Motherhood is chock full of shit you don't need and we have a lot of opinions on that (see Mom Guilt), but let's start with our biggest pet peeve, Maia's raison d'être, NURSING BRAS.
So here's the problem..
...okay, fuck it, we have so many problems with nursing bras. I'll just dump them out for you:
Clips that are hard to unclick while your baby is screaming at you and you have to reclip while arranging baby, clothing, and probably coffee, phone, snacks, etc.
Said clips bulge and squeak when you walk so you feel a bit like a mombot
The extra straps and panels are awkward and annoying
The fabric is rough on sore nipples, and it often pills and looks like shit
The styles look like they were designed for somebody else (which is weird given you're the one who’s buying it)
They're almost universally ugly
Wearing the frumpies contributes to the feelings of alienation and loss of self you're already suffering from as a new mom
You have to buy this thing that you don't want because your boobs keep changing size and shape and it hurts to have them flopping around - so you can’t wear what you normally would and you don’t want to wear nothing
And it's a temporary thing you throw out as soon as you can get away with it (because at this point you hate it with a vengeance)
Ultimately, we can bundle these up into three categories:
Nursing bras are overly complicated and annoying
Nursing bras are uncomfortable
It’s this undesirable, short-lived thing that you don’t want but feel like you have to buy
So why is this the thing that we have?
Let's take a quick look at the history of nursing bras (it doesn't take long, trust me).
Here's the very first nursing bra patented by Henry Wolf in 1872:
It’s really what we’ve got today, with a down flap instead of an up flap down and a button instead of a clip.
Next up, we have Albert Glasser’s patent in 1943, which is the true father of the complicated nursing bra:
At least for the modern nursing bra, we’ve pared it down to not include the nightmare of hook and eye fasteners in the front. The men that have thoughtfully invented these tit slingers for us seem to believe that boobs and nursing are a complex engineering puzzle. I’d like to think that at least these were improvements over what was available at the time? At least there was something for the nursing mom who didn’t want to sit at home alone and topless (not that I haven’t indulged in that particular freedom on occasion).
The key problem with comfort, on the other hand, is that nursing bras follow bra styles of the time, and bra styles reflect fashion styles and are generally used force women's bodies into the closest approximation of the trendy body shape determined by beauty standards of the time. In the '20s we let them loose, in the late '40s and '50s, we weaponized them.
And let me tell you, new mom boobs do not want to be shaped. In fact, what they want is to be changeable in both shape and size, especially if you’re nursing.
That doesn't mean that new moms don't want to be sexy, in fact new moms should absolutely feel sexy, because new moms are badasses and badasses are always sexy. But trends have been shifting to a more relaxed, natural boob shape for a while now. Most importantly, sexy is how a bra makes you feel, how it looks on your body, not how it changes your body to fit someone else's standard. Your body has nothing it needs to live up to, your bra needs to live up to your body.
So why are we buying this thing that’s uncomfortable and short-lived and makes us feel like shit?
I say it again, you don't need a fucking nursing bra.
What you need is a bra you can nurse in. And it doesn’t have to be a short-lived piece of crap. You just need one bra that you can be pregnant in, labor in, recover in, and generally kick motherhood’s ass in. Something gorgeous that deserves you.
That’s why we’re here.
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