And yet, despite obviously looking like a sort of cross between the back end of a bus and a bulldog’s floppy genitals, Esquire magazine has decided to name Halle Berry as its Sexiest Woman Alive. Which is just weird because, you know, Halle Berry. Bleurgh. No, wait, we got mixed up – we were thinking of former EastEnders and Heartbeat star Nick Berry. He’s not actually very sexy at all. But Halle Berry is actually sort of pretty.

Anyway, we could be wrong, but in the accompanying interview it seems like Halle Berry equates sexiness with masturbating a lot. There’s hope for us yet!

We’re coming to learn that when a magazine chooses its sexiest women, it’s more of a reflection of the readership than the woman it chooses. That’s why FHM always stumps for someone like Megan Fox – women who look like third-generation Chinese-whispered police sketches of what 14-year-old boys most like to wank to – while People magazine always goes for Kate Hudson because she looks approachable and is more likely to sell hair conditioner to housewives.

And then there’s Esquire. Marginally more intelligent than other lad mags, Esquire is the publication for slightly more mature men who want to look like they enjoy reading articles on Philip Seymour Hoffman when really they just want to bash one out to all the pictures of Jessica Biel as soon as the wife goes out.

So, as such, it’s only natural that Esquire would pick Halle Berry – a 42-year-old new mother who once harboured thoughts of suicide – as its Sexiest Woman Alive. Because Halle Berry is intelligent, you see. And stylish. And she looks sort of slutty if you take off her trousers and just make her wear a procession of tight T-shirts. Which, funnily enough is what Esquire did.

As we all know, when you’re voted as the Sexiest Woman Alive it’s traditional to respond with a sort of “aw, shucks, me?” shrug that belies the fact that you haven’t eaten anything but slices of carrot since 2004 and you spend eight hours every morning individually moisturising each one of your eyebrow hairs. So that’s what Halle Berry did too, right?

No. Instead Halle Berry kind of acted like she already knew she was sexier than everyone else and then started talking about what we presume to be masturbation.

“I know damned well I am sexier now than I used to be. You know the stuff they say about a woman being responsible for her own orgasms? That’s all true. And in my case, that makes me responsible for pretty damned good orgasms these days.”

Well, that’s nice. Any other final masturbation-centric life mottos, Halle?

“Sexiness is a state of mind — a comfortable state of being. It’s about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments.”

Loving yourself. What a nice way to put it. Anyway, Halle Berry being named as Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive isn’t just good news for Halle Berry and randy men, it also sends a very positive message to women, too.

It says that 42-year-old mothers of newborn babies can be sexy too. So long as, you know, they’re millionaire Oscar-winning actresses, models and beauty queens who lucked out genetically and get to live with male supermodels. And that’s everyone, right?

As far as we're aware, this is because the world has been waiting to replace 'Stupid Berry Baby' with a real name in its special Infants It's OK To Dislike Because They're Already More Beautiful Than You notebook.

But anyway, the wait is over. Halle Berry has finally decided to reveal that her baby will be known as Nahla Ariela Aubry, and we can assume that Halle Berry settled on Nahla Ariela Aubry either because it's the name of an obscure mountain range from Lord Of The Rings or because it's an anagram of Labara Urinal Yeah.

Lots of people think Halle Berry is a bit dim just because she's pretty and thought that Perfect Strangers was an acceptable post-Oscar movie to make, but we're starting to think that actually Halle Berry is kind of a genius. You were probably under the impression that Halle Berry refused to initially reveal the name of her newborn daughter to protect her from the glare of the media, if only for a day.

Not a chance – in fact, Halle Berry was just chasing the headlines. Look at it this way - "Here's my baby, her name's Sarah," is just one story. But thanks to Halle Berry's clever little tactic she's got the 'Halle Berry has a baby' story and the 'Halle Berry names her baby' story, with a 'this is what Halle Berry's boyfriend's sister thinks of the baby' story thrown in as a kind of bonus. Genius.

So, anyway, Halle Berry has named her baby – and she certainly had a lot to live up to. After all, you can't give your baby a normal name because then nobody will know that their mother is famous – and Shiloh Nouvel and Suri and Bluebell Madonna have raised the bar for made-up names to an impossible degree. So what did Halle Berry do to name her baby?

By the look of it, she dropped a mug of tea onto her laptop keyboard and called it whatever came up on her screen. It's a good system, which is why we plan to call our first-born Uyyv6v8 Cdl;. Access Hollywood reports:

It's official, Halle Berry's baby daughter's name is: Nahla Ariela Aubry. The name is pronounced ["GNAW-lah ARE-ee-EL-uh"]. Halle spoke directly with Access Hollywood's Nancy O'Dell about choosing the name. "We didn't have a name picked out until just before we left the hospital," Halle told Nancy. "For us it was hard to name the most important person in our life until we met her."

You know, it's wrong of us to judge Halle Berry for calling her daughter Nahla Ariela Aubry – or, as we like to call her, GNAW-lah ARE-ee-EL-uh – because it's Halle Berry's right as a mother and a human being to call her child whatever she sees fit without outside criticism. So this will be the last time we pass judgement on Nahla Ariela Aubry.

Also, we hear that if you say her name three times into a mirror at midnight, a witch leaps out and eats your skin. We don't want that to happen, either.

Read more:

Halle's Daughter: Nahla Ariela Aubry - Access Hollywood 

Is it 'what's the gender of Halle Berry's baby?' because we know it's a girl. It's not 'what's the name of Halle Berry's baby?' either, because she hasn't got round to telling anyone yet.

