THE charity ‘Mermaids’ is in the news this past week for supplying breast binders (flatteners) to young teenage girls without their parents’ knowledge.

The purpose of these binders is to hide the signs of puberty and enable the young girls to feel less female.

Outrage, not surprisingly, has followed although, as usual, the reality is complex. The issue is with consent. A national paper revealed, through undercover work, that even when somebody claiming to be 13 asked for one of these binders and said their parent would not agree to the use, the charity just went on and sent one anyway.

Binders can damage – it’s not difficult to imagine why – they squash breast tissue and exert a minimising pressure around what in some cases is a still a growing young person yet to achieve skeletal maturity let alone secondary sexual characteristics.

Surely, the greater scandal here is not so much that a teenage girl is wearing a binder, but that somebody without medical or psychiatric expertise supplied one.

My view is that as with other medical devices and aids, binders should be subject to regulation and only be available, free, to a teenager with an appropriate diagnosis via prescription from a doctor.

The wearing of clothes and shoes that cripple, injure and even impair breathing is a feature of women’s everyday life.

Even Royalty!

I am obsessed with our future Queen, Catherine, Princess of Wales and her choice to damage her feet by wearing 4-inch heels. Photos of seven-year-old Princess Charlotte’s sensible school shoes next to her mother’s pain-inducing 4-inch spikes at our late Queen’s funeral make a difficult visual point.

At what age does society decide to limit a female’s physical movement and consign us to years of pain by telling us we’re not real women if we wear sensible shoes?

In our culture, when females of the species reach puberty and certainly by the age of sexual consent, flat shoes are often replaced with painful, health and movement-limiting stilettos. I wonder when Princess Charlotte will be switched over to her mother’s Louboutin lifestyle of bone-crushing, bunion-inducing, back straining shoes.

Perhaps she will have to practise up and down the corridors of whichever Royal residence she’s in before she can manage to smile over the infamous ‘burn’ that balls of your feet reach within a few minutes of taking your entire body weight.

The Princess of Wales is at least 5 foot 9 and at this height already towers over most women and many men. So why does she wear very high heels at public events that ensure she looks down several inches on pretty much everybody? (Oh – have I just answered my own question?)

The 1990s ‘Spice Girl’ and princess of pop Victoria Beckham (formerly Adams) is also a sporter of vertiginous spikes. Perhaps the pain from her feet neutralises awareness of constant hunger. She has given interviews recently describing how she only eats steamed fish and vegetables.

A journalist once described seeing her remove a solitary cherry tomato from her plate. Cherry tomatoes have more calories in them than courgettes – imagine being terrified of the blubber-making property of a marble-sized tomato. Maybe my fruitless attempts to shift weight would be enabled by wearing pin-sharp high heels.