APOLOGIES to any male readers of this column, for my return to an area of the body mentioned in last week’s My World. 

But I cannot resist addressing the revelations of that French sports scientist who spent 15 years studying 130 women with different bust sizes and came up with the surprising news that, basically, bras are irrelevant.

According to Professor Rouillon, “the bra is not needed. Medically, physiologically, anatomically, the breast does not benefit from being deprived of gravity.”

That may be, and perhaps brassieres do “prevent supporting tissues from growing”, but any woman on earth could have saved him these many years of his life by pointing out a few home truths about the importance of undergarments.

Women do not wear bras out of concern for their tissues, silly man. They do so in order that they can go about their daily lives free from unwanted attention, feeling no embarrassment about the state of their upper torso. 

Without a bra, any woman with a sizeable chest would, as breasts are independently moving objects, find herself with two serious encumbrances to deal with.   

The wearing of a bra supplies at least some freedom from this burden, and from some staring, comments and lechery. It’s not that all men are base, but the sight of a freely moving breast would be hard for any red-blooded male to ignore.

I bet ladies will know certain men who have an inability to ignore even restricted bosoms – Bridget Jones Diary had one character named for his tendency to look women, well, not in the eye – and will have had experience with ogling in their lives. I certainly recall a few of this sort.

When I taught at an all-boys school, I often noticed an altered atmosphere if I entered the classroom wearing a skirt or, in autumn and winter, knee high boots. Imagine what would have happened if I walked in with no bra on. It would have been pointless my uttering a word of English teaching for all the attention they’d have paid.

In the same school, the poor head of my department was known as an unsavoury nickname by the boys referring to a part of her breast, an area which would have been even more exposed without a good sturdy bra.  

Sorry, men, for the aspersions I am casting about you all, but surely bras save you from discomfort and embarrassment as well?

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, well before Mary Phelps Jacob was given the first bra patent, women have known that the use of an over the shoulder boulder holder was the only way to get any work done.

Professor Rouillon - thanks but no thanks.