A Male Perspective On Bras

What One Man Learned From Working At Victoria's Secret

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It was April of 2010, and, after five years, I’d finally graduated from college. An English major with double minors in biology and chemistry, I’d planned on attending dental school to become an oral maxillofacial surgeon. But after a series of disconcerting events, I ended up taking a job at Victoria’s Secret to spend a year studying women. I was on top of the world, really, no longer worrying about taking the DAT or writing my personal statement. All I had to do now was learn about a couple of bras, and how hard could that be?

I came to realize just how naïve this assumption was two hours into my first day on the job. I was ringing up a customer when she noticed she’d grabbed the wrong size. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Let me just call to one of the girls on the floor. They’ll grab it for you.” This is what we were trained to do, and it’s a nice gesture until you realize you have no freaking clue what you’re looking at. It could be a Very Sexy push-up. It could be a Flawless demi. It could be a Cottons full coverage. Or it could simply be a double-pouched water balloon launcher, because, here’s the rub: When you don’t listen to country music, anything with steel guitar and banjo sounds like country music. When you don’t have a discerning palate, anything with pasta and marinara sauce tastes like Italian food. And when you don’t have breasts, anything with two cups and some straps looks like a bra.

It was clear I needed help.

Recognizing the I’m-drowning-over-here tone in my voice, the store manager saw to it that I received schooling in the matter. What resulted was a string of lectures I came to call “The Titorials.” My first was with a girl named Casey, who started me slow, first picking up a bra without padding, having me squeeze it, then picking up a bra with padding and having me squeeze it. “See,” she said, “this is a bra without padding, and this… This is a bra with padding. Feel the difference?” I nodded, squeezing what the FAA would approve as a personal flotation device in the event of a water landing.

My second Titorial was with a girl named Colleen. Seeing as I now understood the difference between a push-up and non-push-up bra, she gave me a more in-depth lesson, walking me through each room, carefully explaining the bra collections within it, and how to tell them apart. It was during this that I started to feel more comfortable feeling like a complete idiot. No matter what sex you are — male, female or Cher — selling bras at Victoria’s Secret is really f*cking hard. The Body By Victoria collection, for example, has eight different bras. There’s the full coverage, the unlined full coverage, the demi, the racerback demi, the push-up, the supermodel push-up, the multi-way and the wireless — which sounds like something that might come with a data plan. Multiply this by the 13 other bra collections in the store, and the only thing that keeps you from having a complete meltdown is the reassurance that each bra has what it is and the size labeled on the band. “If all else fails, it’s there,” Colleen said, which I reassured her all else would absolutely fail.

While the Titorials helped in my quest for bra knowledge, I’ve never been much of an auditory learner. I’m more of a hands-on kind of guy, which can be somewhat tricky when you’re dealing with breasts in a professional setting. As a result, it took me about five months to really feel confident both selling and differentiating the bras in the store.

Because most women didn’t want my help finding a bra, I mainly stuck to helping men, which I found to be relatively easy. Once you got them to focus, they generally had a clear notion of what they wanted to see their wives/girlfriends wearing. The only problem came with sizing. If women were often naively mistaken about their bra size, men were proudly ignorant. They either treated breasts like a trophy bass, exaggerating both size and weight, or they blinked once before saying they had no clue. It was somewhat embarrassing to watch, but I can’t really judge. For years, bra size had been a mystery to me. Yeah, I knew the sizes — 34A, 36B, 36DD — and I knew that the bigger the letters got, the better; but I had no idea what they signified. Was 34 the weight in ounces? Did the letters perhaps signify the amount of water a breast displaced if put in a pool? Or were they both just some kind of a visual estimation, based upon the amount of shadow they cast on a wall when a woman walked in front of a lamp?

It turned out to be much simpler than I thought. The number indicated band size, or the circumference of a torso, while the letter indicated cup size. No, I didn’t know how to measure either of these, but it was OK, as I was probably never going to have to do that. That’s what the girls were for. They did the measuring.