"There are literally no rules, which is to say laws, that govern women’s underwear...."

"New York City was... the first jurisdiction to insist on 'full gender neutrality,' meaning an employer can 'require an individual identifying as female to wear a bra or hide her nipples, but only if the same rule applies to a male employee.'... When it comes to federal law... 'it only requires that dress codes have gender parity with regard to burdens such as cost.'...  As to the notion that bras are necessary for women’s health... there is no particular medical reason to wear a bra (and... bras don’t prevent sagging).... To be faced with freed breasts, whether or not nipples are visible, is to be forced to confront deep-seated prejudices about all of this, and that is both upsetting and distracting to a lot of people. Especially at this particular moment in time, when control of women’s bodies and their reproductive purpose has become once again a hot-button political issue.... It is not, of course, your job to make other people comfortable or to help them sort through their own feelings about all of the above...."

Writes Vanessa Friedman in "Are There Any Rules About Going Braless? A reader wonders when it’s OK to abandon the undergarment" (NYT)

The wondering reader is from Madison, Wisconsin, I note. It wasn't me, I should add, though I have the same question. And I believe Friedman did not answer the question asked. 

"In 1942, Vogue quoted a male soldier saying of his female counterparts, 'To look unattractive these days is downright 'morale-breaking and should be considered treason.'"

"The next year, that magazine carried an ad naming women in uniform the 'Best Dressed Women in the World Today.' The government asked Elizabeth Arden to concoct a lipstick to match the red piping on women’s Marine Corps uniforms. Women marines were issued this Montezuma Red lipstick and matching nail polish in their official military kits. (It remained mandatory for thirty more years.) A Tangee cosmetics ad from the era reasoned, 'No lipstick—ours or anyone else’s—will win the war. But it symbolizes one of the reasons we are fighting . . . the precious right of women to be feminine and lovely, under any circumstances.'"

 
Writes Patricia Marx, in "Is the Army’s New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment? It’s fire-resistant but not bulletproof, and was developed with help from eighteen thousand female soldiers" (The New Yorker).

"Even the name of the place Corey Brooks frequented for routine medical care — Magee-Womens Hospital — felt alienating."

"Patients donned pink gowns. Cutouts of pink bras were plastered on the walls. A sign urged patients to 'fight like a girl.' 'Things like that are just incredibly disorienting for someone going into those spaces who is always being reminded, hey, this wasn’t designed for you,' Brooks said. 'You’re not really sure if you should disclose to these people that you’re trans or not.' Brooks identifies as nonbinary and transgender, but as someone who was assigned female at birth, they share similar health needs as cisgender women for gynecologic care and screenings for chest health as they age...."

 
From "For trans people, medical visits can be more traumatizing than healing/Trans patients share their stories of subtle discrimination, outright hostility and ill-informed medical professionals" (WaPo).

Is everything woman-specific now going to be characterized as unfriendly or even wrong and toxic?!

"The young ones tend to never wear a bra.... What is with the hate on bras?... I am very happy to wear a comfortable bra every day..."

"... and I am uncomfortable not wearing one. I find this new generation of braless ladies rude and unprofessional. These young ladies do not seem to mind the stares from others and more so when the office gets a little chilly. I have nothing against 'free the nipple' but why impose this on others in a professional environment?"

Asks an anonymous letter-writer of Roxane Gay, the NYT "work friend" advice columnist.

Hey, you know what's "unprofessional"? Staring at nipples!

As Gay puts it: "Women are not imposing their nipples on you by existing, braless, in public spaces. You are imposing your judgment on their bodies." She advises Anonymous to "interrogate the judgments you place on other people’s bodies." Ha ha ha. "Interrogate." Academic jargon is hilarious encountered in the raw on a chilly morning. I picture a crime suspect grilled in a harshly lit, windowless room. But it makes perfect sense to say: question your own judgments. That's something we should do more often.

