I have big breasts. They’re quite fetching. They precede me, literally.

I’m not boasting here. It’s hardly an accomplishment, it’s not as if I nurtured them in potting soil from JFK’s gravesite and watered them with champagne. I was 13 and they appeared overnight. Cathy, my best friend in Grade 10 and hands-down the high school beauty, said I had the biggest ones in class. “Really?” I said dubiously. For the next 10 years, I ignored my busty substances, but men didn’t and it caused me a lot of strife.

Missy, you’re a feminist, so why are you banging on about your rack, I can hear you saying with a disgust — for which I frankly don’t blame you. But a feminist comes to the aid of her sisters, and Julie Couillard, the beautiful woman who had the bad judgment to date the ex-foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, has been set upon.

On the attack

I refer to a trio of female Globe and Mail columnists who this week attacked Couillard for her breasts, her fragrant beauty and her insistence on defending her dignity as a woman.

Margaret Wente went all scissor-lips and referred to Couillard’s “boobs âe¦ barely contained by a dress that appears to be made from a handkerchief,” her “voluptuous body, her “cleavage,” in a “milked” scandal, “her no visible means of support, no pun intended,” and her “attributes.”

Sarah Hampson, a columnist who continually excoriates the father of her sons for having left her, was so obsessed with Couillard’s breasts that she twice referred with contempt to the “pantsuit” the French woman wore for a television interview with TVA this week, implying that even a pantsuit couldn’t conceal the filthy, sluttish “mounds of her bosom.” In fact, Couillard was wearing a sleek beige suit with a knee-length pencil skirt that shamefully failed to conceal deplorably slender elegant calves and high-heeled shoes of creamy leather. Even men try not to get caught staring at breasts, but Hampson never flicked a glance below the waist.

And Christie Blatchford, an old acquaintance of mine — I hung out with a rough crowd when I worked at the Toronto Sun — referred to the “tracts of land” ill-concealed by a “plunging neckline” that she claims are Couillard’s only asset. And she wrote this: “I am weary of women like her, women who are celebrated for their tracts of land and, little else. I am weary of such dames getting a pass.”

Here cometh the lessons, one about beautiful women and another about the nippled fleshy protuberances so yearned for by live men and so resented by women who are neither beautiful nor breasted.

    1. Beautiful women don’t get a pass for their mistakes but ugly women may. “Cry me a river,” Hampson declares, “she knows what she is doing.”

    2. Many men seem frightened of beauty but many women are sickened by it. Blatchford describes herself as “one who has never been seen as decoration on a man’s arm and thus perhaps for a legion of the shy-tracted or tract-deficient,” so she allegedly speaks up for the plain or unsightly.

Who’s a busybody?

Blatchford blasted Couillard with flesh-shredding hollow-point bullets. There was a time not long ago when a newspaper would not have allowed columnists to do this to any person who was involuntarily or just reluctantly in the public eye. It’s unfortunate that the contraction of feminism should have also shrunk common human decency, but these columnists meow and scratch at everything they don’t have.

Never pretend that something is not worth having simply because you don’t have it, Virginia Woolf said, but she was one of those women’s rights harpies.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper called opposition politicians “old busybodies” for legitimately inquiring about Bernier’s relationship with Couillard. But who’s calling out and identifying the real busybodies: the male-run newspapers and their hypocritical columnists getting mileage from Couillard’s chest?

Harper may have inadvertently nailed it with the word “old.” Young women simply do not think this way about other women’s breasts.

I am 48, my youth gathering up its skirts for a midnight flit. But I still have my daughters, as the elder columnists don’t, and their beauty makes my heart sing. I adore young women with their impossible low-slung jeans, their rivers of laughter and their confidence that the world will treat them kindly.

I don’t resent their beauty as mine dries up like a lakebed, I revel in it.

‘Morally illegal’

I’ll point out another thing that was morally illegal besides the columnists burying their claws into Couillard’s mammaries and screaming in anguish that trollops like her have the world at their feet. It happened long before the recent publicity.

Maxime Bernier had a look on his face as Couillard — in the dress he selected — accompanied him to the swearing-in ceremony in stodgy Ottawa: It was a look that said “I have huge breasts.” However, it was not his, but his girlfriend’s chest that he laid claim to, as deranged as that sounds.

He also crossed the breast barrier.

Touché

Take this, ladies: On my first-ever morning in Paris as I sat in a café eating blood sausage, a troop of soldiers of the Republic, on horseback and relying heavily on Napoleonic costuming, ceremoniously rode up to the Pont de Sully. As they passed the café, they turned in unison and stared at me. I was jet-lagged and mystified.

“They’re looking at your breasts,” my husband said.

“But that’s insane,” I replied.

Insane, yes, but 10 years later it has some value. Now I can tell a collection of woman-hating females at an enabling male-run newspaper that my breasts have stopped horse artillery.

This Week

I attended the ceremony at the Canadian Labour Congress convention in Toronto (thousands of delegates in an airplane hangar, the thing is major) where Dr. Henry Morgentaler received the annual award for Greatest Services to Humanity and Complete Fabulousness. The room was heavily policed for fear of anti-choicers with an arsenal. Every time Morgentaler referred to ending the pain and humiliation of women, the room got to its feet and cheered, men and women alike. It was one of the more heartening moments of recent years and I realized that men and women can be good and brave together.

Or perhaps they were cheering my huge breasts, who am I to say?