I'm A Woman With Big Boobs And Shopping For Bras Is An Exercise In Destroying My Self-Esteem
And anyone who says differently is a liar.
courtesy of the author I've had large breasts for as long as I can remember. Big breasts, man, always. I went to bed flat as a board and woke up with a pair of breasts so massive it was hard for me to figure out how to walk around and maintain an upright posture.
Thankfully, like generations of big-breasted women before me, I managed it.
When you first develop breasts, it can be a bit of a learning curve. You have to find the right bras — or plus-size bras in my case. You have to figure out when they are tender. You to get over the embarrassment of erect nipples; it's a whole deal.
But when you have big breasts, there's a second learning curve.
You have to go through exactly the same stuff as other developing girls but then you have to understand that because your breasts are bigger than average, clothing that looks fine on other people makes you look like a porn star. You learn that sometimes, you have to put deodorant under your breasts. You realize that men are going to catcall you and that men and women alike are going to make assumptions about your sexuality just because you're rocking an extra honking set of fat ol' knockers.
None of it is reasonable or fair and weirdly, while I know I should be the most hung up on the sexism of it all, the thing that makes me the angriest about being a woman with big breasts is shopping for bras.
Listen, when you have big breasts, every time you shop for bras it's like if someone woke you up at 3 AM while you were super-bloated from your period and your boyfriend just dumped you and you haven't showered for three days and then you were forced to try on new jeans: it's a literal exercise in destroying your self-esteem.
Attractive bras for big breasts absolutely exist but if you want to buy them you have to be prepared to shell out over 100 bucks for just one. And I don't know about you, but while my chest-based assets are prodigious, my financial assets don't allow me to spend enough money to buy more than one really expensive bra at a time.
You can buy cheaper bras, sure, but they are almost always woefully unattractive. It's crazy to me that if I wear a v-neck shirt, men on the street will yell comments about railing me on the near fire hydrant. But if you have big breasts and you try to buy reasonably-priced bras, it's like the designers have all decided that your body is the exactly opposite of a wonderland.
You know what doesn't make a person feel sexy? Slapping a weak-ass bow on the center of a glorified Ace bandage for your chest.
When you have big breasts, even buying a sports bra is a trial. You gotta pop them into your average breast sling and go to town. You need real support, often still with underwire.
If I had smaller breasts and was headed to the gym and realized I forgot my sports bra, I could probably pop into a sports shop and quickly grab a $25 Champion special. When I forget my bra and I'm my way to the gym, I'm either doing the sit-down bike or me and my large breasts are laughing all the way home to our sofa and television.
I shouldn't have to pay a tax on my health or my happiness or my sense of self-worth just because I've got big breasts. It just shouldn't be the case, but it totally is. There are all these new internet-based companies now that promise the best fit of your life when it comes to bras but they miss the mark ,too! That's because they either stop at size D or because they are all staunch proponents of the wire-free uni-boob look.
People always tell me that to get the right fit I should go into a specialist ... like I haven't done this roughly eight million times.
Seeing a bra specialist doesn't guarantee all your bras are going to fit because those people aren't doctors, THEY ARE BRA SALESPEOPLE. Their job is to get you in a bra and every bra company out there has a slightly different scale of sizing than every other company, thus ensuring a big breast-having woman's descent into total madness.
When you have small or manageable breasts, you find what works and you can usually get away with buying cheap bras at places like H&M or shockingly, on the internet. If I tried to do either one of those things, it would end in a severe case of quadra-breast or something I like to call The Escape Artist: when your breasts try to inch out of your bra via the bottom.
If you have big breasts, you have to deal with a lot of garbage: people's preconceived notions about you, fashion's hatred of you, pain, discomfort and embarrassment. That should all be enough, and buying affordable beautiful bras for big breasts shouldn't be another piece of trash on the pile.
Rebecca Jane Stokes is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cat, Batman. She hosts the love and dating advice show, Becca After Dark, on YourTango's Facebook Page every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:15 pm Eastern. For more of her work, check out her Tumblr.