In search of the perfect cup • SIDE B
Elena Salamanca *
The way to model and standardize the body, whether it is exotic or rare to be a DD cup, is also discrimination and gender violence. And it is also a horror of capitalism that a woman with an exuberant body cannot find a bra of her size in any store, and if she does, it costs almost minimum wage.
My bra is a DD cup. Double De. A DD 32 cup means that the contour of my bust measures 95 centimeters, that is to say that I went over 5 centimeters from the perfection of Miss Universe (90-60-90) and that having a 95-centimeter bust and measuring barely 1.50 I become rather an imperfect woman.
The market knows this. But not women with a Double D cup size bust, they don't even know they are DD or that that size exists. I, for example, knew about it until a few years ago, when I lived for the first time in Mexico.
That time I asked Doña Julia, the lady who cleaned the apartment where I lived, where I could find a tailor or a seamstress.
—What for?
—I need you to sew me a bra
—Do you have your bras made?
—No, I want you to cut a new one, on the back, and sew it back on, they are always very loose on my back.
—What size are you?
—38.
Dona Julia let out a giggle, I felt a little bad.
—You're not 38, if your back is very small and you're skinny, you're a double D cup, look for a bra like that, you'll see.
I went to a store and there was one, only one, 32 DD, expensive. I tried it on, it fit me perfectly, I looked pretty in the mirror, I bought it.
But I had bought a lot of lace bras in any size: 38, 36C, 34D, all expensive because plus sizes are expensive; so I kept looking for the seamstress. I didn't find any nearby, but there was a tailor. I went through a lot of tribulations thinking about whether to bring her the bras or not. I wasn't going to measure them, ever, I was just going to pin down what I had to cut and sew.
Finally my old bras (they had also been cut and sewn by my seamstress in El Salvador) were already very old, so I went. The tailor was amazed but he was very professional and he mended them the same day.
When I paid him, he let me go: “And why cut them, can't you find your size?”
And I, ashamed, 26 years old, Salvadoran in Mexico, raised by Catholics, replied: “It is difficult.”
**
I did not find 32 DD bras in El Salvador. When I got to the department stores, the clerks would laugh at me or be very rude:
—That size doesn't exist.
—You CANNOT BE 32.
—You are surely 38, or 40, look there -and they pointed to large sizes with contempt.
Huge bras like hammocks awaited me, I wanted to cry. Sometimes he cried.
***
A couple of years later, I was in Madrid, my Mexican bras were already old, so I went into a lingerie store, there was ONLY ONE 32DD BRASSIER. «It doesn't matter, I'll take it, how much does it cost?», «60 euros». 60 euro. That is to say: 80 dollars, or a little more, half or a little more than a minimum salary. Imagine in that store a Salvadoran university professor with a very low salary (private universities in El Salvador pay between 150 and 190 dollars PER MONTH for a professor hour class, even with a master's degree). But fortunately I had saved, I knew I was going to buy bras, whenever I travel I buy books and bras, both impossible to find in El Salvador, so I took out the 60 euros and asked:
—Will they have another one?
—New ones coming next week.
And I waited.
The following week I went with my friend Mario Ernesto, we were going to have lunch together and he accompanied me. Mario Ernesto blushed at so much lace, stockings, panties, thongs, and brassieres.
My bra arrived: “Only one came, look at it”.
It was beautiful: pink, lacy.
I've never owned a pink and lace bra, because maybe bra designers think large sizes aren't sexy, maybe they think DD is just a 50-year-old lady with several breastfed children and that's because of clichés of age and youth she cannot be sexy or at least comfortable with her body; Many may believe that a size DD is not a 25- or 30-year-old girl, who has to wear horrible bras, almost girdles, poorly sewn, poorly designed, which hurt the delicate skin of her breasts and give her a complex.
So I bought it.
But this one was lace, so it was more expensive, it cost 80 euros.
Spanish universities can get more than my monthly salary at UCA for a conference on Central American literature. So my presentations on Pedro Geoffroy Rivas and Salarrué paid for my bra.
When I dropped the 80 euros in the box, Mario Ernesto was more shocked than with the thongs.
It was too much money, he said.
When we went out, he invited me to eat, he gave me a book, he didn't let me pay for anything, he felt bad that a woman had to pay so much for a necessary item of daily use; because fashions say that you can't be big, and if you're big, she can only be a porn actress (most of the time without a bra) and not a writer or student.
