Victoria’s Secret sucks. All the men who lovingly tote the catalog into the bathroom with them for a little light reading might disagree, but I don’t care. Vicky can bite me, and furthermore, I won’t keep her “Secret” any longer: she manufactures a shoddy product, advertises it with models so thin they could have just stepped out of a chemotherapy clinic, and tries to sell it by unleashing a torrent of catalogs upon the prospective consumer.

Let’s backtrack to the purchase of my first bra. I got my first bra at age ten. At age ten, most girls still play hopscotch and jump rope, and in fact my mother cast a critical eye upon me jumping rope and announced that I needed a bra. A couple of days later, we went to the juniors’ department at Sealfon’s and I tried on bras – real ones, not training bras. My mother stood just outside the dressing room door, offering well-meant but also audible-to-the-entire-store help with fastening them. By now, of course, the process of putting on a bra has become as automatic as that of brushing my teeth, but that first time baffled and embarrassed me – should I fasten it upside-down and inside-out in front and then pull it up and around? Put it on like a harness and try to hook it in back? Get it all rigged up first and then pull it on over my head like a shirt? And none of them seemed to fit; they all felt like tiny, too-tight vests. (Don’t even get me started on what happened when the sixth grade began a few weeks later. The envious glares trained upon me by classmates not yet blessed by Mother Nature . . . the so-so-not-funny strap-snapping in the locker room before gym class . . . and after school and on weekends, the new and utterly unwanted attention from boys.)

Now, at age twenty-five, I have large breasts. I wouldn’t compare myself to Pamela Lee or Chesty Morgan by any means, and since I have a comparably large body (roughly 5’ 10″ and 150 pounds), my chest doesn’t look that big, but I come from a long line of well-
appointed women and I fill out a 36D with no trouble at all. Sometimes I wish I had smaller breasts – in the warm weather, for instance, when I can’t use bulky clothing to disguise them from the leering troglodytes I pass on the sidewalk (and by the way, memo to the cavemen – I already know I have big tits. Guess what? I HEARD ABOUT THEM BEFORE YOU), or when I stay home sick from work and I still have to don a bra or my boobs will start to hurt, or when I go running and basically have to strap myself down Yentl-style in order not to give myself a black eye, and I especially wish I had smaller breasts when I blow out an underwire or a strap gets frayed or the elastic starts unraveling, because that means that I have to go bra shopping.

I cannot stand bra shopping. (Other women, except women that can “fly free” and not wear a bra and whom I hereby order to leave this page right now because I hate them, will immediately shudder in recognition when I mention shopping for bras. Everyone hates shopping for bras. Men can imagine trying on jockstrap after jockstrap for a rough idea of how much bra shopping blows – specifically, when most of the jockstraps don’t fit. Now, gents, imagine paying upwards of thirty bucks for each jockstrap. Got the picture?) I stand in that damn dressing room, wrenching my body around trying to get these damn bras on, staring into the mirror with undisguised horror because the light in those little cubicles makes me look like an elongated gelatinous blob, listening to the muffled curses and weeping coming from the cubicles next to me – all this after prowling through the bra aisles for close to an hour trying to find something that would support my breasts adequately, but without giving the impression that it might fit over my HEAD, or double as a SAIL, or perhaps a two-person PARACHUTE, and wondering why lingerie companies equate “big-breasted” with “fat” and as a result they do not design the darling little notions for us D-cups that they do for the more modestly-fronted women in the crowd, despite the fact that some of us do NOT weigh three hundred pounds and would in fact appreciate a brassiere that gives us “a lift” but does not resemble some sort of medieval torture device, and I really resent Victoria’s Secret for that reason.

