The bravest thing I've ever done: running without a bra

(perhaps somewhat NSFW, though I would argue unfairly so, as you'll see! Read with caution at work, probably. Note that you can open and save the link in your browser just by clicking on the headline!)

I didn’t get into lifting weights with the goal of overhauling my entire relationship with my physical self. I just wanted to be hot, and not have to work so hard at it. But one thing led to another, and now I’m ten years into this project of figuring out what all goes on down there, below my head.

This brings me to—I feel so disconnected from them that I’ve never even had a go-to term for them, all the words still embarrass me at least a little—boobs. Breasts. Tits.

I read a couple of excellent essays recently from my fellow large-boob-havers, Eliza McLamb of Binchtopia and writer Clementine Morrigan. The title of Eliza’s essay, “When My Body Gets in the Way,” resonated for me immediately; I remember writing in a journal when I was about 13, “thank god my boobs aren’t too big, it seems like it’d be inconvenient. This size is good.” Little did I know that, as an adult, even at my lowest body weight, I’d never know a cup smaller than D.

Both essays make wonderful points: As our world is currently organized, huge boobs are one of humanity’s most non grata traits. A minority of weirdos fetishize them to a dehumanizing degree; the majority have a mild-to-vicious belief that any boobs, especially large boobs, and any display or acknowledgement thereof, are whorish. There are people who envy them and their owners. Then there are the people who possess the boobs, who bear the weight of all of this, having done nothing to deserve it. To have large boobs is to just experience everyone else continually being weird about them, for your whole life.

At the same time, I’ve never been someone who has liked the arguments where people wave their arms and go, “They’re just sexual organs! It’s biology!” It always feels like it somehow misses the point. I’m not just a pile of organs or a biology machine. There must be a way to think about bodies that isn’t restricted to either subjugating them as penance for imagined sins, or abstracting them to their parts like they’re a car engine.

Both Glamour and Teen Vogue declared this year that nipples are in for spring. When I was growing up, a nip slip was a one-way ticket to being the butt of jokes for the rest of that person’s natural-born life. Now, even the people who pay attention to these things have lost count of how many celebrities’ red carpet outfits have involved nipples on display. The pandemic led many of us into a less-bra-ful and even largely bra-less, lifestyle; why would we let this go? More to the point: This must be the end of trends only for size 0s. I will not be left out of nipples being in.

Eliza writes on sports bras at length, the way that large breasts make mincemeat of them (recent studies suggest sports bras should be replaced as often as every six months). I realized something reading this: I’ve always operated on the notion that exercising sans sports bra would be uncomfortable. But I’d never actually done it. Not once.

Sure, I’ve lifted weights in no bra. I maintain this is one of the beautiful things about lifting: zero demands on the breast. But running? Never. I had a vague notion that it hurt, but this notion was untested.

Sports Bras for Big Boobs: A Guide — Ask A Swole Woman

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I knew there would be more, uh, motion than usual, motion that definitely would have embarrassed me as a kid and cowed me into wearing a sports bra. But by this time, I’ve done far weirder and worse things than run outside with no bra. I could handle this. Right? Right? But I didn’t just want to see what it felt like, physically. I wanted to know how everyone else would react.