***
This story is not a case of banality. I have against me being a shoe shopper, loving heels, wearing miniskirts and lipstick, many people may call me frivolous according to a certain cliché. But I tell this story of brassieres, and I buy them, for the well-being of my soul and my body; because while someone might suggest that wearing a bra is a patriarchal imposition and should set me free and not succumb to either the patriarchy or the market, I paid almost minimum dollar wages to protect myself. I can't walk around with my breasts exposed (liberated, they'll say), because I don't believe in that kind of liberation. Paraphrasing Fernand Braudel, A kitchen has done more for women's liberation than not wearing a bra: The stove made women stand up and no longer cook on their knees or crouching; In addition to the metaphor of not continuing to kneel, it prevented him from arthritis and other rheumatoid diseases, and took the metaphor of evolution back to its literalness: getting up to cook and eat like getting up to walk and finally be homo erectus.
***
I am a 32 DD woman and although my family and my partner ask me not to get self-conscious and “flatter” me for it, I am tired of being told on the street:
—Mommy, what breasts.
—What delicious tits, to suck them.
—Yummy, mamacita, finish raising me.
What terrible Oedipus there are in sexual harassers.
***
Several times, babies on buses have touched my breast, they are nursing babies, and I assume they are hungry. Nature endowed me with an allegory of motherhood, and I know that Rubens would have valued my body, but today's society and consumption do not.
***
I am writing this text because not only I have suffered from complexes -feeling ugly, deformed- for years.
I'm writing this because there are adolescents who have hips and breasts greater than 95 or 100 centimeters and can't find clothes in their size, and they suffer and get depressed to buy clothes in their size in maternity departments; because we have to be dressed in some way, it is, according to us, a symbol of civilization; because Latin America has high rates of obesity (Mexico, for example, and in addition to this, it is the country with the most citizens suffering from diabetes), and it is full of franchises that from time to time cut the pattern of their clothing and make it narrower . Extreme.
It is not possible for a woman to have to pay from 60 to 80 euros for a bra of her size. A bra that is not your size, that oppresses your chest, that damages your skin and mammary glands, can even cause nodules (fleshy tumors) in the chest, and this can even be linked to breast cancer.
It is not possible to suffer for the body and make the body suffer in this way: It is a form of violence, gender and economic.
To model the body, to impose how the body should be -in a kind of postmodern eugenics- is to violate women, young or old, who cannot live their corporality and sexuality with happiness.
***
The first time I lived in Mexico it was in an artistic stay; one of my colleagues was the Brazilian writer Maria Alzira Brum Lemus, she, like me, is a petite woman who wears a DD cup. Maria Alzira has had the same problem all her life to find a bra. One day I explained to her the size 32 DD and I showed her my finding: she saw it, found it perfect, and told me:
"I'm going to steal this bra when you don't care, it's so hard to find."
The carving was enlightening, and the end of years of complexes and fatigue -he gets tired, really- of looking for the perfect glass.
In honor of this fight, she created the character of the "Bra Terrorist" in her book Souvenir Novel. A size 30G girl (huge breasts with a narrow back) bombs a lingerie factory, kidnaps the owner, and will only release him if he makes thousands of size 30Gs, for girls with different bodies.
“The line was a sales success (…) The new lingerie influenced the global economy, both official and pirate, since millions of copies of M. bras, as they came to be called, were sold they produced and sold in every corner and shadow of the planet”, says the novel.
I live in Mexico again and yesterday I found a bra in my size. He was the only one, it was very expensive, I bought it.
I think of the perfect drink and I know it's not a luxury.
I think of my grandmother telling me when I was a teenager: "Don't cry, so many women who wear breasts now and you suffer with yours so beautiful and true." I think of the years when I and other women I know have had to pay a lot of money and cut and mend bras on top of that; I think of the cases of women I know who have developed nodules in their chests and at such a young age -20, 30 years old-, their doctors have told them that it is because of the tightness in their chests that they are given bras that are not the right size for them. or they are too tight and they wound them with their whalebones -the skeleton of the brassier-. And I think, above all, about how cruel we are to others: blacks, yellows, browns, fat, short, too tall, women who never marry, those who never have a boyfriend, men who love other men, women who have too small chests (flat, masculine, etc., we call them) and those who have too big chests (mamacita, raise me again, they tell us).
And I await, resolutely, the arrival of the “Bra Terrorist”.
