hat is your first memory of breasts? Your mother’s? Her smell, her warmth, the feeling of unfathomable safety emanating from her soft skin? Or was it the huge, tanned, bouncing boobs of a blond woman, speaking in Swedish on Eurotrash, a programme you knew you definitely were too young to watch? Like many women, I understood the power of breasts long before I actually had them. They were something that could be used for attention, hoisted up and pushed together, offered willingly to the male gaze. Conversely I also knew they were a body part that – through no fault of their own – seemed to demand comment. I remember the girls at school who wore two sports bras because they were so sick and tired of boys nudging each other and wolf whistling when they climbed on to the bus at 7am. As a young woman you learn very quickly that our breasts don’t really belong to us. And it never stops. I didn’t breastfeed my son for many reasons – mainly because I was in a psychiatric ward, but that’s a different story, for another time – and people still told me I was denying him by not feeding him that milk. “Listen love, I know you’re suicidal and on a lot of medication, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re being a terrible mother by not letting him have those lipids and proteins.” Basically, when it comes to breasts, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. So I wanted to talk about breasts. I wanted to talk about how they are portrayed in films and TV. How there is a platonic ideal of how breasts “should’’ look, and how if you closed your eyes now, I bet you’d be able to see them. There they are, right? Soft, supple, perky, not too big, not too small. The Goldilocks of body parts. I wonder how Goldilocks felt when she got her tits. Probably a bit freaked out and uncomfortable. I wonder if the bears made weird comments about them. Women are continually forced to inhabit this icky space between girlhood and womanhood. Be eternally youthful! Be deeply sexual! Does it make you feel strange that I am talking about the breasts of a fairytale character? Well, women are continually forced to inhabit this icky space between girlhood and womanhood. Be eternally youthful! Be deeply sexual! Our breasts belong to the male gaze, to the strangers on the street who feel an astounding, audacious confidence, as they shout their thoughts on our bodies into our faces, to our sweet children (and I cannot state enough that I fully support every woman in whatever choice she makes when it comes to her body), and of course to capitalism. Yes, your breasts belong to capitalism. Deal with it. But of course, if you choose to make money for yourself by selling your body, you’re scandalous. Channel 4 said I could make a film about breasts. So we gathered some women together and asked them how they felt about theirs. But what we actually ended up talking about was the people in our lives that we loved, the people we had lost. About how our bodies are so much more than separate parts to be categorised, classified and judged. We speculated on how we might feel about ourselves if we hadn’t grown up beneath the microscopic lens of the male gaze – blood red rings around cellulite in magazines, films where the only women worthy of love are thin, white and middle class. We wondered if there was the possibility of a future where we just didn’t have to think about any of it. Where, when we looked down at our bodies, we didn’t dwell on size or flab or those insane phrases made up to make us feel inadequate (have you ever heard a man complain about his saddle bags?). What if, instead, we thought about the people our arms had embraced, the silky heads our hands had lovingly stroked, the miles our legs had walked from the sea to the city, from forests to chalky cliffs? What if we allowed our bodies to elicit the same feeling of warmth and unfathomable safety we got from our mother’s chest? And what if it was her choice whether she breastfed us or not? Boobs is on Channel 4 on 7 February at 10pm.