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

"There is such a bias toward glorifying hot weather and vilifying cold, though a lot of people strongly prefer winter to summer."

"I don't really get depressed in the summer, but I dread it because of the extreme discomfort & nothing to do for it but stay indoors. Winter, on the other hand, is completely manageable by dressing properly."

Says a commenter on "Seasonal Affective Disorder Isn’t Just for Winter/Feeling blue even though everyone seems to be basking in perfect summer weather? There might be a good reason for that" (NYT).  

That was originally published a year ago, but it's on the NYT home page today, presumably because it's great Memorial Day weekend topic: Some of us don't love summer. If you suffer in winter, you have lots of vocal company. And if you enjoy winter, other people are always interfering with the pleasure by openly complaining about it. But there's an excessive celebration of the greatness of summer. If you feel bad in the summer, you might feel harassed by the pressure to join in all this purported fun.

Here's another comment from over there:

They named the woman-focused sports bar Sports Bra.

I'm reading "A bar of their own: Portland’s Sports Bra will only show women’s sports/Jenny Nguyen’s sports bar, opening in April, has already received praise from women’s sports fans around the world" (WaPo). 

From the comments at WaPo:

1. "Men have become discontented and snarly. Women still possess hope. So women's sports and sports fans are still fun. I'd like Netflix or Britbox to feature women's sports leagues. Is that an idea? Why not sports on streaming sites?"

2. "There isn't the demand to warrant that. The reality is that the vast bulk of women's sports don't have a very high level of interest or make any money.... Mark my words, six months from now the headline will read 'bar that only had women's sports on tv closes.'" 

3. "Okay, whateverdoodle, oh Dearth of Hope comment-maker."

"Fur coat? It is said that nobody wants fur these days, but animals do. Rehabilitators, like those at Sacred Friends, in Norfolk, Virginia, cut up old coats and..."

"... use the scraps as little capes and stoles to keep sick animals warm... peta wants your pelts, too. The organization donates them to the homeless ('the only humans with any excuse to wear fur,' according to its Web site), and lately it has shipped fur garments to Afghanistan and Iraq for use by refugees.... Your old bras are welcomed with open arms at the Bra Recyclers, a Phoenix-based enterprise that has sent more than four million bras to homeless shelters, schools, foster programs, and other nonprofits all over the world. As Elaine Birks-Mitchell, the founder of the Bra Recyclers, explained to me over Zoom, bras are not just about fashion. For girls in developing countries, they make it possible to play sports and attend school without embarrassment."

From "A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything/Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them?" by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker).

"Propriety long ago came to seem like morality’s prairie dress, standing prim in a riotous digital landscape..."

"... where no one knows who is Zooming pants-less and intimate selfies are the equivalent of a Tumblr hello. Seen in that light, underwear on Fifth Avenue was probably always a logical endpoint in a progressive blurring of distinctions between public and private. Or so I imagined until an afternoon last week when, glancing up from my Harvest Bowl at Sweetgreen, I spotted through the window a young woman casually crossing Astor Place wearing a pair of cutoffs, some sandals and — it is fully legal to do this — naked above the waist."

That's the end of this long, lavishly illustrated NYT "critic's notebook" piece by Guy Trebay, "Suddenly It’s Bare Season Bras in the parks, skivvies on Fifth Avenue: Is this the logical endpoint of increasingly blurred distinctions between public and private?"

When I first saw this article yesterday, I thought the NYT was gratuitously splashing its pages with pictures of scantily covered breasts. This morning, looking for a morsel of text to cut and display here, I thought it was all pretty funny —  "morality’s prairie dress," "Zooming pants-less," "underwear on Fifth Avenue." 

I was chuckling over the gratuitousness, not of the breasts, but of "my Harvest Bowl at Sweetgreen." If morality wears a prairie dress, surely, morality eats a harvest bowl. 

