Letting The Big Girls Hang Out (potentially NSFW)

I have been bra-free now since Novermber 2003, almost 8 years. I have never looked back. I feel very strongly about going bra-free, because there are psycho-social issues about wearing a bra that make discussing going bra-free very difficult for most women.

When you bring up the topic, many women will cover their breasts with their arms, and most will at least stiffen up and hold their arms closer to their bodies. They become defensive, curl in their shoulders, and emotional. Many women can't discuss bras and their breasts without crying.

Why?

It seems to me that most women consider their bras armor, the same way a warrior wears his breastplate into battle. Same as a warrior, when a woman comes home, the first thing that comes off is that damnable bra. A bra shields the woman. . . from what, I have yet to figure out.

This association of a bra as armor breaks down even further when you think about what bras do and the stated reasons why women wear them: lift the breasts, support the breasts, look attractive, be comfortable. Let's address each of these.

1: Lift/Support
This is one the manufacturers have been trying to sell women for years. Your boobs are too big for your body to manage.

Let's completely ignore the fact that our bodies EVOLVED with the breasts on our chest. Let's also ignore that bras move the weight from the chest to the back and shoulders, often with the result of headaches, back pain, neck pain, and long-term discomfort.

The truth is breasts sag for two reasons: age and weight. Bras have very little to do with it. However, by going bra-free, you can "pick up" your breasts and make them look a little firmer. When you remove the bra, the pectoral muscles and connective tissue in your chest carry the weight of your breast. The first 48 hours of going bra-free are the worst as your muscles become accustomed to carrying weight. After that, the pain subsides rather quickly. In as little as a week, I was doing stairs and playing volleyball (and I'm large-breasted). Also, as most women will tell you, breasts reflect the weight of the woman, but when you've gained weight and then lost it, the breasts tend to sag a little as the result of the stretching.

The idea of wearing bras for your health has also faded. Bras have been linked to fibroids, chronic migraines, and cancer (though the cancer study is very controversial).

2. Look Attractive
Watch TV for 30 seconds, and I'd be surprised if you didn't see at least one example of a woman whose breasts are artificially lifted in order to promote her sex appeal. But what are we promoting? When you think of small, perky, firm, floating tits, who do you think of? Not a 30-yr-old woman with three kids.

Diane Naugler, Ph.D., currently a sociology professor at Kwantlen Polytech in British Columbia, did her thesis on breasts and found that, on average, the perky, firm-looking breasts produced by bras seemed to imitate a young teenage girl (14-16) with B or C cups.

Bras encourage a youth-focused sexuality, adding to the already-disconcerting problem of the sexualization of youngsters. We're trying to make 8-year-olds look 14 just as much as we're trying to make 30-year-olds look 14. Both are wrong. We should be comfortable with our bodies the way they are, not the way the TV tells us they should be.

3. Comfort
The comfort here is purely psychological. I've never known a woman who liked wearing bras so much she didn't take them off the second she got home.

The oft-quoted statement is that 70-80% of women are wearing the wrong-size bra, which contributes to the red indentations, back pain, neck pain, steel-wire-digging-into-your-armpit ugliness that accompanies bra wearing. But this statistic is inaccurate.

99.9999% of women are wearing the wrong size bra - the only exception to this are women who have their bras specially made, usually because the breasts are significantly different. The bra industry, like all other clothing, manufacture bras to standard sizes, sizes that do not necessarily have any basis in reality.

For a bra, the first number is the distance around your chest, underneath your breasts. The second measurement is taken around the chest but also across the nipples. For every inch of difference between the two measurements, add a cup size. 1" = A, 2" = B, 3" = C, etc.

But how many women would actually fit into this standard? Additionally, the measurement reflects both breasts, while the bra individually fits both, forbidding any possibility that the breasts are different sizes.

There is no comfort, support, lift, or attractiveness in wearing bras; there is only the knowledge that you wasted 70 bucks for something that doesn't even work the way it's supposed to and risks your health.

As always, I encourage people to take information into their own hands and use their own brains. Here are some resources if you or someone you know are interested in the subject:

http://www.007b.com/why_wear_bras.php

Going Braless.net (This site is best for its forum, a support group for women who go bra-free)

Burning the Bra: Feminist Pop Culture Revisited (Pops to download a PowerPoint presentation on going braless as feminist practice)

(FYI, the picture is a camisole, an undershirt that is a good alternative to bras, especially in the workplace.)