Ladies, Let's Talk About Boob Sag

“I wish there was a receptacle for my pants at the door,” my husband said. “So when I got home from work — wham! — off with the pants!”

“I want that for my bra,” I said.

He edged away slightly at the manic enthusiasm in my voice. Because girls, real talk: Bras suck. All bras. The super-padded bras, the pointy underwire bras, the smooshy sports bras. The bras you see advertised on Facebook as The Perfect Bra or The One or The Whateverthefuck. Half the human race is supposed to truss up their titties in some constrictive brace that stabs at our milk ducts, digs into our shoulders/chest/back, and worsens the terrible scourge of boob sweat.

It’s the price we pay, we tell ourselves, for perky, round, and symmetrical tits. We’re so obsessed with perfect tatas that we discuss whether or not pregnancy will make them “fall down” and “how we can pick them back up.” Because saggy boobs? Well, that’s a fate worse than death. At least that’s what whole corners of the internet would tell you.

Brake screech, ladies. Full stop. This obsession with perky boobs is stupid AF. We talk a lot about body positivity here at Scary Mommy: loving your body no matter what; loving it for what it can do, not for its adherence to conventional beauty standards; realizing that all bodies are beautiful, no matter their size or shape. And body positivity doesn’t just apply to body weight and size, it also applies to the shape of our breasts.

Listen, ladies, our tits are fine the way they are. More than fine. They’re amazing. Spectacular. Itty-bitty or enormo, small brown nipples or giant pink ones, perky or saggy — your boobs are the bomb.

Here’s an experiment: Take off your top and any oppressive undergarments (Okay, not oppressive. We’re not advocating bra burning here). Parade into the room where your significant other is watching TV/eating cereal/brushing their teeth. Watch their reaction to your braless, not-Angelina-Jolie-in-Tomb-Raider tits. This should convince you that your boobs are amazing, no matter how many children you’ve birthed, no matter how many children you’ve nursed, no matter what your cup size or how far they hang down. Your ladies are, quite simply, amazing.

But you don’t — and shouldn’t — need external approval for your sag. Rachel Pavlik, blogger at RachRiot, says that every Sunday, she and her over 38,000 fans celebrate “The Saggeth” (like the Sabbath, get it?), during which they brag about their bralessness. “I worship wobbly every week, faithfully,” Rachel says. Sometimes her fans post pics, and “they tell me if they’re keeping the saggeth sacred or not.” She started the whole thing as a joke because she hates her bra, but she hopes it also promotes body positivity.

Mallorie Dunn, founder of the company SmartGlamour, admits that most women have a little boob sag. SmartGlamour is a clothing company for people of all “shapes, sizes, heights, ages, identities, and styles,” and that includes boob styles. Dunn says that she hates bras and finds them uncomfortable; as an adult, she says, “[I did] a lot of questioning about body standards […] and I started questioning why we even wear bras.” Sagging breasts, she says, “are supposedly a sign of aging or extra fat — both which are huge no-nos in our society.”

But that’s not the way it should be, and that’s not the way her clothing company works. “We should be able to present ourselves exactly as we’d like, without critique from others. We are not on this earth to be consumed — we are here to make a difference, bring joy, create art, etc., and the perkiness of our chest or shape of our breasts has zero effect on that.”

Amen to that.

Dunn reminds us that “There is no right way for a body to look.” And that includes breasts.

Because the Saggeth cometh, ladies. One day, we will look down and see our nipples nearer to our toes than they were in college, when our breasts were perky and pointed and high. Our tits may look “matronly.” Our tits may look “saggy.” But our tits are our tits. Yes, we need to save the tatas — an important cause. But our breasts call for another type of activism. Let’s free the tatas! Free them from shame, from guilt, from mainstream beauty standards.

Because our boobs are, indeed, spectacular.