I Feel Weird About Push-Up Bras

I never thought I could falsely advertise to myself, but apparently I can.

Photo by Uliana Kopanytsia on Unsplash

Recently, I read Viv Chen’s amazing piece about her experience as a “self-proclaimed bralette bitch” trying on the most dramatic push-up bras at Victoria’s Secret. I’m a big fan of her work in general (if you’re into fashion, you should subscribe!) and this piece was not only funny and well-written, but got me thinking about my own very tumultuous and complicated relationship with these bras—not as a bralette bitch, but as a T-shirt bra tart.

If you can imagine it, despite all my self-deprecating jokes about my minuscule chesticles, having big boobs used to be a core part of my identity. Okay, let me rephrase that. I’m not talking about having actually big boobs, ones that feel heavy without a bra and cause back pain, the type of boobs that are impossible to hide even if you want to. I’m talking about proportionately big boobs. I know, if you’ve seen my outfit photos, you’re probably thinking this would still be impossible for me to achieve even with a push-up bra, but allow me to explain.

While my middle school years were plagued with fears that I’d never have boobs (and being made fun of by my classmates for “looking like a little boy” didn’t help) my breasts eventually materialized, right as The American Girl Guide To Your Body promised me they would. By high school, they still weren’t big, more smallish-average, but because I have a narrow upper body, they felt like a really good size for my frame. And then, two amazing things happened (for my boobs, anyway.) At eighteen, I went on the birth control pill which added about an inch to my bustline, and then I started playing around with push-up bras. Suddenly, I went from having fairly unremarkable-sized boobs to quite big boobs for my frame…in the right bra. I had never thought that having “big boobs” in any capacity was possible for me. But the minute it became possible, I latched onto this new identity.

I was born in 1989, so while I know the stereotype of millennials’ upbringing was that we all wanted to be stick-skinny size 000 supermodels with zero boobs or butt, this was…not my experience. At all. Girls with “Kate Moss” bodies were taunted for never being able to attract a straight man, or accused of anorexia. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in an area that was heavily Italian and Jewish as opposed to WASP, but the beauty ideal in my high school was to have boobs and butt that were proportionately really big for an otherwise slim body. I even recall going shopping with my mom and hearing another mother with her teenage daughter in the dressing room next to us, loudly joking that “these days, you want people to tell you your ass looks fat in those jeans.” (Read that in the most Jewish-sounding tristate area accent possible.) So while I have to respect the lived experience of feeling like the beauty standard was impossibly prepubescent, straight-shaped and malnourished, this could not have been further from my own experience. I try my hardest to remain credulous when women tell me they were bullied for reasons other than transparent jealousy, for having bodacious boobs and badonkadonks too big for their tiny waists. I try.

I had always known push-up bras existed, but also felt they were, on some level, cheating. False advertising. And I wasn’t deluded enough to think I was only wearing them “for myself.” I was wearing them to look attractive, and I certainly didn’t want a guy to take off my bra and be aghast at the contrast. Yes, I had heard that a “handful was enough,” but certainly, one would prefer a bowlful if given the choice, no? And yet, a handful would seem just fine if you weren’t expecting more! As a result, when I first started shopping at Victoria’s Secret in high school, I drew the line at anything more padded than a basic T-shirt bra, and often chuckled smugly to myself as I fondled the ridiculous gel-filled padding in the push-ups. Who did these women think they were fooling?

But by the time I entered college in 2007, wearing a push-up bra seemed far more expected, and far less like cheating. Skimpy clubwear styles at the time, when advertised, often seemed to feature models with either obvious breast implants or some push-up apparatus. Victoria’s Secret was in its heyday, and almost every ad or fashion show featured bras with abundant padding. Push-up bras went from a shameful thing to a big open “secret,” like dying your hair or wearing heels. Suddenly, I started to wonder if I was restricting myself for no good reason. If everyone else was lifting their boobs to Victoria’s Secret Angel proportions—including the Angels themselves, who were often too skinny to have big boobs without padding—why shouldn’t I?

Alessandra Ambrosio had very small boobs, but had great cleavage on the runway. Surely everyone knew what was going on!

