The Guide to Getting It On (141 page)

Saggy and Happy in Papua

In Papua, New Guinea, grown women parade their saggy breasts with pride. It’s considered a sign of childishness or immaturity for a woman in Papua to have the kind of breasts that Americans value. In fact, when ladies in Papua are getting catty, they might accuse someone of having the taut round breasts of a younger woman.

To the traditional Papuan male, the surgically stuffed breasts of American actresses would be a big waste of time and money. And the traditional Papuan woman would think to herself, “Why would a woman want to do something crazy like that to her breasts just when they were starting to sag?”

In our culture, breasts have been often been regarded as the crown jewels of feminine appeal. For whatever reason, American breasts are covered in public. But in Africa and the South Pacific, women have walked around for centuries with their breasts bare. The men in those cultures don’t get much of a rise from women’s breasts. Instead, it’s the parts that are covered up, namely the buttocks, that the men tend to find erotic.

Imagine what a dent it would have put in the lingerie, porn and plastic-surgery businesses if women in America were always topless and breasts weren’t considered sexy? The entire
Playbo
y empire would have never been, and Victoria’s Secret would have started with thongs instead of bras.

War Bonds and Liberty’s Breasts

To see how breasts were starting to be sexualized in America, consider World War I “Liberty Bonds” posters featuring Lady Liberty.

In the first poster, Liberty is a sturdy woman with the sexual appeal of a truck driver. The only way you can tell she is a woman is by the endless yards of drapes that are covering every inch of her body except for her manly, muscled arms and her stern, angular face. After the release of this poster, bond sales continued to sag.

Months later, the next poster was released. Liberty had become less manly and she was even a bit sensual. A year later, by the time the fifth “Buy Bonds” poster was out, Liberty was quite feminine and scantily clad. She looked like she had been dressed by the people at Trashy Lingerie instead of being outfitted in a drapery shop. While her breasts were by no means large, they were taut and had an erotic edge. You actually had to look twice to see if any material from her nearly see-through gown was covering them. By the end of World War I, Uncle Sam was learning what it takes to sell bonds.

Twenty years later, during the second World War, American soldiers consumed six million copies of
Esquire Magazine
. Perhaps this is because it showcased Vargas girls with their massive, gravity-defying bosoms. It was during World War II that pinup girls became famous. The women who prepared the pinup models for the photography shoots would stuff the models’ bras with layer after layer of felt pads. They felt this would help lift the soldiers’ morale, among other things.

Birth of the Bra

For several centuries, the corset was the undergarment that supported the weight of women’s breasts. The first brassiere wasn’t patented until the time of the Civil War and it didn’t appear in the marketplace until the late 1800s. It would be another twenty years after the end of the century before the brassiere would win widespread acceptance among American women. Several elements needed to converge for the bra to knock out the corset.

According to Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau in their excellent book
Uplift—The Bra in America,
here are some of the changes that needed to occur in women’s lives for the bra to become popular:

• A large increase in the number of women involved in physical activities such as bicycle riding, golf, tennis, and swimming. It is difficult to do these things while wearing a corset.
  
• A major increase in the number of women in the workforce. For instance, there were virtually no female telephone operators in the 1880s. By the 1920s, with the explosion of telephones, there were huge numbers of female operators. These operators needed to reach across large switchboards to plug in cords to complete each call. This would have been difficult to do while wearing a corset with bones sewn into it.
  
• The materials and design of the bra had to improve. Bras needed to fit better, have adjustable straps, be able to fasten easily, and they needed to have soft cups with underwiring to help lift and separate the breasts. The latter, when first introduced in 1910 by brassiere visionary Madeleine Gabeau, seriously clashed with the monobosom or monobreast look of the day. The monobosom look made women appear as though they had no defined breasts or cleavage. It was the bodice equivalent of wrap-around sunglasses. Needless to say, there needed to be significant changes in women’s fashion for the bra to nose out the corset.
  
• Women would need to start wearing ready-made clothing rather than having clothes custom made, and the price of the bra had to come down to fit the budget of the “new” working woman.
  
• A further stumbling block to acceptance of the bra was the lack of a universal sizing code. It wasn’t until 1933 that a bra manufacturer proposed sizing bras according to cup sizes A, B, C and D.
  

World War II—Bad for Adolf, a Boon for the Bra

Before World War II, many American women had never worn pants. But once women began manning America’s War Machine, pants are what they wore. Most women were not prepared for this. Articles began appearing in women’s magazines giving tips and suggestions for how to wear pants. With the changes brought about by World War II, American women weren’t just wearing pants and bras, they were punishing them.

This is the first time in history that welders, riveters, and ship builders wore bras, or admitted to it anyway. Bra design needed to seriously evolve to accommodate the range of motion of the new female workforce. Yet the supply of bra-making materials such as rubber, cotton, metal, and rayon was now rationed and in short supply.