(Speaking of gratuitous, why capitalize Harvest Bowl? I could understand the capitalization if it was a frozen dinner in a box. Or a football game.)

"I have 38D boobs and have been wearing a bra since fifth grade, so the thought of returning my boobs to any state of confinement has left me horrified."

"How could I go back to imprisoning my ladies after a wondrous year of letting them roam? In the words of Kate Lambert, 'I see women out and y’all are wearing bras again. I THOUGHT WE HAD AN AGREEMENT.'... Babe, I assure you, it is not about politics — it is about comfort. A few years back, a dear friend wrote about her bra-free path, saying that the decision to not wear a bra was not political, 'except insofar as everything a woman does with her body that isn’t letting someone else dictate what she ought to do with it is a political decision.' That sounds about right to me."

From "Free the Boob!" by Dayna Evans (NY Magazine).

"[L]ast year, Hsu Hsiu-e, 84 and Chang Wan-ji, 83—a married couple who own a laundromat in Taiwan—became global social media stars thanks to their Instagram account..."

"... @wantshowasyoung. The pair pose in compelling outfits styled from clothes their laundromat customers have left behind. The account is now up to over 654,000 followers and the pair was recently named the ambassadors for Taipei Fashion Week." 

From "Grandpa Style: Why 20-Somethings Are Dressing Like Senior Citizens/Thanks to Instagram accounts like @Gramparents and books like ‘Chinatown Pretty,’ milllenials and Gen-Z are coming to appreciate their gray-haired elders’ fashion sense" (WSJ). 

 I'm amused by the way the WSJ tried so hard to get the double letters in "millennial" right and came up with "milllenials." 

Anyway... @wantshowasyoung isn't about youngish people dressing like really old people. It's old people wanting to "show as young" — look young. I'm blogging this little side issue, because I like the Instagram account. Such a perfect idea. Example:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 萬秀的洗衣店｜WANT SHOW as young (@wantshowasyoung)

As for millennials and Gen Zers dressing like "grandfathers," my favorite example of this is the YouTube icon Review Brah, who explains here — in his mesmerizing style — why he dresses like that: 

"It’s simply true that governments attempt to conceal all kinds of things. Even things partially visible to the naked eye."

"But it’s also true that the human body is a complex machine given to all sorts of odd behaviors. As Dan Savage wrote, 'Only Andrew Cuomo knows for sure, of course, and he’s not telling.' But, Savage said, 'I’ve spent a lot of time around gay guys with tit rings, and it’s my considered opinion that those are tit rings. Almost certainly.'... I decided the only thing left to do was call Barney Frank. Back in 2011, the former congressman stepped onto the House floor wearing a light-blue sweater through which his nipples were visible to anybody watching C-Span. Future president Donald Trump was apparently doing just that. 'Barney Frank looked disgusting — nipples protruding — in his blue shirt before Congress. Very very disrespectful,' he said on Twitter.... In general, Frank said, being a politician whose nipples become a subject of mockery or scrutiny isn’t as negative an experience as you might think. 'In some ways, it makes you feel good because it means you have people who are trying to attack you and they can’t find anything substantive.'... ...  Of Cuomo’s critics, he said, 'It reflects badly on them.' With all of that out of the way, I asked Frank if he’d be surprised if it turned out that Cuomo does, in fact, have pierced nipples. 'I’m gonna act as if you didn’t ask me that,' he said."

Since she asks, I guess it "reflects badly" — per Barney Frank — on Olivia Nuzzi, the author of the article I'm quoting "What’s the Deal With Andrew Cuomo’s Nipples? An Investigation" (NY Magazine).

Just to balance things out — though, as you know, with breasts, there's never perfect symmetry — I saw this in The Daily Mail a few days ago: "Experts warn that not wearing a bra during lockdown could damage the Cooper's ligament and cause breasts to sag - as women reveal they're ditching underwear for comfort while working at home."

Experts! Last I looked the expert opinion was that wearing a bra causes breasts to sag.

