It was the first time I'd been a guest on James Whales's show on TalkSport in six years. About ten minutes in, the shock jock started to stare at my chest. Five minutes later, he and hairy "Ash", his producer, began to make "phwooar" sounds about my cleavage. I wanted to be annoyed, but I just wasn't in the mood. Besides, I was wearing a bra and a moderately plunging dress beneath a lightweight overcoat - not your usual page three get-up.
Men being boys, I figured they'd soon take off their imaginary X-ray specs, get bored with this game and look for something more interesting (an interview, perhaps) to get on with. After all the intense scrutiny, however, I felt my eyes being drawn downwards. When a caller rang in and the attention switched away from me, I dropped my head. Nothing I saw looked very impressive. Just a bit of tanned skin and then blue fabric. But what if I brought my elbows in and lifted my shoulders up? Wow, impressive. I waggled my shoulders the way I'd seen it done by Babs Windsor - or was it Les Dawson? Yes, I had created grapefruits out of oranges. I was so distracted by my two new friends, I almost hoisted the fruit out of their bowls altogether.
"Lauren, will you stop doing that!" shouted the presenter, making me jump. "You're putting me off!" Now I have to apologise to all the sisters out there, because then I giggled. It's that easy - bright women are reduced to pairs of lactating lesions every time men leer at our soft bits. I giggled, partly at them, and partly at me for imagining that the way I was dressed (like an adult) could quell laddish behaviour when the sun's been out for a few hours.
When I was on the show before, in 1988, I must have worn my best business outfit; tight trousers from Donna Karan (size 12, if you must know) beneath a little, cropped leather jacket. I probably looked as if I was trying to be sexy. I wasn't, really. Who has the time or money, unless you are the mistress of an Arab sheikh with three rooms full of clothes to choose from and eight hours in which to groom yourself?
What I used to do was this: see which clothes were clean, either my skirt or my fave trousers, dress frantically and rush out of the house.
At a wine-tasting for MPs, I could hear this nasal "phnah phnah" behind me every time I walked past. It was Ken Livingstone, chuckling at the effect my utterly inappropriate clothes were having on his colleagues.
"You do it on purpose, Lauren," he laughed at me. "You know you do . . ." But it's not true. When I pulled on those tight trousers, I just hoped the top button wouldn't pop off if I ate pasta. When I wore the skirt, I fretted about getting ladders in my tights or how to get out of minicabs without doing a Basic Instinct.
In the studio, James Whale eventually took off his porn-tinted spectacles and had to admit that, in my flowing robe and flip-flops, I looked more like an earth mother than a sexy mutha. I was relieved, in a way. What a burden it must be to have your body scrutinised by every passer-by, all the time. Every ounce gained would be an emotional agony; every blemish would become a career disaster.
A couple of days later, I got a call: "Have you seen yourself in the Daily Sport?" There were texts from friends, and e-mails, too. I went into the local newsagents, where Raj smiled at me a little differently from usual. I snuck into a corner where the school kids wouldn't see me and flicked through page after page of misogyny dressed up as lust, sex ads and porn until I found it: my head superimposed on Jordan's topless, thong-clad body.
Suddenly, I saw myself through the eyes of men and realised that, for "lads", women don't exist in any real form. Inside their heads, we are all just superimposed on to topless bodies.
