I Fought the Bra and the Bra Won

Congratulations to me! I bought a backless dress! I tried it on in the store with my regular bra, and someone in the store, someone European in a shirt with a lot of zippers, told me, “You’re going to get the stick-on bra and it’ll look perfect.”

And when I said, “Do you have one I can try with it?”, they said, “What luck! We’re just out of your size.”

But I bought the dress anyway!

[Europeans are nothing if not persuasive. How else do you explain Gwen Stefani and Shakira’s recent yodeling?]

And I ordered the stick-on bra online!

Life is easy, sometimes, I told myself. I can do it all! The feminist dream is MINE! And then I laughed a maniacal Scooby Doo villain laugh because screw those people who say “You can’t have it all!” Didn’t I just come home from work, take the babysitter home, cook dinner, play with my kids, AND find my stick-on bra in a package on my doorstep? Take that, suckas!

And did I try it on right when it came? Hell no! I’m too busy to do that! I’m too busy to take the dress to a proper lingerie store and get fitted for something appropriate. Who does that?

So the day comes when I’m supposed to wear the backless dress and I put all the supplies out on the bed. There before me are:

-the strapless dress

-the stick-on bra

-stick-on bra back-up plans (cause I’m basically a feminist Boy Scout baller) including a bra extender, a low-back strapless bra, and duct tape (last resort)

-Phone to watch YouTube videos of how to put stick-on bra

And so it begins! Haha! I’m excited. This is going to be so fun, I think, not only to put these stick-on shells on my person (I always hated that expression, as if you have a “person” lingering in your periphery that you store things on), but also to flounce into the party in my hi-low, backless dress, the air kissing my bare back!

“She’s like the Wind” begins to play in my head, and I envision myself, in this backless dress, hair flowing behind me, air cascading over my back like those car commercials indicating excellent aerodynamics, riding up the beach to meet a 1980’s Patrick Swayze. Ah, yes, victory will be mine, as soon as I get this stick-on bra on. Let’s do this!

I load up the YouTube for how to put on these shell-shaped adhesives, and there before me is a beautiful woman about 26 cup sizes smaller than me, and she could easily be my daughter she’s so young--so young I grow concerned about her life choices and should she even be in this video? Is it legal? Is it saying something about me? No, I tell myself, she’s definitely at least 18. And perhaps how-two bra videos are the first stepping stone to international model famedom, what do I know? So there she is, our rising supermodel, popping her breasts into the shells and pulling them taught with the cinching strings. In ten seconds flat (not a pun) she is lifted, cinched and on her merry, backless dress way. Lickety split, barba quick! Clearly, I think, this is going to be amazing and easy. Why had I never used these before? Think of all the backless opportunities I’d missed till now!

At any moment did I stop to think, “Hey, maybe I should find a video of someone with my body type to show me how to do this right?”

Did I say to anyone, “Aren’t these shells kind of an assault on the female form?”

Or did I consider, “Is the patriarchy literally putting my breasts into gluey clamps?”

Nope! I didn’t do that! I thought the stickers would work! If the YouTube bra tutorial version of Gigi Hadid could do it surely I could too!

Plowing forward with excitement, I shoved my 43 year-old breasts into the stickers and pulled the cinching string! Voila! So easy! See? Anyone with any cup size and any version of breast elasticity can do this!

Except that when I presented myself to my family in my backless dress and my stickered support, everyone’s foreheads crinkled. They seemed to grow concerned, as if I had a prominent goiter growing before their eyes. They were repulsed, but also confused about why.

“Something’s not right,” my husband offered tenderly.

“Is the dress length too long?”

“No. It’s not the length.”

“Maybe I should wear my hair up?” I asked.

“I think,” my husband began carefully, “It’s what’s happening in your waist area. What is that?”

When I looked in the mirror, that was my breasts cinched together like a giant pill-shaped flesh ball, hovering around my bellybutton.

As if I had a six-pack, but the six-pack was actually 2 breasts.

As if I was shoplifting a Nerf football.

I thought--no biggie! I’ll rearrange the stickers, pull them up and tighten and everything will be lifted and better.

The next try produced one breast facing forward on the right, at about rib level, and the other somewhere over near my left armpit. And, adjusting those suckers was nothing short of Homeland-style torture. But did I quit? No way!

If the Europeans in the zippered shirts believed in me, surely I could believe in myself.

At around the fifth try, the adhesive was starting to give, my nipples looked like they’d been in a photo shoot for the movie, Saw 14, and my husband was looking concerned about ever unseeing what he’d just seen.

So it was on to plan B. The bra extender! I bought a bra extender to attach onto my regular bra. So prepared!

The extender wrapped all the way around my waist so I could push it down and there would be no bra lines at all. And it worked! No bra straps! A backless dress without any visual of a bra and all the support I needed! Hurray! And yet, I did not account for the straps to ride up and create something of a series of horizontal prison bars for my trying-to-escape back fat. Whoops!

Next came a strapless bustier-type thing, which peeked its straitjacket-like fabric up above the bottom seam. Nope!

I considered the duct tape, but after the sticker situation, my flesh was in no shape to deal with adhesives again.

Lastly, I conceived of the insane notion that I might go bra-free! Why not! People do it! And they look happy and free (they usually also have body odor and a lot of split-ends, but that’s not relevant here). However, the humidity in DC is a forceful foe, and the thought of the sweat rings that would ensue, on my front, posed a social horror so great I moved on to the next possibility: NOT wearing the backless dress.

I know you should “never ever give up”, but that day I accepted defeat. The backless dress is not for me. If you are a woman in her 40’s just go ahead and move on. Your breasts are of a different variety. They will not be stickered in place. They have been around the block, and your breasts need some certainty. They’re not here for the guessing game of glue-based support. Your breasts want an underwire and something industrial in beige to help them defy gravity each day.

Now, who feels sexy?