Young Brunette Girl In Black Brassiere And Stockings

Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch has been associated with the 'bra burning movement' because she pointed out how restrictive and uncomfortable a bra in that time period could be. "Bras are a ludicrous invention," she wrote, "but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression." For some, the bra remains a symbol of restrictions imposed by society on women: "...the classic burning of the bras...represented liberation from the oppression of the male patriarchy, right down to unbinding yourself from the constrictions of your smooth silhouette."
Some people question the medical or social necessity of bras. An informal movement advocates breast freedom, top freedom, bra freedom, or simply going braless.
Bra opponents believe training bras are used to indoctrinate girls into thinking about their breasts as sexual objects. In their view, bras are not functional undergarments but simply exist to make the body more sexy and appealing. Feminist author Iris Young wrote that the bra "serves as a barrier to touch" and that a braless woman is "deobjectified", eliminating the "hard, pointy look that phallic culture posits as the norm." Without a bra, women's breasts are not consistently shaped objects but change as the woman moves, reflecting the natural body. Unbound breasts mock the ideal of the perfect breast. "Most scandalous of all, without a bra, the nipples show. Nipples are indecent. Cleavage is good—the more, the better..." Susan Brownmiller in her book Femininity took the position that women without bras shock and anger men because men "implicitly think that they own breasts and that only they should remove bras."
In October 2009, Somalia’s hard-line Islamic group Al-Shabaab forced women in public to shake their breasts at gunpoint to see if they wore bras, which they called "un-Islamic". Those found to be wearing a bra were publicly whipped because bras are seen as "deceptive" and to violate their interpretation of Sharia law.