Why have large breasts become "must haves"?

Or less. TV is particularly depressing.

I went out into London on my own on the tube for the first time in ages. I was surprised how ordinary and frankly ugly many people look because I've become a bit conditioned by rather insular life style.

Didn't Liza whatshername of DM fame have hers reduced because she wanted to conform to the waif like standards as displayed in Vogue?

I live in a place where every woman seems to have something or other fake about her and every other shop is a beauty salon. I will argue until I'm blue in the face about my right to dress nicely and not feel I'm comprising my sex or my intellect but the extent to which these women go is totally depressing. Even young teenage girls all have fake eyelashes here.

Yes. I think that's true. How does society value women? How they look. Sad but true.

It's also relevant to the 'market'. Ie which man. It's matches taste.

In lots of settings it would feel very wrong. In some it's the best. So we don't all do it.

You can buy implants with a payment plan and instalments.

Because for some people how they look is their only asset. So they have to conform. Or they think it's their only asset.

Let's face it, you're not going to win The X Factor of BGT even with the most amazing voice. You have to look right too.

Some of us can see it and reject it. Others see it and accept it, even embrace it because it gives them what they want but can't achieve otherwise. Others can't even see it.

I can only think of Sister Wendy Beckett who's not very attractive and she's not been on the telly for yonks. Oh and Ann Widdicombe but I think she's considered more of an oddity than a woman by many.

The only female scientist I could think of was Susan Greenfield and she's got fake blonde hair and fake lashes.

I think when you have images in the media such as page 3, porn is definitely more pervasive and there is a culture around image and placing value on image it is very hard not to be swayed by that. Particularly because much of it is unconscious.

Just thinking about the media images projected:

How many fat female newsreaders do we see?

How many unattractive female presenters can you name?

Think of your favourite TV programme. How attractive are the women? More than averagely attractive?

Think of female politicians, how attractive are they?

What about well known female scientists?

In fact can you name any woman on TV who is not good looking?

Think of children's TV and "family" TV. What do the women look like? Do they look like people you might see on the bus?

On the subject of boobs, I went to buy another couple of bras for DD yesterday in my lunch hour. Went to Matalan (yes, I know, I know but it's all that within reach of work). They had bras for adult women - the usual range of lacey, upheaved, padded creations. And they had a range for teens - more or less the same DD is a size 28AA. She doesn't need a bra but she has one because it makes her feel more comfortable in PE when all her friends have them. She has some George plain white cotton ones and one with butterflies on it, no padding, no underwiring. Why would I want to buy my 12 yr old something that would give her massive great bosoms! It's obscene. There was one rail with some sensible bras and guess what.....they had almost all sold apart from one that was a 34. Hope that teaches them something....

My mum was surprised the other day that a woman on the tv was a glamour model because she had an ordinary face.

My niece told my mum (in that voice teenagers use when they are explaining things to people who they consider too old to understand the world) that being a glamour model isn't about how attractive you are it is about what you are prepared to do.

And surely implants come under the category of what you are prepared to do. Most young women aren't going to go down that route.

Cogito, your early post really jumped out at me:
"I think it's just fashion. Same as high heels, hemlines, tattoos, haircuts or anything else.... all it takes is for some celebrity to set the trend and people will try to emulate them. Boob fashion goes in cycles. Top-heavy Jordan's a body-shape icon for a lot of young women at the moment. It was flat-chested Twiggy in the sixties. Busty Marilyn and Jane Russell in the fifties. Flat-chested flappers in the twenties. Fifties girls would have stuffed socks down their bras. Eighties girls went for chicken fillets. Today they can have something more permanently inserted.

"I saw something on QI the other night about the correlation of (female) hemlines and (male) hair-length with economic conditions. In times of plenty (sixties, noughties) hemlines rise and hair gets longer. In times of hardship (thirties, seventies) hemlines come down and hair gets shorter. Maybe there's a similar correlation between chest size and affluence?"

It strikes me that there's a very clear correlation here, but with social attitudes towards women: 20s = period of female emancipation, women have newly got the vote, are going out to work in increasing numbers; 50s = "new wave" fashion, backlash against the economic freedoms gained by women during the war (when women did all sorts of work, from skilled manual labour in shipyards through to code breaking at Bletchley park), massive emphasis on getting women back into the kitchen, Doris Day as the icon of suburban housewife; 60s = again period of relative emancipation, driven in part by the revolution in control of our own fertility brought about by the pill; 80s = yet another bloody backlash ("new romantic" fashion).

'Must Haves' for who exactly...

kittens I'm not silly and my boobs are GGs. When I get into my healthy BMI (on target for end of March) I'll probably go down to double Fs. I'm just naturally booby. I'm also far from fertile. I only had my one and only child after attending a fertility/recurrent miscarriage clinic. So that blows that myth out of the water.

I agree with the poster who said it's all to do with celebrity and having too much time and money on your hands. I am trying to impress on dd (11) that celebrity is NOT something that one should aspire to. She wants to be a writer, but she doesn't see the appeal in being famous. She just wants to see her books in print with merchandising and movies and such :)