Never mind how good she was in the series – look at her tits! What a great shame.

Perhaps the industry needs to reassess how freely productions allow women to be naked on screen, and ask why it continues to be accepted that the private body parts of women can be shown so regularly, while the modesty of male actors is always protected?

It seems to me that it is only exacerbating the wider problems facing women in the industry, and is doing nobody any favours.