It’s impossible for me to get into the huge impact push-up bras made on me without getting a little TMI about my boobs, assuming that threshold has not already been crossed. Although I joke about how small they are, even after taking up weightlifting and breastfeeding two kids, my boobs are not literally flat. I have a five-inch difference between my ribcage and bust, so while they’re small, they definitely exist. The “problem,” if you will, is that they’re extremely far apart. My boobs never got the memo about covid being over, they’re still standing six feet apart in the CVS checkout line mumbling about how The Daily Show is the only thing “keeping them sane in these unprecedented times.” If I wear something low-cut without a bra, you don’t see any cleavage at all, you see ribs. So even if a push-up bra is not heavily padded, just inching my boobs away from my armpits makes a huge impact in how big they look (I achieve the same effect from many non-padded swimsuits, but last I checked a bathing suit top is not appropriate for day-to-day life.) Anyway, as soon as I realized the absolute magic of pushing them closer together, I had another thought: what if I also made them bigger, not just closer together? How far could I go? How big could I make them? And at what point would a man feel he had ordered a curvy woman on Temu and got…something else? (Okay, we didn’t really have Temu back then, let’s call it AliExpress.)

Me, 2026, low-cut dress for date night, no bra. They disappear into my armpits, but it’s okay.

I became an expert in all the ways to make a push-up bra part of my everyday attire, and I really mean every day. I wanted to keep things consistent, so I only wore tops that accommodated a bra. I had my tricks to get around skimpy halters and tube tops. I invested in those Victoria’s Secret tops with built-in bras, a really good strapless push-up with non-slip elastic on the sides, clear straps for my regular push-ups, and an adjuster which could transform any bra into a backless bra. I was ready for anything the world could throw at me, at least if “anything” began and ended with average boobs. Sometimes, I’d look at girls—even girls with smaller boobs than I had—and felt jealous of them that they could “pull off” strapless tops, as if my push-up bra was inextricably fused to me.

Oh yeah, THE French Connection bandage dress was involved.

And the people around me noticed. Because the birth control and push-up bra discovery happened around the same time—right before college—people assumed I had just gotten my boobs done. I logged into Facebook one morning before going to class and saw a DM from a guy who apparently went to my school but who I didn’t recognize, informing me he had been scrolling through my photos and noticed a “suspicious rate of growth,” asking if I had gotten breast implants. At another point, I was flirting with a guy at a party during my freshman year, and he expressed interest in going out with me, but first wanted to clarify that my boobs were real, because he had a rule against fake ones. In hindsight I think I was being “negged” and I don’t think this rule ever existed. I, regrettably, found myself explaining the mechanisms of the Victoria’s Secret Miraculous “add two cup sizes” bra as opposed to slapping him and storming off.

The night I met my husband, about a year later, I was wearing a dramatic push-up bra with clear straps under a Forever 21 “going out” top. A few photos were taken that night, and yeah, looking back on these bazungas, they looked not only like breast implants but like horrible bolt-on ones that might appear on a contestant on Flavor of Love named Candi. I wondered (and still sometimes wonder) if they had been the main reason my husband approached me in the first place. He insists that he’s really more of an ass guy, but given how dramatic they looked, I find it hard to believe they were not at least part of his equation!

Eventually, he saw what they really looked like, and he didn’t go fleeing for the hills (and neither did anyone before him, quite frankly) so I was correct that the push-up bra did not represent a degree of false advertising that would doom all my relationship prospects. But if the bra impacted anyone’s view of me, it was my own. I had become so inured to how I looked with a push-up bra that I almost forgot that I was wearing it at all. I began to view my “real” size as the size that my boobs were with all the padding, and on the occasion that I wore something without a push-up bra, I felt I looked horrifically masculine and unsexy, even though I used to be mostly fine with that size. As Viv Chen might refer to this phenomenon, I was experiencing “push-up bra dysmorphia.”

It didn’t help that I often received the type of attention that a girl with naturally big boobs might have received, which I experienced on a spectrum from flattery to mild annoyance, but never deep shame. I know getting attention for one’s boobs is typically a negative experience for women, but given that I didn’t experience it at a disturbingly formative age, and given that I’ve always felt inadequate feminine, even some crass-but-harmless attention felt like a compliment. Most importantly, the attention validated my identity as a desirable, feminine woman—something I didn’t think I could be without huge boobs.

