Showing posts with label undergarments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label undergarments. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

I threw away ALL my bras!




Yes. Just now. I. Threw. Away. My. Bras.

ALL of them. They went straight into the garbage bin, and in that bold instant I said goodbye forever to straps biting into me, hooks digging into my flesh, baggy fit, too-tight fit, squashed uni-boob torture traps, and everything else that I have endured since the age of 14.

This is, of course, a pandemic thing. Trapped in the house, you let things slide a bit, so I’d pop something over my head, a bright Indian-print dress, maybe - braless – then found I was going to the grocery store that way, and the earth didn’t fall down.




Nobody was looking, for one thing, which is a real blessing at my age. Some older women complain that they have become “invisible", but I LOVE being invisible because I can go about incognito, almost undetected. The writer/observer/detective in me loves it.

The other thing that nudged me to this unthinkable act is the current war against body-shaming and the general fattening of the developed world, verging on dangerous obesity but fast becoming the norm. Women’s sizes have “sized up” for several years now, so the 10 you wear now is more like a 14 a few years back. It matters not at all, to anyone really, but somehow I hung on to the horror of gaining weight that was instilled in me virtually from childhood.

We were all on diets, all the time. None of us could enjoy food without guilt or saying “I’m being bad”. My older sister was so obsessed that she kept a chart beside her scale in the bathroom, which had a graph with date, time of day, weight, and measurements for bust, waist, hips and thighs. She ticked all those boxes daily, and agonized if she was up a few pounds or a couple of inches. Because she was supposedly my role model, I was expected to follow her, and did, damaging myself in ways I’m still trying to pull myself out of.




When I was 16 I went into a suicidal depression so severe that my parents actually sent me to a doctor. He said I needed to lose 30 pounds and dress the way the boys liked. That would cure my depression. (It hasn't worked yet.) I weighed about 140, and my sister described me as "enormous". These influences programmed and twisted me mentally in a way Nazi interrogators would have approved of. 

But things have changed, and so drastically. I see it every day. I went through a phase of exclaiming to my husband, “Look at that! Doesn’t anyone care any more? She must be 300 pounds!” He would say something like, “Why do YOU care?” It made me wonder. I began to notice women were letting it all hang out, mostly younger women who were quite obese, but middle-aged and older women too, wearing short-shorts and spaghetti-strap tops with no bra, no “underpinnings” like we used to wear even in the firmness of youth.

I was at the tail-end of the girdle era, though said older sister wore them even at her lightest (104 pounds, which she agonized over; she had an ideal of 100 pounds which she never attained, claiming that if she did, she’d be hit by a car and killed the same day). So I don’t remember wearing one. Panty hose was a new thing, so I didn’t have to deal with garters, but bras were another story.




Bras were a rite of passage, like your first period, and being busty at 13 was a good thing, but BOY did you need a lot of coverage and “support” (meaning, disguise and control). A girl friend of mine once made me do up her bra in back because she just couldn’t manage it herself. There were just so many hooks. She was a 36C and wanted me to know it. I was relatively flat then and very depressed. I couldn’t wait to wear those holsters the other girls were wearing, even under heavy sweaters and winter dresses.

OK then, THAT wasn’t healthy – was it? – but what we’re seeing now does shock me sometimes. When I see this let-it-all-hang-out bodily freedom,  I even resent that I was forced to torture and abuse myself just to attain the proper “shape”, which was then re-shaped even more, no matter how excruciatingly uncomfortably. It’s a whole new ballgame now, but meantime I kept on playing the SAME ballgame for literally decades, trying to find something that fit me and supported me (never mind comfort) as my body changed and changed, weight surging up and down, ashamed of it, appalled at myself, covering up, but still wearing the holsters, because. . . I guess it was unthinkable NOT to.




You couldn't go around without a bra. Jesus!

In my day, my deluded, frightening, astoundingly ignorant day, the only people who went braless were rabid feminists and little old ladies who had given up. Drooping breasts were like having a rat’s nest for hair – just so ugly it wasn’t thinkable, not in public anyway, where appearances had to be carefully kept up. My mother wore house dresses around the house, but put on a much more formal kind of dress to go to the grocery store. That's how it was.

The “fat woman” in our neighbourhood was heavily stigmatized, and my mother (who didn’t have friends but “caseloads”) was basically the only person who associated with her. Her friends were blind ladies, ladies with “retarded” or “mongoloid” kids, people no one else wanted whom she adopted, thereby assuring they would be beholden to her forever. So the neighbourhood  “fat lady” was in the same category. She might have weighed 250, not more than 280 tops, and in this era of My 600 lb. Life, that’s almost thin. (People on that show talk about "getting down to 500".) She did wear the requisite confining bra and was cruelly girdled, making her look like a sausage in what must have been torture in hot weather.




