My 30GG boobs have wrecked my life since I was 14 – I even got detention for hugging my BROTHER, says Ashley James
HER impressive career has seen her go from takeaway manager and model to reluctant reality star, DJ and This Morning presenter.
But Ashley James says there’s been one constant niggle throughout the years – her big boobs.
At the age of 14, after gaining a scholarship to boarding school, she developed a 30GG chest, causing her a whole heap of trouble.
And now the former Made in Chelsea and Celebrity Big Brother star has confessed she really dislikes her boobs – after being told to hide them away in her younger days and then being urged to flaunt them for TV.
The presenter, more recently a regular on This Morning, said for 23 years her chest has drawn too much attention – even leading her to be accused of being both sex-mad and too prudish.
Revealing the shadow they have cast over her life, she said she was given a detention at school for hugging her brother because even teachers became preoccupied with her curvy figure.
Now, after previously having to switch from baggy clothing to conceal her shape to cleavage displays, she says: “Now I don’t give a f***. I’m absolutely sick to death of feeling like I have to present myself in a way that makes society not judge me.
“When I was breastfeeding it was this constant narrative of ‘Stop attention- seeking, put it away’. These are the same comments that I had as a 14-year-old girl.”
She said of her boobs: “I didn’t pay for them, I didn’t want them, I don’t even particularly like them – and at the time I didn’t particularly like breastfeeding but my son wouldn’t take a bottle.
“At no point in my life, whether I was 14 or now at 37, do I want people to look at my boobs.”
School sex jibes
Ashley grew up in a working class family in Northumberland. Her mum was a hairdresser and her father a farmer-turned-truck driver, who wanted to send her to boarding school because he didn’t want her to be dependent on any man.
She won a scholarship to prestigious Mowden Hall boarding school, where the girls were outnumbered 14 to one by the boys.
Ashley, speaking on the It Can’t Just Be Me podcast, said: “I think it started when I was 14. I was the first intake of girls, 37 of us versus 500 boys. And it was also the year that I got boobs and I was suddenly a 30GG, but I was also a child in every sense. I wasn’t sexual.
“There was like whispers that people fancy me. It was just really gross, sexualised – I remember boys would run up to me being like ‘Are you shaven?’ It was just really sexual and graphic.
“Adults, including teachers, would almost treat me like I was this kind of sex-mad person.
“I got detention for hugging my brother because they were like ‘Well, will people in town know it’s your brother? What are they going to think?”
“I was taught to ‘cover up if you want to be taken seriously.’
“So I’d say that I spent my early teens and into my twenties probably also being a bit misogynistic because I had been taught ‘if you want to be taken seriously you don’t dress certain ways, and you don’t wear make-up and you don’t do all of these overtly feminine things.
Adults, including teachers, would almost treat me like I was this kind of sex-mad person
Ashley James
“I was a teenager in the Cruel Intentions era, so I very much was like ‘I’m going to be like Reese Witherspoon.’
“So my virginity and my worth is all defined on me being holier than thou.”
But she added that also drew comments, saying: “At school when I tried to kind of dress in a way that I wouldn’t have attention on me, I remember being called prudish.”
‘Sex sells’
After finishing school, Ashley went on to university and then to work at BBC Radio Cumbria, as well as further jobs as a model for Abercrombie & Fitch, and a manager of Itsu.
But at the restaurant, aged 25, she became sick of City guys saying, “What’s a pretty girl like you working behind a till?”
After quitting, she enrolled on a TV presenting course, where a fellow student who was an extra on Made in Chelsea suggested she came along.
Although Ashley admits she looked down on reality TV as “rubbish”, she decided she might learn something about television and gain contacts, so she went along – and ended up being invited on to the show.
“I remember thinking ‘How funny will it be to my mates who know that I hate reality TV if I’m on it’ – I really thought it would be that one-off thing.
“When I got an agent in the Made in Chelsea days, it was suddenly like ‘Sex sells, you need to dress more sexy’.
“So I was suddenly thrust the other way where I was being told my success depended on me sexing it up.
“The point that I left one agent was when they were really pushing me to have a famous boyfriend.
“They were like ‘If you want to be famous, you need a famous boyfriend’. I was like ‘I don’t want to be famous, I just want to be successful’.”
As her profile grew, she was linked to David Walliams, although neither she nor the former Britain’s Got Talent judge ever confirmed the romance.
She did date comedian and host, Matt Richardson, best known for co-hosting The Xtra Factor alongside Caroline Flack, but went on to reconnect via a dating app with former university friend Tommy Adams who was also on a graduate scheme when they were with clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch.
The couple began a relationship in 2019 and now have two children, Alfie, four, and Ada, 22 months.
But even in motherhood Ashley said she found herself powerless to stop people focusing attention on her looks and clothes whatever she wore.
She said: “I remember a brand saying ‘We wouldn’t work with Ashley, we need someone who’s more feminist’. I was like ‘I am a feminist’.
“I’m literally just wearing clothes on a body. And also ‘Am I not allowed to date?’
“So then I allowed a lot of men to date me in secret.
“I felt like I didn’t want them to have the heat on them.
“I feel so sad, the amount of women who contact me saying ‘I would love to wear that but I end up wearing clothes that I don’t like because I don’t want people to look at my boobs’.
“It’s like ‘isn’t that so sad that as women, and as grown women, people feel like they can’t wear certain things because they don’t want people to assume that their morality or their sexuality is based on their body type. It’s so mad.”