No – the big question pertaining to Halle Berry's new baby is 'but what does Halle Berry's boyfriend's sister make of the birth?' And we've got the answer to that one after the jump. Alternatively you could just re-read the headline – there's a clue in the title.

Celebrity mothers have it harder than most new mothers, you know. Whereas the traditional routine for a new mother involves a few weeks of stumbling around the house in an insomniac fug dressed in a puke-covered dressing gown and resenting your partner's reproductive system, celebrities have to get back in shape immediately for the magazine cover shoots and the How To Get Your Pre-Baby Body Back fitness DVDs and the front cover of the inevitable I Tried To Smother My Baby In Its Sleep postnatal depression self-help book. 

So sometimes celebrities are too busy to deal with the minutiae of motherhood. Take Halle Berry, for example. Halle Berry gave birth to her baby daughter on Sunday, but as far as we know she hasn't got round to naming it yet. And if Halle Berry hasn't done that yet, then she's hardly likely to comment on her feelings about the baby, is she?

It's clearly Halle Berry's time to delegate, then. But who can Halle trust to give an accurate account of the delicate mix of overwhelming emotions that she's currently experiencing in the first few days of motherhood? Her boyfriend Gabriel Aubry? Hardly – look at him. You can't be that chiseled and smouldering without being as dumb as a bag of sand. Halle Berry's own parents? No. Aubry's parents? No? Friends?

No way – not when Gabriel Aubry's Quebec-based sister is on the scene to recount her own feelings. Well, not 'on the scene' exactly. Unless Quebec is the scene. Is Quebec the scene? Probably not. Anyway, fans of hearing what a woman who's never met the baby thinks of the baby she's never met should read the hell on:

"I was so happy when I found out," Eugenie Aubry, 36, tells PEOPLE about the new baby girl born on Sunday to Halle Berry and Eugenie's younger brother, Gabriel Aubry. "It's been a long time since we've had a new baby in the family," said Eugenie. "It's very exciting." While she has yet to meet her brand new niece, the Canadian resident was thrilled to hear that new mom Halle has been practising her language skills. "I'm a Quebecer, and it's great that she is learning how to speak French," Eugenie says. "I'm glad that the little one will speak French, too." 

What do you mean that the largely positive reaction to a baby's birth by a woman who's related to the baby but has never met it hardly counts as news? What are you, stupid? It was on People magazine's website, so it's obviously news. 

Plus, it has to be news because we've just commissioned a comprehensive 48-part series of reports on everyone who Halle Berry is slightly related to and what they think of the baby, and we don't want to look like fools. So stick around tomorrow for the scorching baby opinions of Halle Berry's second cousin's uncle's wife's niece twice removed. SPOILER ALERT – she thinks the baby's a shithead.

Read more:

Halle Berry Boyfriend's Family 'So Happy' About Baby News - People 

But even confusingly drawn-out celebrity pregnancies have to come to an end at some point, and yesterday Halle Berry gave birth to her first child – a baby girl that hasn't even got a name yet.

Although the birth of her daughter is joyous news for Halle Berry and her immediate family, it's even better news for her neighbours – now that she's had her baby, Halle's obscenely milk-engorged breasts will finally begin to subside, causing less day-to-day structural damage and stopping quite so many people from tripping over her gigantic pregnant nipples.

Staying alive until the year 2026 has just got a whole lot more enticing. Before, all we had to look forward to was the opening of the DLR to Charing Cross and the advent of Vinge's Singularity whereby humans will become slaves to their robot masters forever, but they've just been blown out of the water by the competition between Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt and Halle Berry's unnamed daughter to become the most beautiful human being in all of creation.

Up until yesterday Shiloh looked like a dead cert for the title, but now Halle Berry and her male model boyfriend Gabriel Aubry have just produced a baby girl the field has been blown wide open. Unless by some quirk of genetics Halle Berry's baby is exceptionally ugly. She might be for all we know – as E! Online reports, Halle Berry's keeping details of the baby close to her chest for the time being:

The Oscar winner and her model boyfriend, Gabriel Aubry, welcomed a daughter Sunday in Los Angeles. This is the first child for Berry, who has not yet announced her new arrival's name. The actress is "doing great," according to her rep.

That's it. Wouldn't have taken much to add "the baby looks normal" or "the baby is remarkably ugly" to the statement but, nooo, Halle Berry's probably too busy 'recovering' and 'caring for the new baby' to think about us. Typical.

No doubt Halle Berry is experiencing that extreme mixture of joy and total abject fear that comes with giving birth to a child, but in the past Halle Berry said that she enjoys being pregnant so much that she'll let Aubry knock her up again as soon as possible. That is, unless she gave birth naturally, because if that's the case she's probably still in the 'you're never putting that thing anywhere near me again' stage.

No doubt there'll be all kinds of exclusive baby photo deals with magazines in the coming weeks so we can all see what Halle Berry's baby looks like – early rumours suggest that it probably looks exactly the same as every other baby ever born – but what about the name?

Well, we have some sad news to report. Halle Berry wants the new baby to be an Aubry and not a Berry. That's an insane choice to make, because now it won't be nearly as funny if Halle Berry calls the baby Kerry or Geri or Cherry or Mary or Teri or Cherie. But, nooo, Halle Berry's obviously too busy 'thinking of the longterm benefit of her child' to provide us with three seconds of mild amusement. Selfish bitch.

Read more:

Halle Berry Baby Time - E! Online