Imagine staying at home during the coronawar and worrying that your comfortable loungewear stylings were endangering what's left of your breastal perkiness! We've got bigger things to worry about, like the imaginary nipple piercings of the New York Governor.

"There’s been a real shift in how people, especially young women, think about beauty and desire. We’re in the age of #MeToo. Ideals are changing..."

"... and people want diversity and representation, ethnically and racially, but also in terms of shape and body type. For retailers to not adapt or evolve can be a fatal flaw."

Said marketing professor Kalinda Ukanwa, quoted under the heading "Out-of-touch, overly sexual marketing," the 3rd of "5 factors that led to Victoria’s Secret’s fall" (WaPo).

From the comments at WaPo:

Originally, Victoria's Secret sold pretty underthings and nightgowns in a time when women were wearing practical or professional clothes. Then they changed and the merchandise was more about overt sexuality and tartiness. It was like they were trying to replace Frederick's of Hollywood. The store windows could be embarrassing to people shopping with kids. Go back to things women want to wear for themselves, drop the stripper vibe, and the business could flourish again....

Do you remember the original Victoria's Secret — in the 1970s? It did always have to do with the male shopper, but it was created by a man who felt bad about the way he was treated when he went shopping for lingerie for his wife — like a "pervert." That is, it wasn't so much about the kind of leering, domineering male #MeToo is fighting, but about a male who himself feels dismissed and judged — the subordinate man.

"Oh, Thank God, It’s Over Now."

A headline at NY Magazine. I clicked because I thought that it was going to be about the impeachment hearings and that it was interesting that somebody at NY Magazine was glad they were over. But it's about the annual televised Victoria's Secret fashion show.

Victoria’s Secret has become emblematic of an outdated kind of sex appeal, one that was sold to women but catered to men. It also probably doesn’t help that Les Wexner, the former CEO of L Brands, was a well-known client of Jeffrey Epstein....

The brand has had some attempts to change. A September ad campaign was inspired by Me Too and photos of a plus-size model and a transgender model were shown in stores (the plus-size model in question, people were quick to point out, has made fatphobic comments in the past). Still, the general response was, “Too little too late.”...

"So you (and your boobs) stay comfortable while you run."

Well, I am uncomfortable with this one boob who is emailing me too much while he runs:



(Click to enlarge and clarify.)

ADDED: Oh, I see. I'm a press outlet. But only to Cory Booker. I'm getting press releases. Example:

"But the one-hour TV special was such a nonevent of excruciating cliches and non-sexiness that it’s not worth a cultural renovation. It’s a teardown."

"Or we could all just get out of the way and let it rot until it falls down on its own....  You’d think Victoria’s Secret would have made sure this show was exciting and captivating — a sort of good-faith argument in favor of its stubborn commitment to marketing-as-usual. Instead, executives produced a show in which the models paraded down the runway like dusty showgirls blowing kisses and drawing hearts in the air, with one model practically indistinguishable from another... If the show is all about empowered models, why not identify them by name when they appear onstage? Or is anonymity part of the fantasy? If some of these women can attract millions of Instagram followers just by posting selfies from elevators, imagine the thrill Victoria’s Secret might be able to gin up if it really made the show about connecting with these women — not in some earnest, substantial way, of course, but in a gleefully superficial, faux-intimate, social media-enhanced way that would be perfect for television. It takes an extraordinary amount of ineptitude, laziness and sheer disregard to make a show as stultifying and lifeless as the Victoria’s Secret one. It may be that the company was so focused on defending its casting against those who call it anachronistic that it forgot that the whole argument becomes moot if the show is so boring that it’s unwatchable."

Writes Robin Givhan in "The Victoria’s Secret fashion show is too boring to even argue about" (WaPo).