Well, all that’s gone now – isn’t it? – so why did it take me so long to dump these things, these things that dug in, cut my flesh, didn’t support me anyway because they never fit? We still hear that shaming statement, “80% of women wear the wrong-sized bra!”, no doubt perpetrated by the bra industry and meant to make women scurry to an expensive specialty shop to be “fitted”. Never do they mention that there is NO SUCH THING as the “right-sized bra”, unless you have them individually tailored to your body, which none of us can afford. Not only that, but they never tell us exactly how they arrived at that 80% statistic. It seems it was plucked out of the thin air, but no one thinks about that. Stats are intimidating and generally designed to induce shame and the consumer response which is the only way to relieve it. So we skulk about knowing we’re wearing the wrong size, depressed about it, but unable to fix it. Nothing is more cruel and nasty and self-punishing than trying on bras, spending a fortune, and finding deep red lines and welts all over your body the next day.

So the bras are in the garbage, but I did make one small concession. I have never worn anything like a sports bra, and thought they were only for young women who jogged, but had the thought that if I walked briskly it might be uncomfortable for me with no support at all. I also jounce violently in the car.  I am 66 years old, breast-fed two babies, and need tell you no more about gravity. Cautiously, I experimented. I ordered  two lightweight sports bras online, and pulled one on – no hooks, no clasps, no underwiring, no plastic or metal or anything at all but soft, very forgiving fabric.  To my amazement, it felt GORGEOUS. Nothing cut. Nothing bound. It felt like a comfortable tank top and actually lifted me up like two cradling hands. (Excuse me for that.) 




I would not wear these every day, in fact I may not even wear them at all, ever. But it made me realize I could have spared myself a lot of distress for a lot of years just by wearing something that looked good and felt nice under a clingy blouse (which I never wear anyway). The sports bras went into a drawer for now, until the pandemic passes, during which time I will do what I swore I’d never do – just throw on one thing, an Indian-pattern dress from China ($20 on Amazon), and be “dressed” – dressed enough to GO OUT. 

What does this mean? I don’t know, but I DO know you will never catch me pulling and twisting at circles of wire under my breasts, and yanking on metal hooks that leave little holes in my back. For these things are now where they belong, in with the garbage and the baggage and all the other things I am shedding and throwing away, in the bittersweet realization that I never needed to torture myself like that to begin with, and never will again.


Friday, June 13, 2014

That's why she can't get a man!




































"That's why we can't get a man for Edith!"

(word-for-word transcript)

CRUEL WORDS – yet it was lucky she heard them

“How dreadful! They said I was careless about perspiration odor in underthings. 

Oh dear, I don’t realize I was offending that way”

(Due to the vicious comments of her friends, Edith sees the light)

“Girls, may I join the Lux party tonight?”

“You bet, Edith – it takes only a jiffy”

“Lux is swell – it takes away odor, yet saves colors”

“My, that was easy! I’ll do it every night – then I’ll be sure I’m not offending anyone ever”

PARTIES ALL THE TIME NOW

“Edith is having a grand time”

“Yes, all the men rave about her now – she’s always dainty, thanks to Lux”

AVOID OFFENDING

Underthings absorb perspiration odor. Protect daintiness this easy way. . .

Wearing underthings a second day is a careless habit no girl can risk. We all perspire, and the odor clings. It becomes noticeable to others even before we’re aware of it ourselves.

But it’s easy to be sure of never offending. Just swish underthings through Lux each night – perspiration odor vanishes.

Of course, Lux has none of the harmful alkali ordinary soaps often have, and with Lux there’s no injurious cake-soak rubbing. These things weaken fabrics, fade colors. Anything safe in water alone is safe in Lux.




Oh. . . KAY. Now that I've had a chance to absorb all that, if absorb is the right word, I wonder if it belongs in the same category as those awful "can this marriage be saved?" Lysol douche ads.

But when I really look at it, as Lucy would say, "Euuuwwwwwww."

Standards of hygiene really were different then. People bathed once a week, in many cases, and washed their hair once a month (in the sink, then wrapped their head in a towel like a turban). Washers were inefficient, and clothes were dried on a line in the back yard.

Deodorants weren't common, and unheard-of in men.

So I don't know about this ad. Unless Edith's potential "man" was down on his hands and knees sniffing her crotch, I'm not sure it would be such an obstacle (in fact, I have heard that certain men enjoy such things).

But the ad pretty much states that poor Edith is wearing the same pair of panties (and note how they avoid that word - too sexual?) over and over again. Double-euuuwwwwwwwww.

It's worse than the guy who turns them inside-out and wears them again.




Yuck.

But wait, they do say "underthings", don't they? In the cartoon, she's holding up a slip. I wonder how stinky a slip could be after two days?

The Lysol douche ads were secret code for "birth control douche", which could not be mentioned by law. So  I have a theory this wasn't about slips at all. It's just that they couldn't mention panties. Panties, to my mind anyway, are the only item of apparel that could get really stinky after a day.

So she's swishing her gitch, or gotch, or ginch, or gonch, or gitchies, or gotchies around in warm water and Lux. (To do this, you join with your friends at a "Lux party", which by today's standards is hard to imagine.) The weird thing is that the ad implies you should do this "every night", as if you have only one of everything. So how would it dry? By blowing on it?

Hey, Edith - now that you're so popular because you smell like Lux soap - get one of those boyfriends to come over and help you out.