When I met my husband’s ex-girlfriend during a trip to his childhood hometown, she honked my boobs (I was wearing a Frederick’s of Hollywood mint green corset in an Ohio dive bar, God help me) and remarked that she was still waiting for hers to come in. (One bit of evidence that my husband might have been telling the truth about not being a boob guy.) Another time, my husband and I were at a restaurant when he went to the bathroom and overheard our waiter telling his coworker that he was having a hard time serving us because “I can’t stop staring at that girl’s tits.” Amused, my husband shared this information with me, and we both found it funny enough to make sure we rounded up our tip to a round number (with no additional cents) and we drew nipples on the two zero’s on the receipt.

But eventually, this phase ended. First of all, around the mid-2010s, the major body trend (at least in my cultural milieu) shifted to a disproportionately large ass, not boobs. (I had always wanted both, but the emphasis had previously been on the boobs.) This was a game-changer for me. Focusing on maximizing the size of my ass did not require any kind of clothing or padding apparatus (padding a butt seemed incredibly wrong in a way that a push-up bra didn’t) just an intense regimen of protein and weightlifting, and maybe gaining a couple pounds. I also happen to be a pear shape—almost all my weight is gained below the waist—so it felt like I had more of a natural advantage with ass than I did with tits. Of course, my ass still wasn’t big enough for my own unrealistic fantasies, but I found that maximizing—and dressing for—my ass was probably a more realistic goal for me than wearing a Miraculous bikini and having to press down on my boobs to wring out the water every time I got in the pool.

My fashion also changed. In my boob era, my nightlife uniform was a mini low-cut bodycon dress, which could explain why I was confused for a sex worker on two occasions (that’s what my husband and I get for having a terrible sense of direction and getting lost in Central Park at 2 AM.) The 2010s brought around different trends which just weren’t as boob-forward: tight mockneck thong bodysuits underneath high-waisted skinny jeans with Jeffrey Campbell Lita boots, off-shoulder tops with chokers, maybe some side boob in one of those American Apparel bodysuits but not a lot of cleavage. As unfathomable as it once would have been to me, my arsenal of push-up bras gathered dust and became obsolete.

It’s 2016, bitches!!! Boobs are OUT!

Then, I went off the pill to try and get pregnant, and I lost about an inch on my bustline, reducing my boobs back to their original high school size. I proceeded to have two kids a few years apart, and the advent of my nursing era and the covid pandemic meant that I just stopped wearing any kind of underwire bra at all. Push-ups were officially off the menu. It was all nursing or wireless T-shirt bras from here on out (and might I recommend Tommy John for that.)

But recently I wondered if maybe I was too quick to cast aside the push-up bras of yore. As Viv noted, more boob-forward styles seem to be in vogue lately, and what better way to wear boob-forward styles than with optimal boobs? My husband knows what my boobs look like now, and he’s seen them at all phases of life, in a variety of shapes and sizes, with two different children attached to them at different points, so if I’m engaging in “false advertising” I’m falsely advertising to people I don’t want to sleep with anyway. I purchased a few push-up bras off Amazon and figured I’d give them a try again, for old time’s sake. And even though these bras were much subtler than the monstrosities I was strapping to my chest in college, I figured they’d be fun to add a little extra oomph in those low-cut date night tops that allow my introverted boobs to hide in my armpits.

But just as I had once gotten used to how I looked in a push-up bra, I had become—thankfully—inured to my natural size over the years. I couldn’t help but find my new push-up bra silhouette to be a little absurd and cartoonish, in a way I wouldn’t describe a woman who naturally had boobs that size. Something about them on my body just felt wrong and imbalanced. Figuring my husband might disagree—he is a man, after all—I showed him how a plunging dress looked with a push-up bra and he just said, “Yeah, I think that’s a bit much.”

So, for now, my push-up bra era is largely over, although I’m keeping them around just in case I change my mind, or in case something compels me to go as Sofia Vergara for Halloween. And even if push-up bras were, in any way, “false advertising,” the only person I regret hoodwinking is myself.

You might also like…