I've always assumed the show is unwatchable, and it seemed anachronistic to me all along. When did it begin? I have to look it up, because Givhan didn't mention it. I was not back in the days when bras and panties were called "unmentionables." It was 1995. The middle of the Clinton administration. The first season of "Friends." The Oklahoma City bombing. Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment. "Forrest Gump" won the Oscar. O.J. Simpson went on trial. Maybe much of America saw this as a time to watch tall, fit women prance around in bras and panties from a mall store, but it seemed hopelessly old fashioned to me. It's boring and unwatchable now, Robin Givhan says, and I don't doubt it. But why was it ever watchable?

"Sara Lynn Michener, 39, stopped shopping at Victoria’s Secret about 10 years ago. She said she was frustrated..."

"... by the seemingly inexperienced sales people, the overwhelming 'pinkness' of the brand and the inauthentic 'glamazon images' in the store. She now mostly buys her bras online and at Nordstrom, environments that are mostly free of the sexed-up imagery that makes Victoria’s Secret the store it is. 'Even if I walk into the Nordstrom section, I’m going to have a bad day, so you can imagine Victoria’s Secret,' Ms. Michener, a writer who lives in the Bay Area, said."

From a long article in the NYT called "In 2018, Where Does Victoria’s Secret Stand?/The lingerie company has clung to the idea that women should look sexy for men. And sales are plummeting."

Of course, my question was: Ms. Michener, a writer — is she related to James A. Michener?

Googling her name, I found her page on Medium: "Sara Lynn Michener/Writer. Maker. Feminist. Internet Curator. Spitfire. Ravenclaw. Trekkie. Social Justice Apologist." Ravenclaw — what is that, some Harry Potter category? Yes — "6 reasons to get excited if you’re sorted into Ravenclaw" ("Ravenclaw is the house that champions those with a 'ready mind'"). Do people pushing 40 really think of themselves in terms of Harry Potter classifications? I guess it's better than astrology, and it looks like you just pick the one you think you are, so it's probably also better than the Myers Briggs system.

But is Sara Lynn Michener related to James A. Michener? The closest I got to an answer was an essay by Ms. Michener, "The Life and Times of Thurber James Michener/Obituary of a Beloved Dog."

... I placed all the love I had left in this dog, knowing he could never hurt me unless he was parted from me, like my own little pantalaimon. He licked my tears and put his head on my chest or dove between body and arm and seemed to make it possible for me to breathe. He followed me around extra closely, he was happily affectionate when I was happy, and gently affectionate when I was sad. I came to understand that the magic of this town I had loved, was merely how I had seen it — along with everyone else who comes to love a place to the point of fiction. Every American small town has a dark underbelly once the veil of what feels so deeply like community is lifted, so easily and under the slightest pressure. When I saw it for what it truly was without that love, I left with an effort that would not have been possible without my constant. All eighteen pounds of him in fur, bone, blood, and a love of bacon and peanut butter.

Anyway, I was thinking about James A. Michener, because I've been working my way through a box set of the complete episodes of "Friends," and his name came up in "The One With The Stoned Guy" (from February 1995). Ross wants to accommodate a girlfriend who expects him to talk dirty when they have sex, Joey gives him some lessons, and Ross reports back: "Oh, I was unbelievable.... I was the James Michener of dirty talk. It was the most elaborate filth you have ever heard. I mean, there were characters, plot lines, themes, a motif... at one point there were villagers."

At one point there were villagers! Did Americans understand that line in 1995? TV writers 23 years ago expected a mainstream audience to grasp a surreal turn in the dialogue that demanded understanding of the work of a specific writer. But it was James A. Michener — and he was still alive (alive and 88) and he'd even published a novel that year — another one of his 40 books. I'm just going to guess that knowing, back then, that a Michener story would have villagers was about as difficult as understanding, these days, what it means to be a Ravenclaw.

"My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me."

