When I grow up, I want to… have big breasts.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence my sister and I didn’t know what to do with our lives, but my brother did.

I remember thinking about the future as a kid. I didn’t think about what I would do for a living, but what I would look like as a woman. How beautiful would I be? How big would my breasts become?

I had a ritual to help my imagination: I would stuff two stiff pairs of socks down my shirt and show off my bulky bosom to my mother. You can imagine how big my disappointment was when the girls didn’t grow. At all. Until I was 15. And even then, they never grew past the smallest A-cup to my dismay. Boys at school bullied me, calling me “the hot wall”. Although I despised the taste, I drank a glass of malt beer every night because according to people with webMD Ph.D.’s, it made your boobs grow. I only wore push-up bras, sometimes two. I hated looking in the mirror, I hated going swimming, I hated being naked. I didn’t take off my bra during sex until I was 22. It’s safe to say, the male gaze was so internalized, it became my own.

Around the same time, I was a massive Britney Spears fan. It was 1998 when her first single “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” hit the market like a nuclear bomb. Everywhere I looked there she was… on MTV, magazine covers, t-shirts, cups, pillows, even bed sheets. My own room was plastered in glossy full body posters of Brit – her big round plastic breasts popping out of her shirt and into the camera with a smile that said “I’m innocent like a child but fuckable like a woman”.

Spears was America’s sweetheart, the girl next door that rose to world fame. The marketing machine around her made it seem like it was almost an accessible goal that any girl could achieve. You just have to be pretty, and you too can be a star. So naturally, Britney was my role model. Park benches became my stage for my sold-out performances. I even created my own choreography and had my step-mother direct a music video I starred in.

Boys look up to successful men inventing computers, writing novels, leading companies or directing movies. Especially in the 90’s, girls didn’t have that many options. We looked up to the half-naked popstars that smiled down at us from the posters on our peach colored bedroom walls. It only makes sense that I didn’t dream of making partner in a law firm, but of big breasts, so I too could writhe on the floor of a club, sweating and panting like Britney in her smash hit “Slave4U”.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with capitalizing on your body, but it has to be a choice. As long as we live in a society that for one, lacks women in leadership roles and consumes and capitalizes on women’s bodies, it isn’t one.

We simply need more women in leadership roles to inspire more girls to become women in leadership roles. You can’t dream of what you don’t know exists.