Bralessness is the state of not wearing a brassiere as part of a woman's underwear. Women may choose to not wear a bra due to discomfort, health-related issues, their cost, or for social and cultural reasons.
As of 2006, about 10% of Australian women did not wear a bra. Surveys have reported that 5–25% of Western women do not wear a bra.
Terminology
The word braless was first used circa 1965. Other terms for going braless include breast freedom, top freedom, and bra freedom.Menon, Dilip. "An Ordinary Country". The Journal of Asian Studies. 69.3 (2010): 687-690. Activists advocating going braless have referred to protests as a "bra-cott".
In feminism In the Western world, since the 1960s, there has been a trend towards bralessness among a number of women, especially millennials, who have expressed opposition to and are giving up wearing bras. In 2016, Allure magazine fashion director Rachael Wang wrote, "Going braless is as old as feminism, but it seems to be bubbling to the surface more recently as a direct response to Third Wave moments like #freethenipple hashtag campaign, increased trans-visibility like Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover ... and Lena Dunham's show Girls."
A feminist protest at the 1968 Miss America contest is often seen as the beginning of the anti-bra movement, prompting manufacturers to market new designs that created a softer, more natural look.
Effect on health and breast morphology Health impact of wearing tight fitting bras Studies have indicated sports bras which are overly tight may restrict respiratory function.
Because finding a well-fitting bra is difficult, women who wear bras sometimes feel constricted. One study found that 70% of women wear bras that are too small. Sekhon says that bras can impede blood flow to back and chest muscles, contributing to sore back muscles. Women with large breasts who stop wearing a bra may experience improved blood flow more quickly than women with smaller breasts, as bras supporting larger breasts tend to fit tighter than those worn by women with smaller breasts.
Orthopedic effects According to a study published in the Clinical Study of Pain, large-breasted women can reduce back pain by going braless, and they may find going braless as a preferred treatment instead of reduction with a mammaplasty.
Comfort
Women with large breasts feel increased comfort compared to women with smaller breasts. Some women who have gone braless while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic do not want to go back to wearing bras again.
Braless at home
Upon returning home from a day at work, many women report one of the things they look forward to is taking off their bra as soon as they get home. One editor wrote, "Taking your bra off is an extremely liberating feeling, and one we females look forward to—every day, all day long." During the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent requirement for remote work, many women publicly admitted to forgoing wearing a bra at all times.
Miami fashion blogger Maria Tettamanti gladly confessed that while working from home she is braless. "The only positive attribute coming out of this pandemic is the notion we can work from home bralessfree of wires, overly snug, overly padded bras."
During April 2020, online bra sales dropped 12%. Women welcomed the chance to avoid the normal discomfort that often accompanies wearing a bra. One clothing manufacturer surveyed 1000 women and found that 35% of women were braless while working from home. They also reported that hashtags like #nobranoproblem and #bralessandflawless were common on Twitter.
Misconceptions
Cancer fears
Some women choose not to wear bras because they worry that it might increase the risk of breast cancer. This idea was promoted in a controversial 1995 book Dressed to Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. A 2002 survey found that 6% of women agreed that "Under-wire bras can cause breast cancer", 63% disagreed with this claim, and another 31% did not know.
There is no credible scientific evidence that wearing bras causes cancer. The United States National Cancer Institute states that bras have not been found to increase a woman's risk for breast cancer,Fact Sheet on Breast Cancer Risk Factors , from the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Accessed 10 July 2008. and the American Cancer Society stated, "There are no scientifically valid studies that show wearing bras of any type causes breast cancer."
Misinformation about bras and cancer spread across the internet "mostly inspired by one study with several scientific flaws...The study, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, did not adjust for known breast cancer risk factors that might be associated with bra-wearing behavior, like weight and age. Also, study participants knew the hypothesis before taking the survey." A well-regarded 2014 study by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found no direct link between wearing a bra and developing breast cancer. The report noted, "no aspect of bra wearing, including bra cup size, recency, average number of hours a day worn, wearing a bra with an underwire, or age first began regularly wearing a bra, was associated with risks" of breast cancer. The study included detailed studies of women's lifestyle and bra-wearing habits and found no correlation between bra use and cancer.
Breast sagging
A common misconception is that bras are required to keep breasts from sagging later in life. There is no relationship between wearing a bra and whether breasts sag. Wearing a bra for any amount of time does not arrest, slow, or in any way affect breast ptosis. John Dixey, former CEO of bra-maker Playtex, explained on a British TV Channel 4 interview, "We have evidence that wearing a bra could not prevent sagging, because the breast itself is not muscle, so keeping it toned up is an impossibility. ... There's no permanent effect on the breast from wearing a particular bra. The bra will give you the shape the bra's been designed to give while you're wearing it."
