Though she'll always have a permanent place in our heart/loins, we're a little worried that Helen Mirren is toeing the thin line that separates saucy cougars from grandmothers who say totally inappropriate things at dinner. First, the Oscar-winning actress made it known that she eschews bangers and mash for a somewhat more unpalatable "date rape and eightball" combination platter. Now, in an insane 3500-word interview with the Times in which writer Chrissy Iley can barely restrain herself from pouncing on Mirren to reenact Caligula's most salacious scenes, the Dame airs some even more controversial views on women:

She’s saying that she loves women “in general more than men”. But she has requested in the past that she be interviewed by a man because she gets on better with men. Was that true, then? “No, it’s more that I prefer male journalists because there’s a streak of female journalism — the bitches — who are mean-spirited and nasty because you are another woman and want to make you feel crap. It’s very upsetting. I’m more careful when I’m being interviewed by a woman because, from experience as well as reading articles about other women, I know there is a little stiletto knife hidden behind the back.” She’s laughing as she sizes me up. But she’s right. On the whole, women don’t like other women, because women are competitive with each other. She says: “In a rape case the courts in defence of a man would select as many women as they could for the jury, because women go against women. Whether in a deep-seated animalistic way, going back billions of years, or from a sense of tribal jealousy or just antagonism, I don’t know. But other women on a rape case would say she was asking for it. The only reason I can think of is that they’re sexually jealous.”

Sadly, Iley does little to disprove the point, bragging that she wore no panties to the interview with Mirren (!) while ineloquently fixating on the actress's sexual power, as in this passage:

“My husband’s film is called Love Ranch. It’s a brothel in Nevada in the 1970s,” she says with a tiny but perceptible glint of naughtiness in her eye. [Do you play] a madam? “Of course. I’m not one of the old girls,” she laughs. She could be — very many people would definitely want to have sex with her.

Bluntly put! Get in line, Chrissy — Mirren's married, and Russell Brand's currently seeking first alternate status.