Busting out

Women pay good money for big boobs, but I never felt comfortable with my breasts. Now it's finally time to face down my fears and find a bra that fits.

By Sarah Hepola

Read more: Body Image, Breasts, Lingerie, Bras, Life, Sarah Hepola

Dec. 10, 2007 | I was in the middle of a semi-naked makeout session with the man I was (foolishly) dating when he interrupted to ask a question.

"What size are those?" He meant my breasts.

"Umm ... double D's?" It's a sign of bad dirty talk when a sentence ends in a question mark. ("And now I'm going to ... spank you?")

"What are they really?" It seemed to matter to him, which was annoying. I probably should have realized, in this moment, that I was in a ridiculous, dead-end relationship with a guy whose best asset was his dropped R's. Instead, what struck me was this: I did not know my bra size. And I never had.

Well, I could hazard a guess. I was something bigger than double D. I was a 34 ridiculous. A 34 pain in the ass. Whatever I was, it was something I had avoided knowing, something I had hid from myself, like refusing to step on the doctor's scale for, like, three decades.

"I don't know," I finally said, tugging my shirt back on.

"Well, they're huge!" he said.

Yeah, OK. They are also that.

It must sound like I'm bragging. Would you believe that I'm not? A gajillion porno sites and essentially all of modern pop culture would suggest having big boobs is a wonderful thing, an aspirational thing; hey, people pay good money for these puppies. But for me, it's something I never wanted, something that never fit what I felt like inside, something I try badly to ignore. Unfortunately, most people don't return the favor. People talk about my boobs. People make jokes about them. And eventually, I started making jokes about them, too. Recently, I was standing outside a bar when a gay man I'd never met before asked if he could squeeze them. And the kicker? I said yes.

But underneath all the good-natured self-mockery and the saucy, low-cut tops, there is something else: I am embarrassed by my knockers. And the fact that something I am embarrassed about is the first thing people notice about me? Well, that kinda sucks. I feel like I could save a baby from a burning building, I could cure cancer with glitter alone, and I would still be referred to as "Sarah, you know, the short one with the big tits."

I had my first bra fitting in the sixth grade, about a year after I needed it. It was an amateur affair performed by my older cousin, an expert on scratch-and-sniff stickers but hardly lingerie. Since hitting puberty at the ambitious age of 9 years old, I had refused to take off any clothes in public, and so my cousin placed her flimsy A-cups over my T-shirt.

"It doesn't exactly fit," she told me.

Yeah, but it would do. It would have to do! I wasn't going to a mall to get groped by some silver-haired saleslady, tape measure draped around her wrinkled neck, smelling of powder.

I'll sum up my early adolescence like this: I wore T-shirts in the pool. I showered alone. I learned that clever ruse of changing clothes but never being naked. I tried to be terribly quiet about all this, because if I was terribly quiet, then all of it just might disappear.

Which is the kind of magical thinking that got me to the age of 33, not knowing the size of my breasts. I don't need an "Oprah" episode and a thousand women's magazine articles and the cast of "What Not to Wear" to tell me I'm in the wrong cup size. My breasts spill out the top. (I was horrified to discover the tabloid press had a name for this: quadriboobage!) My breasts spill out the bottom. They spill out everywhere boobs can spill out, basically. But even if my breasts never fit what I felt inside, it seemed like at some point -- at some point! -- I should still have a bra that fit.

Most chain stores and mall department stores now offer bra sizing (thank you, Oprah and a thousand women's magazine articles and the cast of "What Not to Wear"), but they won't do me much good. Gap Body and Victoria's Secret stock no larger than a double D. One of the most famous purveyors of women's lingerie, Calvin Klein, makes selected bras as large as a size D but even those seem intentionally designed to fit only small-breasted women, a decision that is not only annoying but also downright bad business, like making jeans exclusively for tall, skinny people. (I once met a Calvin Klein executive, and when I told her I had a complaint about their bras, she grabbed my hand and said, "We know. We totally know.") I was delighted, nearly clapping in the aisles, to find an Elle MacPherson bra at Bloomingdale's in an E-cup. For one thing, it almost-kinda fit. For another, it was totally slamming.

But to find a bra that perfectly fit me -- special me, wonderfully endowed me -- I would have to make a journey to one of the boutiques for larger-busted women. A quick side note: I'm 5-foot-2, and I wear mostly medium-size clothes, and my foot is a 6, the size often chosen for display because it looks so damn adorable. I remember, years ago, my best friend complaining of the agony of having size 10 feet. Even if stores did stock her size, the shoes looked ungainly in a size 10. It was humiliating. It made her feel grotesque. At the time, I just thought, sheesh, what a bunch of wasted energy. So, OK: I get it now. "Grotesque" would be the word running through my mind as I headed to my first bra fitting. Grotesque, humiliating and also nervous.

Town Shop is located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, home of well-heeled housewives, which is exactly where I would imagine fussy boutique lingerie stores to be. Because this is one of the best-known lingerie boutiques in Manhattan, I expected a certain decorum, the whole fussy Russian grandmother with a look of disdain and a tape measure. But no one pulls out a tape measure. No salesperson appears over the age of 45. No one smells of powder, or examines the circumference of my breasts with a squinty frown. And can you believe I am actually disappointed by this?

I approach the counter and interrupt a group of young, attractive black and Latina women laughing behind the counter.

"I need to get fitted for, like, a bra or something." Suddenly, I am in sixth grade again.

One of them takes me by the hand and leads me into a dressing room, where we stand there, staring at each other.

"What happens next?" I ask.

"Show them to me," she says.

"How?" I wasn't expecting a shrimp dinner and roses, but I wasn't expecting this.

She laughs. "Take off your shirt. Come on, it's a girl thing."

So this is her approach, and it probably works for most women. It's casual. Just us girls. You know, like all the slumber parties we had, when we hung out in our PJs, had pillow fights, and did exercises to increase the size of our chests, like those scenes in Judy Blume's "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret?" Except I didn't go to slumber parties like that. I love Judy Blume, but when I read that book, at the age of 9, I wanted to throw it across the room.

But I take off my shirt anyway. She stares at me and brings back bras that she has guesstimated to be my size. (She is correct, as it turns out.) They look like I expect: Beige and giant, like you could parachute out of a plane with them. I try them on and she is surprisingly hands-on with me, running one finger along each seam, sticking a finger deep in the crevasse of my cleavage and rooting around, jiggling things unexpectedly. Even my boyfriend and my doctor aren't this thorough.

Next page: It's as if the doctor told you your penis size, and each time you came into a store, you had to announce it