Let’s be honest here for just a moment. Almost the second we get home, that bra comes off. I don’t know a single woman who actually looks forward to putting on a bra every day. Countless memes have been made over the discomfort of these devil’s contraptions and many girl talks over how much we hate them! So when I saw ads on a Facebook for a few weeks about how wearing bras were actually bad for your health, I became kind of curious how necessary these self-appointed boob jails really were!
In researching this growing debate in society about the necessity of bras, I determined there really isn’t a lot of hard research being done. There was one rather decent study done in France by a professor where he determined after 15 years of research that bras were, in fact, more harmful to women’s health, because they stopped women’s natural muscle tissue from providing support thus creating more of the sagging issues they were supposed to be helping. Now, his study did determine that if you have been wearing bras for 30+ years that the damage done was more than likely irreversible, but anyone wearing them for less time could ditch the bra and strengthen the muscle tissue back. 300 women were observed during the study and those that decided to ditch the bra had a 7-millimeter lift each year that they went braless, they had fewer stretch marks, and their breasts were firmer than the women who wore them (according to lifehack.org and healthline.com)
Now, over the years we have had a few braless campaigns happen in society. My grandma herself was big into the feminist movement in the 60’s and 70’s where plenty of “burning bra events” were done to shed light on being held back politically within society. I’m not really of the same mindset that women are restricted politically by wearing a bra, but let’s evaluate for a second why we wear them. We choose to wear bras that are pretty uncomfortable because we have been told for years that 1) we need to and 2) we look better doing it. Maybe as I get older I get a little bit more rebellious, but I just don’t really like the idea of spending days not in my peak of comfort because of what someone else determines to be right or wrong.
So here is what I have done for almost 3 months, I haven’t worn a bra on the norm. There have been times when I’ve chosen to put the jail cells back on. For example, any weddings I went to or times that I felt the shirt made it inappropriate to not wear one. This decision to ditch a bra does not mean that I have chosen to be indecent, most people wouldn’t even realize that I’ve done this unless I told them. This is something that has become a personal choice that I don’t regret for one minute! Besides the potential health benefits, it just feels great! I spend my days in comfort, versus restriction. I honestly wonder why I haven’t done it sooner.
Now I realize that I am not a woman that has been highly blessed in the chest area, so maybe ditching a bra on a regular basis was an easier decision for me because all I lost was tons of padding. I do not consider myself to be a feminist, but I will say it does feel nice that I have been making the effort to raise my daughter that you don’t have to live a certain way just because everyone else tells you it is the right way to live and this is just one of the ways that I feel I can do that. So if you hate wearing a bra as much as I did, maybe it’s time to evaluate it’s worth. If you want to wear one, great! If you don’t, then DON’T! I think it’s just time that we, as women, maybe not make these types of decisions because someone else has told us what we are supposed to do.