Social issues
Modern women have been socialized to believe that perky breasts are desirable. Laura Tempesta, bra expert and founder of bra manufacturer Bravolution, stated, "Lifted breasts are considered attractive in our culture which is why bra-wearing is a cultural development." Women feel pressured to wear bras because society expects their breasts to "stay firm and in the right position", or that if they are braless, it means she is promiscuous, loose, or slutty. An increasing number of millennial women reject these ideas as holdovers from earlier eras when a "woman's existence is for the male gaze."
An increasing number of women, especially those among the millennial generation, feel more comfortable about not wearing a bra, and what they wear is based more on what they want and not due to social norms or feminist ideology. With the increasing acceptance of the Me Too movement, co-workers and others have finally realized that they do not have the right to say anything about a woman who chooses not to wear a bra. Jennifer Maher, a gender studies professor at Indiana University, says wearing or not wearing a bra is no longer "a feminist tenet".
Feminist reaction
During the 1960s, a few feminists embraced bralessness. However, most Western women continued to wear bras, despite complaining about how uncomfortable they were.
In 1968 at the feminist Miss America protest, protesters symbolically threw a number of feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can". These included bras, which were among items the protesters called "instruments of female torture" and accouterments of what they perceived to be enforced femininity. A local news story in the Atlantic City Press reported that "the bras, girdles, falsies, curlers, and copies of popular women's magazines burned in the 'Freedom Trash Can'". But individuals who were present said that no one burned a bra nor did anyone take off her bra. Reporter Lindsy Van Gelder drew an analogy between the feminist protesters and Vietnam War protesters who burned their draft cards, and this parallel between protesters burning their draft cards and women burning their bras was encouraged by some organizers including Robin Morgan. "The media picked up on the bra part", Carol Hanisch said later. "I often say that if they had called us 'girdle burners,' every woman in America would have run to join us."
Feminism and "bra-burning" became linked in popular culture. While feminist women may or may not literally have burned their bras that day, some stopped wearing them in protest. Feminist author Bonnie J. Dow suggested that the association between feminism and bra-burning was encouraged by individuals who opposed the feminist movement. "Bra-burning" created an image that women were not really seeking freedom from sexism, but were attempting to assert themselves as sexual beings. This might lead individuals to believe, as Susan J. Douglas wrote, that the women were merely trying to be "trendy, and to attract men". Some feminist activists believe that anti-feminists use the bra burning myth and the subject of going braless to trivialize what the protesters were trying to accomplish at the feminist 1968 Miss America protest and the feminist movement in general.
The trope of feminists burning their bras was anticipated by an earlier generation of feminists who called for burning corsets as a step toward liberation. In 1873 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote:
Some feminists began arguing in the 1960s and 1970s that the bra was an example of how women's clothing shaped and even deformed women's bodies to male expectations. Professor Lisa Jardine listened to feminist Germaine Greer talk about bras during a formal college dinner in Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1964 (Greer had become a member of the college faculty in 1962):
Greer's book The Female Eunuch (1970) became associated with the anti-bra movement because she pointed out how restrictive and uncomfortable a bra could be. "Bras are a ludicrous invention", she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."
Susan Brownmiller in her book Femininity (1984) took the position that women without bras shock and anger men because men "implicitly think that they own breasts and that only they should remove bras."
Feminist author Iris Marion Young wrote in 2005 that the bra "serves as a barrier to touch" and that a braless woman is "deobjectified", eliminating the "hard, pointy look that phallic culture posits as the norm." Without a bra, in her view, women's breasts are not consistently shaped objects but change as the woman moves, reflecting the natural body. Young also argued that training bras are used to indoctrinate girls into thinking about their breasts as sexual objects and to accentuate their sexuality. She wrote in 2007 that, in American culture, breasts are subject to patriarchal American media-dominated culture [that] objectifies breasts before such a distancing glance that freezes and masters." Academic Wendy Burns-Ardolino wrote in 2007 that women's decision to wear bras is mediated by the "male gaze".
In March, 2017, actress Emma Watson was braless in a Vanity Fair photo shoot. She was criticized by some who thought she was a hypocrite for supporting feminism and showing some skin. She responded, "Feminism is about giving women a choice; feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It's about freedom, it's about liberation, it's about equality. I really don't know what my tits have to do with it."
Bralessness as a form of protest