The over the shoulder boulder holder

What do an egg cup, a tea cup, a coffee cup and a challenge cup have in common? 

They are the original cup sizes for bras.

Who knew? 

Having just experienced a female lingerie emergency, I thought I’d find out more about this garment that I either love or loathe.

I suppose I better own up to the nature of the emergency. Well, it wasn’t a 911, but it did draw blood. I was happily chatting away to my male colleagues when all of a sudden, the underwear on my, rather nice bra, stabbed me brutally in the boob.

 

“Are you okay?”

“Um… yes, I’m fine,” I replied breathlessly and a little desperately trying to find a way out of the conversation and into the sanctuary of the ladies’ room.

“Seriously, what happened? You look pale?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“Why are you crossing your arms like that?”

“You want to know? Fine. I tell you. My bra just tried to stab me in the heart! OKAY!”

 Funny, how quickly they vacated my office and left me to try and extricate myself. Of course, it would be one of those days when you can’t take 20 minutes to run to the mall and buy a new one, so I had to resign myself to having one boob up one boob down for the day.

In fact, when asked about my most embarrassing moments, underwear malfunctions feature high on my list. But that is another story.

The bra is officially 115 years old. However, it has appeared in history all the way back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Minoans. Then of course we had the corset. Now, I am not an advocate of wholesale whale slaughter, but I venture to suggest that whalebone might be more comfortable than the steel underwire that just almost gave me a mastectomy.

By 1900 several “emancipation garments” had been designed and patented. One rigid metal structure resembling a large dustbin was designed by Henry Lesher. Thank the Lord it didn’t catch on. Olivia Flynt had a “bust supporter” that sort of designated each boob into a pocket. Charles Moorhouse offered a “breast-enlarging garment” complete with BDSM rubber straps and cups.

In 1907, French Vogue coined the term brassiere or bra and voila here we are. Mary Phelps Jacobs is widely recognised as the architect of the bra. In a very Scarlet o’Hara fashion crisis she made a bra from two silk hankies and some ribbon. Not quite as impressive as the ballroom curtains, but functional nonetheless.

Credit for the first brassiere usually goes to Mary Phelps Jacob, a 19-year-old girl-about-Manhattan who, in 1910, bought a sheer evening gown for a party. The whalebone corset that was supposed to define her figure actually poked out of the plunging fabric. What was a girl to do? She and her maid dug two silk hankies out of a drawer, sewed them on to a length of pink ribbon, added some string and tucked her breasts in place. Girlfriends asked if she would make a similar device for them. Then somebody paid her a dollar to do so, and she took the hint.

Now corsets went out of style with the French Revolution, or started to, but really ended up on the trash heap of history with the advent of World War 1. Corsets were outlawed, apparently the steel was needed to build battleships. Who knew. By World War 2 women in the forces had to wear bra’s for “protection”? The advent of the bulletproof vest?

The only real blip on the sales horison of the bra came in the 1960s with the bra-burning Germaine Greer. When Ira Rosenthal, wife of William, the minds behind our current cup size conundrum and the Maidenform bra, was asked if she was worried, she replied that she had gravity on her side. Sure enough once the bra burning teens became breast-feeding baby boomers, they were back in Maidenforms.

Then along came Larry Nadler, the MBA behind the Wonderbra. It claimed to the first bra to empower woman rather than disempower them. I think that is a pretty lofty statement for a bra, but hey, its advertising.

What is more bizarre is what goes into making my Victoria’s Secret over the shoulder boulder holders. The Today Show says, “Even the simplest bra is composed of complex industrial parts that require the expertise of chemical engineers, biomechanics scientists, veteran seamstresses and color specialists. It takes hundreds of machines to produce…”

 

Did you know:

• Caterpillar spit and crude oil are among the ingredients of some bras
• Over 4,000,000 new bras are created on average every day
• Women own an average of 6.5 bras (The half bra, is what I was reduced to with the underwire crisis – we keep these in the hope that we can fix them, which we can’t)
• In the last 15 years, the average bust size has increased from 34B to 36C
• How many ounces in a cup? An A cup – approximately 8 fluid ounces; B cup – 13 ounces; C cup – 21 ounces; and D cup – 27 ounces. They were originally known as egg cup, tea cup, coffee cup and challenge cup
• Women spend around $16 billion a year on bras

(I found these on http://www.intimateguide.com/bras/bra-history-101-with-nifty-vintage-photos/)

Cleaning out the closet

“Don’t worry. My son is gay. Once you get over the gay thing it’s not so bad. Here, have another drink.”

In life as in music timing is everything. Arguably there is no perfect time to spring this on your parent, but some times are better than others. The night before your Matric finals, might not be one of them.

I know you think the world is all about you.

You can’t help it; you are an 18-year-old boy.

I forgive you.

I don’t know if your father will.

Here is the thing.

It is not that you are gay.

It is that you are having sex.

You know how you feel about your parents getting it on?

Multiply that by about 1 000 and you may have inkling of how they feel about you doing it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.

Let’s take the Matric finals first. Your father is terrified for you. He’d write those exams for you in an instant. He’s worried that you haven’t studied enough, that the education he gave you will fall short, that you won’t be able to achieve your dreams and so on. He also has to deal with the fact that in two months his baby boy will be moving out and going to Varsity. He knows what happens at Varsity and he is panicking – a lot.

Then you add into the mix that not only are you sexually active, but also have been active enough to make a decision on your orientation. Now he is remembering the Catholic Church trials in the States and wondering if you’ve been abused. Then he remembers all the times you’ve had a mate crash over in his house and he’s feeling a little freaky. 

Let’s put this in perspective. I’m not gay, but back in the murky depths of time, I was young once too. It unfolded like this…

Age 17

My father: “I’m going to the pharmacy, do you need anything?”

My mother: “No, but pick up your daughter’s pill while you’re there.”

He went to the pharmacy and was appalled to given a box of birth control. He was convinced it was a mistake. It wasn’t. Still, better safe than sorry he thought. She’s is just being careful and is taking it for medical reasons totally unassociated with sex.

Age 20

My father and my boyfriend pass each other in the hallway emerging from different showers.

We could just have been cuddling. Right?

Age 21

“Dad, I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

Okay, he reasoned, two bedrooms in the house, everything is still okay.

Age 23

“I’m getting married!”

Perhaps it won’t be consummated.

Age 25

“I’m having a baby!”

This was when the proverbial penny dropped with a thundering crash.

My father looked across at my husband and in the face of incontrovertible proof had to accept that I was sexually active.

I don’t think he has ever quite got over it.

You see, no matter you old you are or how grown up you feel, your Dad will always see you as the tiny newborn baby he held in his arms, the little boy he taught to ride a bike and as his son.

Okay, a Victoria Secret underwear model might have been an easier sell than the captain of the rugby team, but hey, he’ll get over the “gay” thing, just not over the “my son having sex” thing. Ever.

Whether gay or straight, flinging your sexuality in your parents’ faces can lead to disastrous consequences – in my case, my father threatened to move to Saudi Arabia and put me in a burka.

They don’t flaunt their sex life in front of you, so show some respect and conduct yours with a little bit of discretion.

And by that I do not mean in the backseat of your dad’s BMW.