It required 1,000 pounds of rubber to build an airplane, 1,750 pounds of rubber to build a tank, and 150,000 pounds of rubber to build a battleship. Yet America’s main supply for rubber had been through Asia—a trade route that evaporated with the beginning of hostilities. Without rubber there was little elastic with which to make bras. It was not easy for bra manufacturers to make it through the war!

Not only were bras keeping Rosie the Riveter’s breasts from flopping, one bra manufacturer was given a secret contract by the government to produce special vests that carrier pigeons could wear. The vests, which employed much of Maidenform’s bra technology, allowed paratroopers to parachute while holding carrier pigeons. The pigeons were used for communications when radio silence was essential, such as right before D-Day. Along with making pants a part of women’s wardrobes, World War II also gave the bra, with its increasingly pointed cups, a new name: the Torpedo.

Foundations Start to Shake & Bras Become Sexy

By the end of World War II, actresses started sprouting seriously pointed breasts. It was as if the sultry Vargas Girl drawings were suddenly hopping off the pages of
Esquire
and coming to life. Books like
Peyton Place
were bringing small-town sleaze into the public eye, and the Kinsey reports on the sexuality of Americans shocked and intrigued the masses. Sex was in the air!

Shortly after World War II, the Sweater Girl started to appear. When viewed from the side, Sweater Girl actress Lana Turner’s breasts came out at a 90 degree angle. This was achieved by a bra which was the latex equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge. A similar two-cupped engineering marvel called the “Bullet Bra” sold in the millions.

1947 was the year when Frederick Mellinger opened the first Frederick’s of Hollywood. Millions of Americans were seeing his sexy magazine ads and receiving his Frederick’s catalogue. Frederick’s teased and titillated customers with their Peek-A-Boo brassiere and half-moon stick-on brassiere.

By 1949, Maidenform had begun its Dream campaign, which showed women wearing bras and flowing skirts saying things like, “I dreamed I danced all night in my Maidenform Bra” or “I dreamed I won the election in my Maidenform Bra.” One of the Maidenform ads from 1962 showed a sexy young woman wearing only a bra with a bare midriff, a long tight skirt, and elbow-length gloves. She was standing next to a large bull with one hand sensuously stroking one of the bull’s big horns. The caption read, “I dreamed I took the bull by the horns in my Maidenform Bra.” Only a blind person would have missed the sexual innuendo of the ad. Many of today’s feminists would have concerns about this notion, saying that it implied women’s power was dependent on their sexuality or sexual allure. Nonetheless, like their gutsy mothers who built our planes and tanks in World War II, women in the 1960s, with their Maidenform bras, were as much of a force to be reckoned with.

The 1950s also gave birth to the inflatable bra, which gave a woman the option of pulling a tube out of each breast cup and filling it up to the desired level of allure. This was also helpful if the woman was flying in a plane and it went down over the ocean.

In 1970, Victoria’s Secret emerged to grab the sexy-bra baton from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Frederick’s had acquired a sleazy edge, while Victoria’s Secret screamed “classy and elegant.” Victoria’s Secret suddenly worked its way under women’s blouses and into their pants. American women no longer needed to blush or make excuses to enter a Victoria’s Secret as they had in the later Frederick’s years. And if the thousand-or-so Victoria’s Secret stores weren’t enough, millions upon millions of Victoria’s Secret catalogues have been read by American women and men from coast to coast. Unfortunately, there has been a price to be paid for the new elegance and sexual allure—a bra from Victoria’s Secret often costs two or three times as much as a similar design from Sears or Target.

The bra is the final outpost that separates the outside world from the sensuous breast. Because of what it covers, the bra has achieved a kind of fetish quality for both men and women. That fetish quality has reached new heights in the last few decades when rock icons like Madonna started wearing designer underwear on the outside rather than on the inside. Foundations were shifting once more.

Crossing Your Heart from 1920 to Today

Bra and breast fashion has yo-yo’ed over the years, going from boy-like breasts to the Torpedo, and back again. In the 1920s, the flat-chested look was in fashion. By the 1930s, the full-busted look was back. By the 1940s, women started calling the brassiere a “bra.” Bras and panties were populating underwear drawers nationwide.

During the first wave of 1960s feminism, the popular saying
Burn Your Bra
came into being, as if bras were a ball and chain placed on women’s chests by male jailers. Yet women hold almost half of the bra patents that have been awarded, and women have owned a number of bra-manufacturing plants. There’s never been a glass ceiling holding women back from the higher ranks of corporate bradom.

Far from holding women back, the bra was designed to hold parts of them up. It was made to help women deal with the discomforting pull of gravity. Of course, considering that breasts weigh from eight ounces to ten pounds, gravity has meant different things to different women.

Since the 1970s, some women have been trading in their natural breasts for surgically-enhanced models where the Torpedo Bra of the 1940s seems to be sewn into their chests.