"I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes.... A color psychology article on Bustle tells me that I fear commitment. 'Grey is emotionless,' it says, 'boring, detached, and indecisive. Those who say their favorite color is grey don’t tend to have any major likes or dislikes.'... Lovers of gray 'lack the passion that comes with loving a real color.' And yet I yearn for it. I fill my drawers with gray brassieres. I dress my bed in sheets and duvets like a day with all the blue drained out of it. The tidiness, the monochrome inspire peace.... As the black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said to the color photographer William Eggleston: 'You know, William, color is bullshit.'... Dorothy may tumble, tornadic, into Technicolor, but still she always wishes to go home.... I sometimes drive an hour to the ocean, hoping I will find it thoroughly obscured by fog. I am not a melancholic or a bore, but I want a break from all the rainbow violence in the world...."

From "Ode to Gray" by Meghan Flaherty (in The Paris Review).



You know, William, color is bullshit.

The high school official told the 17-year-girl to "stand up and move around" so she could see if her nipples were still showing...

... and then offered her 4 adhesive bandages to X out her nipples. The girl, Lizzy Martinez, had left off wearing her bra that day because a sunburn (we're told) made the bra unusually uncomfortable.

From the NYT, "Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?":

“She told me, ‘I’m thinking of ways I could fix this for you. She said, ‘I was a heavier girl and I have all the tricks up my sleeve,’” Ms. Martinez said....

The incident happened two weeks ago — Ms. Martinez’s initial tweet about the incident went viral — but the backlash is still going strong. On Monday, Ms. Martinez and some of her classmates held a silent protest in support of “the destigmitization of natural bodies.” Despite threats of disciplinary action, about 30 female students opted not to wear bras, and a number of students decorated their backpacks with Band-Aids in the shape of an X. One student wore a shirt that read, “Do my ni**ples offend you?” (The asterisks were hers.)...

In the case of Ms. Martinez, for example, the school is “foisting this notion that unrestrained breasts are sexual and likely to cause disruption and distract other students,” [said lawprof Meredith Harbach]. But this kind of messaging that targets young women — your skirt is too short, you look too sexy, you’re distracting the boys — “deflects any and all conversation about appropriate mutually respectful behavior in schools between boys and girls... Who is disrupted actually? It’s Lizzy. Whose learning experience is impacted?.... It doesn’t sound like other kids had a major disruption, but she sure did.”...

Meanwhile, women whose nipples don't show are getting injections to produce those "Kendall Jenner" bumps because they love the look. This amusing video was in the NY Post recently:

"The popularity of lightweight bras in China today echoes the 'natural breasts movement' of nearly a century ago. "

Sixth Tone reports:

Back then, beauty standards favored flat over busty: Many Chinese women bound their chests with white cloth or wore tight vests. Small so-called lilac breasts — as well as tiny feet — had long been the stuff of Chinese men’s sexual fantasies. On Women’s Day in 1927, a group of sex workers demonstrated naked in Wuhan, now situated in central China’s Hubei province, to protest breast binding. The year after the Wuhan demonstration, the government banned breast binding nationwide for health reasons, as it had done for foot binding more than a decade earlier....

Lingerie wasn’t something people talked about publicly until the 1990s, when modern advertising once more redefined society’s feminine aesthetics — this time favoring large bosoms.... But the tide is turning again — spurred in part by rising feminist awareness — and many young Chinese women are no longer ashamed of their small breasts...

“We are probably the first Chinese [underwear] brand that uses models with small breasts — in the past, every brand would look for models who had a ‘career line,’” Liu says, referring to cleavage enhanced by push-up bras that supposedly lead to smoother career paths in male-dominated offices.

But the lightweight bras, without padding, present the problem of showing nipples, which, we're told, is "still taboo" in China, but:

Mao, the public relations officer [at a retailer of non-padded bras], solves the problem by opting for thicker clothes whenever she wears a bralette. But she thinks visible nipples will gain acceptance at some point. “I’ve seen Rachel’s nipples on ‘Friends’ popping out many times,” she says.