When Chidera Eggerue, now 23, was a teenager, she knew exactly what she wanted for her 18th birthday. “I told my mum: ‘When I turn 18 and get a job, I’m getting a boob job,’” she says, laughing. “Seriously, what hypothetical job for an 18-year-old was ever going to pay for a boob job? They’re, like, eight grand. But I just thought: ‘I’m going to get a boob job and then I won’t be sad about my boobs any more.’”
The south Londoner never went through with the surgery. Instead, she had a revelation about body image. That she, a young woman, not even 18, felt her boobs were “too saggy” and not the perfectly rounded, pert shape that dominates mainstream images of women, was something that needed to be challenged. She decided to leave her boobs as nature intended: without interference – and without a bra.
“At the time, it was only small-boobed women who were ‘allowed’ to not wear a bra – because there wasn’t much to judge,” she says. As a “larger-boobed woman”, her decision attracted a lot of unwanted attention. “People would say: ‘You’re jiggling too much. I can see your nipples. This is bad. Cover yourself up.’ I couldn’t understand why. Every time I asked somebody, the answer was: ‘Because you’re a girl. Because you’re a woman.’ I knew that wasn’t really an acceptable answer. I had to challenge it.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
