This is a guest post, we will call the author Ms. R. I’m sure this post was not easy for Ms. R to write, there for I am enforcing a strict no snark rule for the comments! I reserve the right to remove or not post any comment left on this post! The opinions in this post are that of Ms. R, please respect her.
First, I’d like to thank By Baby’s Rules for letting me rant up her blog, since I don’t blog yet. Maybe I should. (Heck yes you should! A very valuable perspective!~BBR)
By Baby’s Rules and I had opposite surgeries. Yet, we both have the same reaction to Curvy Kate’s Star In A Bra rules. Disgust is putting it mildly to me.
As per ASPS numbers, a half million women a year undergo breast surgery in the US alone. That’s not a small section of the population, and that ignores minor procedures that disqualify a women from entering, such as a lumpectomy or cyst removal. As one living with a fairly major surgery, it wasn’t easy, and still isn’t that easy, to find bras that fit and aren’t painful. Bras that don’t have an irritating liner for hyper sensitive skin. Wires that don’t rest on or pinch scarring. Now, get into finding a bra that is comfortable and find one in a small band, large cup size. Now find one that’s not just some beige boulder holder type bra. Good luck. It’s hard. It’s not fun.
Society loves to tell women as a whole that your breasts are only good to attract a sexual partner. But if you dare let a doctor near your breasts, apparently now they are nothing and you should be ashamed of them and hide them. That’s harder to deal with than living with breasts that didn’t fit a bra, no matter what.
Yeah, the surgery that mutilated my breasts? I was at least a 30V under UK sizing. I had surgery over a decade ago, well over. 30V is a size that does NOT exist now, women can barely find a bra over UK KK cup sizes. 10+ years ago, heck, in the US any UK sizing was not around. At 30V, with the genetic fun of dense, heavy breasts, the weight is damaging. I have spinal arthritis. I have shoulders that have some permanent rolling forward. I have scars from ill fitted bras fighting to hang on to my shoulders and carry the weight. My surgeon does not do surgery under the age of 25 without serious medical need, and he makes sure one is wearing a correctly fitted bra first. He never questioned putting me through a difficult, nasty, invasive surgery that could have left me with deformed breasts because it was what I needed to function and survive without wrecking my body.
I was potentially too young during surgery, and yes I’ve had plenty of returning tissue. It’s still dense and heavy. I’m now in the 32G-H range, depends on the line. So I’m not small. But heck, I’m still on the edge of sizing out of some lines. So, yeah, I still get what it’s like to have to look at cute bras and go “nope, won’t fit, hrm, if I go to a 34….” So, it’s not a friendly world still. But 32G is better than 30V.
Per Star In A Bra T&C (found on CK’s Facebook page and the SIAB app)– it’s for natural D+ cup size breasts that are not enhanced. Well, I’ve got natural D+ breasts and I don’t find medically needed surgery to be an enhancement. But as anyone who asks will learn, ANY surgery is disqualifying. Take a cyst out – you can’t enter. Have a mastectomy and reconstruction – you can’t enter. Have implants – you can’t enter. Have a medically needed reduction – you can’t enter.
The first reason is that altered breasts are an unfair advantage. Well, great, but hrm, looking at my breasts, they seem to be fitting my bra the same as any other G cup woman. I can look at By Baby’s Rules and see how bras will likely fit since we share the annoying issue of center gores being too wide and too high, so I think she’s rocking some pretty normal looking breasts.
But that fails as the other reason is alter breasts don’t fill a bra normally. If I’m not filling a bra and looking “normal”, then how is that an advantage? If I’m spilling out all over, or having cups wrinkle badly – no one is going to think I have attractive enough breasts to model a line. I wouldn’t blame them for that, and I’d agree.
So the two reasons are busy negating each other. So I am directed to contact CK to go over this in more detail. Well, hrm. I got a read response in 17 minutes. I got NO contact for 4 business days. I got told it went to the wrong person, it went to the wrong inbox, and it accidentally went to spam. Sure thing. Because the reality is I got no response until I went and put it out publicly that they requested the email and are now ignoring me. Email did me nothing since I just got quoted prior claims and that oh, so sorry you won’t buy the bras now, but you’ll come back was the underlying statement. I posed valid, serious questions which are still not answered. I did wind up with another contact, which I suspect I probably wasn’t supposed to, but that woman did answer questions, take me seriously and treat me with basic respect.
Too bad she was the second/third contact I had. Because the discrimination and mockery of my needed surgery went too far. Because I’d rather alter bras to fit from lines who may not be diverse but don’t claim to be.
Curvy Kate makes a big deal about diversity in the bra world. Unless of course you have the audacity to mutate your breasts via surgery. Then, your unnatural, enhanced breasts are an unfair advantage and don’t fit a bra normally.
But then, I’m being mean by not supporting Curvy Kate trying to make women happy with their big breasts. If that’s what they were actually doing, I’d be supporting them. I’d be waving the white bra with the best of them. But it’s not what they are doing. You still have to fit their odd standard of perfection. You can’t have a health scare. Because any change to your breasts is not allowed. If the rules allowed medically needed surgery, I’d still not enter, but I wouldn’t be so pissed.
It does come down to breast hate. I stuffed myself in badly fitted, cheap sports bras because that was “comfortable”. That’s just me being stubborn. I wasn’t ashamed of my breasts, I just didn’t like the uncomfortable bras I should wear. Well, when I started to wear the right size bra, huh, they aren’t uncomfortable. I love my breast and don’t I have some CUTE bras! Wait, I had a reduction. I should have breast shame for that. Because a well fitted bra fixes everything. It’s bad enough to see on nearly every big breast blog. Because I’m tired of pointing out that per ASPS, medically needed reductions are far more common than cosmetic reductions. Because I’m tired of someone other than my doctor thinking they know what is best for me. I have to live with these breasts, no one else does. If it makes me happy to have a reduction until I’m a 32A cup, then I’m happy and that’s who matters.
Support for women should be very, very simple. Are they happy with their breasts as they are now? If so, good, support them. If not, help guide them NICELY into the best option to make them happy. If they’re happy in a VS bra that’s too small, give up and let them wear that until they learn otherwise if they aren’t badly sized. If they are happy in a 42F, yay for them! It is NOT my business what makes someone else happy with their breasts. It is not anyone’s business that I am happy with my breasts post surgery.
But Curvy Kate is just following the big breast standard that surgery is “evil”. Which is all some of us hear, and face every day. But people seem to not get that the woman who is wearing a soft cup bra who has uneven breasts may have several reasons why. Maybe that’s just how her breasts are and she’s comfortable in that soft cup. Maybe she’s getting implants fixed. Maybe she just had a cyst remove and one side is swollen and sore. Maybe she’s recovering from a mastectomy and preparing for her first round of radiation or chemo. Or there are countless other reasons why she’s wearing that bra with uneven boobs. Unless she expresses dislike for her appearance, it doesn’t matter. She’s still wearing a bra and deserves the same respect anyone wants.
But with current standards and Curvy Kate rulings, every single woman is one health scare away from being disqualified and being told she should be ashamed of her breasts. Which is a very danger precedent to set and use as an example of so called diversity. Let’s try for diversity that accepts EVERY breast out there, no matter who has it or what has happened, so long as the one who wears the breast is happy with it.
