Just Thinking about Loving the Body
When I was seventeen, a friend’s mom often went braless in loose-fitting shirts she had made out of cotton patterned pillowcases. Boxy, breezy. She was old and pruny and an ex-model and also an entrepreneur and ran what I can only call a resort-missionary-compound-retreat-NGO in the Caribbean. Her daughters thought her braless pillowcase shirt situation was super embarrassing, but I had literally never (ever) (swear to god NEVER) seen such confident freedom in a woman aging. That was like 20 years ago and I am slowly becoming that lady, who gave no fucks and also grew no fucks and seemed to not allow fucks to even enter her house. Sure I know things were complicated but if I can bypass the complexities and talk about being older and choosing to quit wearing a bra and let your titties swang in the breeze for a moment: sounds FUCKING GOOD. I’m doing it, like a lot.
I’m honestly not sure what else to say about it. I like not saying things about it, since the internet, where I am posting this letter to no-one in particular, is awash with people’s opinions on every goddamn thing and we’re all literally sick of it (how much can one brain take). But I’m going out on a limb and guessing that this opinion, in spite of Progress Made(TM) and Feminist Foremothers(TM) and Votes for Women(TM), is still kind of niche. You know, like women allowing the hair on their legs to be hair on their legs instead of slicing it off daily as an expensive and time-consuming hobby.
Anyway, isn’t that weird? I try to explain what it’s like, wearing an underwire bra nearly every waking hour and engaging in constant vigilant self-observation to make sure straps are here, buttons are there, slips are here, adjusting wires and buckles so they aren’t stabbing or digging, and the wrong things aren’t see-through to my husband, who has never worn a bra in his life—or even cared what his clothes looked like or whether his nipples were even vaguely suggested through his shirt—and it’s like one of those very insane activities. It really makes me feel insane, that I spent so much of my twenties caring so much about this. It’s understandable, what with “professional dress codes” and cultural pressure (really pins you, like a bug in Nabokov’s study, in the American Bible belt where I was born & raised). But I’m officially almost forty and tilling in all the fucks in my field, soon there will be none.
And sure it’s handy that I have little boobs. Little boobs rock.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I did not break the dress code of my private Christian college multiple times including getting thrown out of the library. But powerful authorities seed many acts of small resistance, so for sure I started getting pissed about this in college and that’s the beginning of this story.
The end? Probably I will be super cray by the time I’m on my deathbed and will insist on being buried in a only muumuu of peach tulle, or at the very least, braless in the boxy cotton shirts I made when I was 36 and feeling beautiful and free. An unbelievable combination. Despite adhering to many/most beauty standards in my twenties, I never felt beautiful. Literally never! My own poor brain starved me of the freedom and ease of being that happens when you can appreciate and love your own body. Thanks to reading great books and unfollowing models (except Ashley Graham and Chrissy Teigen, sry they’re my faves not unfollowing), I’m close to 40 and finally feeling beautiful.
