Underwear
When you are young, you really don’t give undergarments a thought, other than to take care of the number one priority at that time, which is making sure it’s cute and sexy. By the time you hit your 50’s, the number one priority is comfort. Move over sexy, you’ve been replaced.
I’ve gotten to the point where I now understand the bra burning of the ‘70’s. Really, why is a bra necessary? Is this not a left over relic of the corset? Why must we contain our breasts? Culturally speaking, who decided that this was important? Is this some Puritan leftover?
I am ready to burn my bra. I mean, you start out the day fine enough. You don’t notice it too much. But the first thing you do when you get home at the end of the day? Aside from greet your husband, dogs, and cat (not necessarily in that order), is to take the damn thing off. Aaahhh…so good.
This is why I fell hook, line and sinker for a new online bra company who touted their comfort. See? The bra companies are getting smart. They know we older women want, nay crave comfort—forget Victoria Secret, the real secret these other bra companies realize is none of us wants sexy anymore, we want comfort. See first paragraph above.
This one particular company has you fill out this whole profile. Oh! This has been the problem the whole time—different styles of breasts! Do your breasts lie north to south or east to west? Are they tear shaped or rounded? Hang to the side or the middle? They have pictures to visualize all the different ways your boobs can hang. And then they ask you some other questions and, wait for it, the piéce de resistance, is…the half size! What the heck, how has nobody thought of this one before? You are not comfortable in your bra because you thought this whole time you were a 34, but no, you are a 34 and a half! Like a shoe size!
I then pay over $70 for what I’m told will be the most comfortable bra ever. I am so excited and can’t wait for my new bra to arrive. That’s the thing these new bra companies also realize—we’ll pay any price if you tell us it’s going to be comfortable. $70? Pshaw. We’d pay $100 even. It’s like a Mastercard commercial. New bra, $70. Never being aware you are wearing a bra? Priceless.
My new bra arrives. I think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. For like an hour. Next thing you know that underwire is digging into me. Son of a bitch. And I realize then, that the notion of a comfortable bra is like the Holy Grail. The odds of finding Jimmy Hoffa are greater than finding a comfortable bra. In fact, those words, comfortable bra, are an oxymoron. There is no such thing as a comfortable bra.
One of the best things of being in quarantine during the Covid-19 crisis? NOT WEARING A BRA. Now, age and gravity do conspire to cause some downward progression of the ladies. But I’d much rather take that trade off for the comfort and freedom that being bra-less provides. I’d like to start a movement, resurrect that bra burning from the ‘70’s, and encourage all women to set their girls free and Puritan mores be damned.
Underpants are the next item of under garments we need to discuss. In your youth you are fine with underwear that just has a cotton liner. Silky, satiny and lacy fabric everywhere else. Now? 100% cotton all the way, not just that thin little strip of a liner. Lord, your skin needs to breathe and yes, once again, be comfortable. And while you might still get away with the bikini brief, high cuts, low cuts are definitely out.
And you know what else is out? In fact, it was never even in, in my case—the thong. What in the heck and who in the heck invented this? Growing up, such thongs, er things, didn’t exist. I only became aware of them when I took my daughter shopping at Victoria Secret for her underwear when she was a teen. She was all about the thong. “Mom,” she’d tell me, there’s no visible panty line with the thong. “Well, honey,” I’d reply, “that’s because you’ve got a string up your ass.” To be fair, I gave it a shot. I put one on. And precisely 5 seconds later took it off. Comfort test fail, total fail. I can’t wait to see if my daughter is wearing a thong thirty years from now. Or has developed a severe skin rash from years of chafing in her tukuss.
That brings us to Spanx. For a minute, they almost had me fooled. They almost had me convinced that Spanx, something that looked like, acted like, sounded like a girdle, was in fact, not a girdle. Wellll, if it looks a like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
I forked over a decent amount of dough for this newest invention so excited to have my tummy flattened, no visible panty line issues and be…wait for it… comfortable. I bought it specifically for a speaking engagement that I had in front of 300 plus people and wanted to make sure my pooch was as flat as could be.
Have you ever tried wearing a Spanx? Let me rephrase that, have you ever tried getting into a Spanx? The process of trying to force your skin into this fabric, when there is far more skin than there is fabric leaves you wondering if you got the right size. But you know you did, so you keep on tugging and pulling it up and your fat just keeps creeping up higher and higher, trying to escape the constricting confines. You look down and see you’ve got some spillage over the top, so you pull some more and kinda tuck/push that extra fat down into the girdle—this is when I realized that Spanx was a girdle—nothing new or different at all.
While the thong took 5 seconds for me to rip it off, I lasted about an hour in the Spanx, before I realized that breathing was difficult and I couldn’t feel my abdomen. Problem was, the event lasted about three hours. I cursed myself for not giving it a test run beforehand. But this was Spanx! It was not a girdle! At the first possible moment, as soon as the event was over, I said to my colleague, hold on a minute I’ll be right back. And like Clark Kent, though without a phone booth, ducked into the bathroom and ripped those Spanx off. Sweet relief. I’ll be burning Spanx alongside my bras.
So, the definition of comfort? No thongs, no Spanx, no bras, and 100% all cotton undies, preferably in white or nude.