(Sometimes) It's Hard To Be a Woman
- Tracy Grathwohl
- 37 minutes ago
- 4 min read
I got stuck in a dress.
It was a cute white dress, with large flowers. I thought it would be good for summer cocktail parties – not that I have any on the docket. My philosophy is that impromptu cocktail parties can pop up anytime, and one should have a dress at the ready.
Sadly, this dress wasn’t right for me and had to be returned.
Mr. Hockey wasn’t home and couldn’t help when I was taking it off. I managed to pull the dress’s zipper down about 3 inches to lift it over my head – but my body had expanded to fill its entirety, much like a cat squeezing itself into a fishbowl.
I was trapped.
There’s a little-known law of motion that states: “A body’s ingress into a garment cannot be equal to a body’s egress out of that garment.” You’ve never heard of it because this was Sir Isaac Newton’s 58th law of motion. We only studied Newton’s first three laws in high school. The 58th law is only taught in PhD programs. And women’s changing rooms.
I was resigned to wait for Mr. Hockey. But I tried one last time; exhaling until I was deflated enough to wiggle my way out.
This happens to me a couple times a year. The worst is in a store, where your options are ripping it or leaving the dressing room, dress hiked up over your knickers, arms akimbo, to ask a stranger to extricate you.
No woman is immune from Newton’s 58th law. Once, the living legend/icon, Jane Fonda, couldn’t get out of a beaded gown. She slept in it.
With my short arms, it was a miracle I got into the dress. I’ve asked salespeople, friends, and hotel concierges for help zipping up. When I ask Mr. Hockey – a trained mechanical engineer, familiar with zipper mechanics – he grunts, tugs, and asks me to hold the fabric together. Even when my girth isn’t the cause, he sometimes can’t zip it.
How can we solve this? It’s impractical to have a “Downton Abbey” type lady’s maid to help women with the finishing touches of dressing. I bet I could make good money on a Saturday night helping women zip up or down. Ask Jane Fonda.
Or we could have longer zipper pulls. Just saying.
Zipping dresses is only part of our sartorial travails. Let’s talk about bras.
Women think about their bras even more than 12-year-old boys do. Does it show through my top? Is it low-cut enough for this V-neck? Must I handwash it? When can I take it off?
The most uplifting moment of my day is when my boobs are no longer uplifted.
Women need different bras for different circumstances. I own padded bras, strapless bras and underwire bras. I also have the Spice Girls: sporty bra, posh bra, baby bra, ginger bra, and, well, all bras are scary bras.
Not one of those bras are comfortable. Some of them are actively painful. I’m surprised the CIA hasn’t thought of using bras on prisoners during interrogations. A terrorist wouldn’t last under the torture of an underwire.
Not a female terrorist, of course. (Remember, girls can do anything!) She would never buckle.
Torturing terrorists with bras would be a great movie. They could call it “Zero Dark 34C.”
I wish I didn’t have to wear a bra. Some women don’t! But my free-range breasts can’t be left unattended. They need to be contained.
Speaking of containment, Spanx.
I don’t think shapewear works for me due to the Principle of Mass Conservation. (Yippee! More physics!)
The Principle of Mass Conservation states that mass can’t be created or destroyed within an isolated system. If you apply a force to that system, such as a tight spandex tube around its waist, everything inside that system will have to shift elsewhere. Like when you squeeze toothpaste with the cap on.
When I wear shapewear, it feels like my organs have been pushed up into my chest and out, until my arms look like the stuffed, muscle-padded arms of a five-year-old’s Spiderman costume.
Maybe that’s why Skims creator, Kim Kardashian, named her daughter North – as a nod to our intestines moving north.
I can’t wear a shapewear anyway. My upper-middle-aged body’s heat index is a constant 165 degrees Fahrenheit, or roughly the temperature we cook pork cutlets to. If I add a snug, elastic, polymer fabric under my dress, I will combust.
Also, it looks like I’m not wearing it when I do wear it. And it takes me three times as long in the restroom. Spandex is hard to pull down and even harder to pull up when you have a body heat index of a boneless chicken thigh.
Newton’s 59th Law of Motion explains this spandex/peeing phenomenon. It’s best shown in the formula: A fabric’s elastic tension multiplied by a body’s volume of sweat equals the amount of time spent in a hotel ballroom’s restroom. This equation also works for swimsuits.
Speaking of swimsuits: Oh darn, I can’t!
The end of this column is nigh!
I didn’t even get to hair, make-up, or women’s shoes. Not to mention menstruation, motherhood, menopause, mental load, misogyny, and (yikes!) mustaches.
Let me wrap up with this quote: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
Editor, please delete “sometimes” from my title. It should read, “It’s Hard To Be a Woman.”
*The editor of this webiste (me) would have overstruck "Sometimes" from the title, as the writer (me) requested. But I would have to learn how to do this and I don't want to.
Published in The East Hampton Press on June 11,2026
Photograph by Raquel Baires for Unsplash
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