Attention, TV: Women Don't Sleep In Their Bras

Poor Abby McCarthy isn't having the greatest divorce. Her ex is living with a CW actress (and no, not one who plays a mom). Her brother can't stop judging her for not having tried harder to make things work. Going public about her problems has put her career as a self-help writer in jeopardy. Her rebound guy stinks at sex. Worst of all, she's about to get a new one ripped for her in this very space. And here's why.

Women do not sleep in bras.

Really, this is more about the FCC's rules about what counts as obscenity in basic cable's 10 PM hour than it is any specific offense about this week's episode of Girlfriends' Guide To Divorce. In fact, the scene prior to the one from which the screen shot above was captured actually pretty cleverly establishes a reason for Abby to have had sex in her bra, like every TV character and no actual woman: Nate, her new trick, sucks in bed, and basically finished before he could even try to check out Abby's nipples. But look, I don't care how awkward or terrible the sex is: after it's over and you're going to try to sleep, the bra comes off.

And yes, I know there's no legal way that Bravo could have shown Abby waking up next to Nate with areolas exposed. But I submit that the Modesty Bedsheet is less unrealistic than the notion that a woman would spend several hours of sleep in a brassiere. I'm sure some women reading this will say they don't even try to take a nap in a bra, and it's probably the same reason they undo their bras and fish them out of their sleeves the second they cross the threshold of their homes at the end of the workday: them shits uncomfortable. I don't care if you're wearing the exact right size -- which, as we all know, most of us aren't -- the combination of inflexible wire pressed into your ribcage and elastic pressed into your back is one most of us want to shed as soon as it's societally acceptable to do so. We don't try to drift off to Dreamland in our half-corsets.

"But a man wrote this episode -- maybe he doesn't know!" Yes, I read the credits and saw that series co-star Paul Adelstein is credited as its author. But even if he has somehow gotten to the age of forty-five without ever having had a conversation with a woman about her lingerie-wearing habits -- hey, his wife Liza Weil has tiny boobies; maybe she doesn't even wear a bra! -- it's not like there was any shortage of women on the set who could have set him straight, from series creator Marti Noxon to Lisa Edelstein, the actor who had to try to sell this complete fraud. Ladies: we were counting on you, and you let us down.

If the idea was that Abby is so repressed about her body that even after having (D+) sex with a new dude, she feels like she has to keep her bosom covered up, then maybe this episode should have come before last week's, in which a solo underwear dance party is just the prelude to her getting her tits caught in a window. But honestly, that was a breast assault that's only a few degrees more violent than the night of a thousand pinches that this bra situation would have caused, which is why almost any woman can back me up in my claim that it does not actually happen in real life, basically ever.