What If I Don’t Want to Ditch My Bra, Though?
Can I still be a feminist when I’m out of step with the lockdown mood?
One of the first “pandemic life changes” for women I read about last year was the concept of “binning our bras”. From the very first moment that we all started working from home, I read article after piece after tweet extolling the joys of a bra-free existence. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, I found cartoons shouting about the relief of ditching the breast scaffolding.
It wasn’t just my news feed, either. TikTok users (I don’t number among them because I’m over 30) began doing “no bra challenge” dances. A YouGov poll revealed that a fifth of British women began to wear bras less often in lockdown, and a staggering 34% of us ditched them completely. Thirty-four percent! That’s a whole lot of as-nature-intended.
I’ll be honest here: I’ve never understood the popular trope that dictates that we women always feel immeasurably better at the end of a long day when we finally slip out of our miserably constrictive underwires and let our boobs hang where they naturally want to. I hate that feeling, personally.
I don’t have big breasts, by the way — after breastfeeding 3 babies for a cumulative total of about 5 years, they’re redundant, shriveled little teabag-like protuberances…
