It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you have breasts, people oogle them. Of course they do. We all know it. Those of us with breasts have known it for a very long time.

And finally this week I managed to find an article which ‘proved’ this is the case with absolute certainty.

In a less than scientifically rigorous experiment, one woman walked around a city with a camera attached to her boobs.

You try not to click on a link like that but I’ve always wanted to see the world from a boob’s perspective.

The video begins and you’re confronted with a woman wearing a hot pink basque beneath her otherwise sedate work clothes. Her breasts – it must be said – are barely contained therein.

Pretty quickly you realise that other factors are involved here: predominantly that she looks terrible and therefore why wouldn’t somebody look at her with a little judgment? Second, her boobs are practically begging to be fondled. I’d be hard-pressed not to gawp at them. There’s even one moment where a young baby in a back carrier, cranes his head to peer at the chest, clearly wondering if its lunchtime yet.

And the poor men in the video barely know what to do with themselves. You can see the conflict they’re having between curiosity, lust and respectability. I actually felt sorry for them.

Similarly, on YouTube I caught sight of a video conducting another so-called social experiment.

A woman who has been on an online dating site, dons a fat suit to arrive at her first date with prospective partners.

The men are greeted by a larger-than-she-appeared-in-the-profile-pic lady. The video seems to be judging the guys and their reaction to this.

All bar one of the men either tells her she looks quite different to how they expected, and all of them are clearly surprised. I’m not judging the men here. It’s not a sizest issue.

If somebody makes out to you online that they look a certain way, and that turns out to be false they’re in the wrong for lying. The other person is perfectly justified in not being interested on those grounds.

It’s not about being fat – if their profile pic showed a large lady and a supermodel turned up, the datee would be perfectly justified in disappointment or surprise that this was not what they expected.

It doesn’t mean they won’t like you as a person, it doesn’t mean you can’t be friends and no character assassination needs to take place.

But we are attracted to lovers physically.

We shouldn’t judge somebody’s character on what they look like, but we are perfectly justified in not being attracted to someone based on those grounds.

  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.