The last taboo

GETTING them out for the lads is perfectly acceptable just so long as the lads in question are not hungry babes in arms. Or that's how it seems. This, for those of you who hadn't noticed, is National Breast-feeding Awareness Week. Is it possible to be any more aware of breasts than we already are, you might wonder? Breasts are everywhere: on billboards, on the front of magazines, inside newspapers, busting out of every fashion page. The transparently enhanced Emma Noble, affianced to James Major, exhibiting hers in a borrowed dress with all the style of a cast off from the bargain counter at Frocks'R'Us; an uplifted Liz

Hurley spilling out of hers Cannes; you can't walk the streets without

fear of meeting more than an eyeful from Wonderbra woman on a bus shelter poster.

Yet we remain terribly muddled about breasts. The breast, Freud once said, is the place where hunger and desire meet. Is that why we can watch women flaunt them and yawn, yet still frown or look away when they are put to their primary use in public, to feed babies? It must - now that televised death is going

prime-time - be the last taboo. A couple of years ago the Cancer Research Campaign ran a promotion to persuade women to examine their own breasts. It was an acknowledgment that there was - is - still a reluctance among women to examine their own breasts for lumps, a simple but potentially life-saving act. Does it stem from a feeling that somehow women's breasts don't belong to them, that they have little right to this part of their bodies, that they are somehow separate from them? Increasingly this appears not as some peculiarly female neurosis but a cultural one.

Fashion writers tell us that breasts came back in the eighties, but really became apparent as a style statement in the nineties - which might lead one to ask where they had been before.

Some of this style consciousness was probably due to a resurgent Italian dress design, some to Madonna's ferociously pointy breasts designed by Gaultier. The style arbiters said these were aggressive breasts, breasts brandished as weapons, as culture rather than nature, thrust at us by a woman who knew exactly whose property they were. It was look-but-don't-touch. It brought the renaissance of the Wonderbra. After the lean years, as it were, Gossard had to increase its workforce and production to seven days a week to meet increased orders.

Suddenly the launch of a new bra became an event; the models became instant celebrities, for five minutes or at least as long as it took for their image on the posters to fade.

Yet in her aptly-titled book on the subject, Mixed Messages, Brigid McConville tells us there are still many women who are not so at ease with all this imagery. ''My mother wouldn't call a breast a breast. She called it her 'chest'.'' But, then, most of us rarely call a breast a breast unless we are trying to be grown-up. Most settle on the slang word of choice or of the playground years. The tabloid choice is boob. A word, interestingly, which also means a mistake. The page three girl, a relic from the early Murdoch days when breasts were not so freely bared, struggles on still in the pages of the Star and the Sport, locked forever in some seventies timewarp and a

G-string. Once upon a time, in tabloid land, page three was the guarantee of a path to a glamorous world of opening supermarkets and popping up at B-list celebrity events in nightclubs. Now those who've got it become models, those who haven't just flaunt it more mundanely than ever before.

Sure we can put the current prevalance of exposed breasts down to that post-feminist, laddish culture that thinks it's all a bit ironic, a bit of a laugh. Still, at a time when women are encroaching on male power it's hardly surprising that there's an inclination by some to keep them in their properly decorative and passive place. While getting them out is fine, make sure it's not in a cafe, or a restaurant, or on the plane or the train, or anywhere else sensitive souls might be offended by the sight of a mother suckling her child.

Exposed breasts serve to remind women that we are different from men and a nice pair of secondary sexual characteristics is still the way many who ought to know better measure a woman's worth. Women, it appears, can enjoy it too if they are the right shape. Maybe breast envy has overtaken penis envy.

Perhaps muddled is the wrong word. Bizarre might be nearer the mark. For while breast-baring is all around we live in a country that has one of the highest rates of mortality for breast cancer in the world. Where the eminent breast cancer specialist, Professor Karol Sikora, describes women's chances of surviving the disease as a ''cruel lottery''. While the resurgence of the breast as a style accessory was taking place in the eighties, 11,000 women with breast cancer may have died unnecessarily because of the haphazard organisation of NHS services. Some doctors have said that one is likely to receive better treatment in Bombay than we do in parts of Britain. A study in the British Medical Journal of nearly 4000 Scots with breast cancer found those lucky enough to be looked after by specialist surgeons lived significantly longer.

Early detection is vital, but many women who need treatment say the practice and the language of the medical establishment leave a

lot to be desired. Mammograms, needles inserted without anaesthetic, diagrams drawn on breasts that are to be removed - all of this can feel punitive and cause pain. Pain, however, is something that women keep to themselves.

We breastfeed our babies in toilets, for God's sake.

While it seems to matter little whether Paula Yates's or Pamela Anderson's breasts are real or not, implants have been shown to be dangerous. They can leak silicone into the body. Still the demand for breast implants grows while

breast-feeding rates remain stubbornly, dismally low. What a very strange people we are.