GRACE Jones was on Radio 4, talking about her body. “I love it,” she seemed genuinely delighted. She said she’d been out in Hyde Park, I’m sure I didn’t pick this up wrongly, in a topless corset.

I can’t think of a time I’ve heard a woman in real life – not a model or an actress or someone on the telly – talk about their body in such positive terms. I wanted to whoop at how refreshing and delightful I found it.

But then it made me think about why we don’t all talk about ourselves in such flattering terms. A woman in real life would be hesitant to say how fabulous she felt, and certainly hesitant to even think about wandering around the local park with her boobs free to the elements, due to the suspicious scorn that would be poured on her. It’s de rigeur to have a particular flaw you can bring out in company and tut over.

It’s impossible to exercise without people assuming you’re trying to lose weight, rather than from the pleasure of it. It’s impossible to suggest dessert without someone making a comment about it being “naughty”.

Why is food so divided into “good” and “bad”? There are too many foods I know the calorie count of. Where has this information come from? Why can’t the corner of my brain storing up this useless knowledge (banana: 105; Stilton: 120; Pret dairy-free coconut yoghurt pot: 269 calories) have retained more of the French I spent months struggling to learn? Probably because you use it or lose it – and I hear more people talking about calorie counts than I do speaking in French.

Of course, there’s an obesity epidemic but I’m not talking about women whose health is genuinely at risk due to their weight. I’m also not talking about women with eating disorders, a mental health problem that is complicated and heartbreaking.

I’m talking about healthy women who perpetually want to be slimmer because… because why? It will make them feel better about themselves. Life and all its component parts are difficult enough to juggle without this added pressure.

Amy Shumer had a sketch recently about “new bodies,” riffing on how women visualise themselves to be in the future once they’ve reached their ideal weight. I sympathise with this. I’ve put on two and a half stone in the past year and none of my clothes even think about fitting me. I refuse to buy new, larger clothes in the vain, abstract hope that the weight will dissolve as mysteriously as it accumulated. I think I’m still nine stone until I see a photograph of myself and do a double take. But the problem is, I just don’t care. I cycle everywhere. I can make it all the way through a Bikram torture – sorry, yoga – session when the skinny minxes in their bikini tops and shorts need to sit down. The weight will never dissolve because I don’t care. It’s the first time I’ve felt this way and it’s phenomenally liberating.

If I ever had a daughter it makes me furious to think about the time I would have to waste on positive reinforcement, on explaining to her how she’s just fine the way she is. My friends with sons – they have none of this. They just rough and tumble their way through life without a second thought about what their thighs are doing. It makes me rage to think of the time and energy wasted on constant fretting and denial of enjoyment by women who look marvellous as they are. It’s exhausting to think of the possibility of having to be a shield against an enemy that we create ourselves.

How about we all get together, all the women, and we go full controversial and we just decide we like ourselves. We like our bodies. They’re pretty cool. We don’t care what size they are or which bits wobble that we’d like to stay still.

What if we all said, as a collective, there are worse things than a very slight double chin that no one else notices. That our stomachs are supposed to have a bit of a cushion over the top. That the backs of our arms jiggle a little when we’re having a fine enough time to be animated.

The number of girls in Scotland being detained on hospital wards, for eating disorders, self harm and suicide risk, is growing annually. The Scottish Children’s Services Coalition says the rise is linked to increasing pressures on girls and young women, from “academic pressure to their increasing sexualisation and objectification, amplified by social media, with the drive to achieve unrealistic body images.” I’m never entirely convinced that eating disorders are triggered by external factors such as media images but dieting and the desire to be physically improved by becoming thinner is seen almost universally as a virtue.

Self-dislike is a virtue, is the status quo. It’s time to recast it as a vice.