In the past few months, we’ve traded in cubicles for home offices (or couches), swapped salads for sourdough, and relied on Zoom more than we ever thought we would. With all those shifts, it’s no surprise that what we wear on a daily basis has also changed: Gone are the days of business casual or office-appropriate clothing. Now, we’re all finding a lot of comfort in sweatpants, and, in a twist anyone with breasts saw coming, many women have chosen to forgo wearing a bra.
It makes a lot of sense. Who wants to be poked and prodded by underwire when they’re wearing their coziest clothes and have nowhere to go? But while ditching a bra might offer some temporary comfort, you probably haven’t thought about the long-term effects of not wearing a bra. So, what’s the deal? What really happens to your breasts when you stop wearing a bra?
Turns out, it’s a little complicated. We talked to a handful of experts, and the verdict on whether wearing a bra is actually bad for your breasts (or for you) is still out. At the end of the day (or the beginning, in this case), whether you want to put on a bra is entirely up to you, but knowing all the potential risks and consequences can help you make the best decision for you.
Intervention: Bras & Bondage
Stakeholder:
18-30 years old Women who have never tried wearing no underwear
Intervention: A day without bra
I got two friends to try the experiment and here is their feedback
I found two stakeholders to join my convention and here is the feedback from them
A:The moment I undid my bra, it was like a fish that had leapt out of the tank and been picked up and put back in, free, comfortable and even cozy.
Of course I’ve never tried going out without underwear, it’s so internalised that I’d probably feel like running around naked without it.
I’ve thought about trying to go without underwear, but my surroundings don’t allow me to do so. If I were living in a different environment I would probably try to take off my underwear because it’s so comfortable without it hahahahahaha and I want my body to be free in any environment.
A:I think bra and underwear are fundamentally the same in nature, but the bra is just a different type of bondage, so I would not choose to try to go out directly with a bra.
B：The main underwear brands that are now comfortable are also gimmicky, with steel rings being phased out but side but still with the addition of gel bones to collect side boobs. Not wearing them is always more comfortable than wearing them, and breast patches and tank tops have come about because we are disenfranchised but conscious of this inexplicable shame, so we compromise after feeling uncomfortable. For example, women recommend less stifling ways of covering their nipples to each other, adding time and effort costs and paying money, but men have not had this trouble since they were born.
The first picture was taken with my friend and I. It is actually a composite picture, the crowd in front and behind is an illusion, we want to express the blurring of women’s sense of self in the external environment. When women are not sheltered by their clothes, their fear of the outside world and their uncertainty about themselves are mixed together.
The second image shows a bra with the clasp undone and a bra without the clasp undone, they do not look different together, but when they are on the woman’s body, the woman feels very different. Wearing an ill-fitting bra for a long time can actually affect chest breathing and respiratory muscle fatigue
When this intervention was over, I found that the women themselves were positive about being comfortable without a bra, but could not accept themselves going out without one. It is only
Not wearing underwear is a very comfortable thing to do, especially in summer. Some good looking suspenders, and bras can detract from their aesthetic appeal. The reasons why women wear bras range from admonitions from their mothers at an early age, to having to wear them today because of the shame of exposure, or because they really feel that it helps them to have a more perfect figure. Much of this shame comes from our social environment, which is relatively conservative, especially when it comes to female exposure, and the subtle thought that women themselves cannot accept being exposed. After doing this intervention, I found that the women themselves were positive about being comfortable without a bra, but could not accept themselves going out without one.
When this intervention was over, I found that the women themselves were positive about being comfortable without a bra, but could not accept themselves going out without one. It is only when women really face themselves and put their own needs first that they can truly achieve a greater sense of self
So I interviewed Luo Mei, a PhD in film, to ask her about the male gaze in film and asked her
Visual art is the art of ‘seeing’, but it is the ‘how’ of seeing that may be the learning curve. Is it possible that we ‘see’ only from a particular standpoint? Or do we look at the world through a pair of tinted glasses? Is it possible to take off these glasses?
The development of visual art in the West was early on a vague sense that ‘seeing’ was a power, not simply a noble aesthetic experience. But it was not until the second half of the 20th century that artists began to seriously reflect on the power of looking in artworks and attempted to remove these ‘glasses of power’.
“The ‘gaze’ is everywhere, and the seemingly neutral values may hide a relationship of domination that is embedded in everyone’s mind. We now live in a world of images: advertisements, the internet, television …… are full of ‘tinted glasses’: why do house advertisements always have to be accompanied by beautiful women? Why are all alcohol advertisements about successful men? And why do thugs often speak Taiwanese? Postmodern art’s rethinking of the gaze is not only about art, but also about our lives themselves. It takes a lot of courage to see through the gaze and to break it, but only when you have the courage to take off these glasses can you see a different landscape.
According to the USC survey results, it reflects the current gender landscape of the Western film industry, or at least the British and American film industries: the overall number of female directors is small, those who have the opportunity to work on big projects are even rarer, and the women who are able to secure independent directing opportunities, in the vast majority of cases they are by default expected to work on small to medium productions of female subjects that will not be screened on a large scale. With films like Mulan and Black Widow both directed by women, it is a very difficult decision for Hollywood to let women lead big productions in the superhero genre, even though both films are based around “big female leads”.
Women directors have a strong desire to express themselves about the male world. They may enter the male perspective without any barriers, as in the case of Kathryn Bigelow, the only woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, with her consistent masculinity in Detroit, The Hurt Locker and Point Break; they may also dismantle male authority from a female standpoint, detecting marginal experiences that men deliberately suppress or are reluctant to acknowledge, crises of androgyny and troubled gender identity. In either case, the female director’s representation of male subjects does not start from a place of hostility, derogation or negation, and feminist philosopher Judy Butler’s theory of ‘gender resistance’ is appropriate here: the directors and their subjects are doubly interrogating conventional gender propositions, and they and their subjects in the film are working together to change the audience’s They and their subjects work together to change the way audiences think about gender, as women directors practice self-transformation through their work, thereby subverting the homogeneity of identity and gender.
In fact, the problem of female characters in Chinese film and television, like the problem of middle-aged actresses, which has been discussed many times, is not a new one, but in recent years, as female independence has become a major trend of the times, it has been taken seriously.
And the more the times progress, the more it reflects the backward and conservative side of our films and dramas that are either sophomoric, clumsy or incompetent in their portrayal of female characters.