I resent Victoria’s Secret because they don’t design bras for larger-breasted women, and they make their faint contempt for the large-breasted woman unmistakably clear, through their choice of models and through the products that the models wear in the catalog. I don’t have a problem with the models per se; like every other woman in America with a normal body weight who doesn’t eat a lettuce leaf and a Grape Nut for dinner, I long ago learned to roll my eyes at the skeletal freaks that adorn clothing catalogs and fashion mags. I find the VS models extremely frightening and weird – Yasmeen, who obviously had at least three ribs removed to make her waist that small; the drugged-looking blonde; Elle MacPherson’s whippet-hard body and nasty “outie” bellybutton; Stephanie Seymour, writhing gravely on the arm of a sofa, clad in that foolish transparent bodystocking; Tyra Banks giving herself a backache by thrusting her breasts out as far as possible; the long-haired brunette who always poses with her hands behind her back ever since word got out that she had a sex change (I remember when we could see her hands and I have no doubt that “she” had some, uh, alterations done); Helena Christensen, clearly on the point of bursting into giggles. But they model for a lingerie catalog, so whatever, they don’t stomp on my last nerve that much. Putting these skinny women into push-up bras and Miracle bras and padded bras – in other words, telling women that they have to stay famine-thin BUT they should have big breasts that sit up and say hello – DOES stomp on my last nerve, and do they sell adequate bras for those of us that DO have big breasts? NO. All of the cute, snazzy, original bras, with velour and satin edging and flannel and little hearts and flowers and stuff, ONLY come in the smaller sizes, and the “full-figured” designs look like refugees from Big Edie Beale’s closet, for God’s sake.

Somehow, the brain trust at Victoria’s Secret has latched onto the idea that nobody actually HAS these big breasts that they say their lingerie can simulate – that the ideal doesn’t exist, and if it does, it sits around the house watching Springer and eating Hi-Hos. Well, I have 36D breasts. I have a perfectly normal body – not in the best of shape, but not fat. I refuse to let Victoria’s Secret, or any of the other clothing companies like Banana Republic that think a “large” bra means a C cup, tell me that I don’t have a nice body or a body worth designing pretty and luxurious bras for, and I also refuse to buy any more bras from Victoria’s Secret, period, because they fall apart after three wearings, and it stands to reason that a woman with large breasts will feel somewhat reluctant to have the little lacy harness that she paid thirty clams for fall apart in the middle of the work day. I could live with VS’s assumption that I have a freakishly large chest if they put together a sturdy and workable brassiere, but they don’t, so I can’t. They put seams in the wrong places, they don’t make the straps wide enough, the underwires pop out and the lace tears if I breathe on it.

Vicky, if you can hear me, listen up and listen good. If you put your mind to it and design bras that flatter every breast type – not just the pancake people you currently cater to – and if you design these bras with quality and lasting support in mind, and if you incorporate the little frou-frous like velvet and ribbons and sheer panels and funky patterns into designs for the larger sizes, you will win the undying customer loyalty of hundreds of thousands of women – including me. But if you continue to pretend as though you make a quality product, when in fact you offer a poorly-made and unflattering line of sleazy lingerie that not only ignores an entire group of women but makes them feel somehow inferior and abnormal by doing so, and if you continue to hammer on the idea that small breasts don’t cut it, so let’s squeeze them together and push them up and pad them forward, while simultaneously ignoring big breasts as if they represent some sort of niche market, and if you continue to hawk this repellent double standard for the benefit of the knuckle- draggers who use your magazine to masturbate, you won’t get one thin dime out of me, because I would rather make my own damn bra out of an Ace bandage and a coat hanger. I’ve got it going on up front, and if you refuse to make a red lacy number that my honey can tear off me with his teeth, I’ll find someone else who does, and give them my money instead.

I strongly advise all my sisters in bra-wearing – and that should cover, so to speak, most of you – to take the same stance, no matter what letter you have on the tag of your brassiere. Don’t let Vicky tell you that your body sucks, because Vicky sells an inferior product by preying on female insecurities, and that sucks like a Hoover, no matter how much money it makes them or how many other companies do the same thing.

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