I’ve never been able to do that pony tail thing, but I’ve never been a girly girl, and I never messed with my hair very much. I was born in the late 50s, and grew up in the 60s and 70s. Now, my mother styled my hair during the 60s, during the first part of the decade I was wearing a mini-beehive when she could catch me and hold me down long enough to curl and spray my hair. At the end of the decade, I was sporting long hair, like 99.9% of the younger female population. But I never got into the blowdrying, curling iron, and hot rollers thing of the 70s and later. Occasionally, I’d use my sister’s blow dryer if I wanted to get my hair dry quicker than it would on its own, but that’s very occasionally. I do own a handheld hair dryer now…because it helps immensely when I defrost the freezer.
I learned how to unhook and remove my bra while wearing a shirt from my Aunt Vinnie. I’ve occasionally made reference to my fictional Cousin Vinnie, but I do have a real life Aunt Vinnie, and she was in the habit of removing her bra when it became too uncomfortable, as long as she was with just the family at home. I’ve always hated wearing bras, and this skill fascinated me, so I practiced it until I could slip that bra off in no time at all.
Grandma Bodoni used to wear corsets, which had whalebone stays. She was skilled at slipping the stays out of the corsets without removing her outer clothes.
You don’t have to take your bra off everyday without taking off your shirt, but sometimes it’s just more practical. For example, in the locker room during gym class, most girls are pretty shy about whipping their clothes off, even around other girls unless, of course, one of those girls starts rubbing you with baby oil or something ;). And if your knockers are big enough and/or you have a co-ed gym class like I did, you’ll need to put on a sports bra so you don’t flop all over the place. So you learn how to take off your clothes without, well, taking off your clothes. This is also handy for when you’re wearing clothes to lounge in, like PJs, and don’t really want to change out of your shirt 'cause you’ll sleep in it, but don’t feel comfortable wearing a bra while you sleep.
For what it’s worth, I learned how to take mine off under my shirt at camp when I was 11 or 12. It was a co-ed camp and, while we had separate cabins from the boys, we didn’t have any shades on the windows (the cabin was mostly just something for shelter in case it rained), so you could see straight in.
I figured it out at camp - easiest way to get the thing off but stay in shirt if you weren’t sure whether or not the boys were looking.
When everybody was oohing and aahing over the Flashdance move, I was just puzzled - everybody acted like it was something so special and sexy, and I just thought “what, people didn’t already know how to do this?”
No, I mean we can take off our bras without even thinking because we do it every day, the under the shirt thing isn’t rocket surgery once you have the basics whipped.