The Guide to Getting It On (142 page)

The First Falsies

In case you think that insecurity about the size of body parts is a newly-acquired disease in America, some of the first falsies could be ordered through the Sears Catalogue in the late 1890s. They were called “bust pads” and were described as helping to “plump up the bosom.” The same Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue with the bust pads also sold “The Princess Bust Developer, a New Scientific Help To Nature, If Nature Has Not Favored You.” The Princess Bust Developer promised to enlarge and shape the bosom. It included a cream that was called “Bust Cream or Food, Unrivaled for Enlargement of the Bust,” and a pump that looked like a toilet plunger. This sort of thing is still being advertised in magazines and on late-night TV!

For those of you who think that body-part insecurity only belonged to women, dozens of ads from the
Police Gazette
in the 1890s promised solutions for enlarging the penis.

No Room for Misfits

It is estimated that 80% of women aren’t wearing the right bra. It’s not like they accidently put on someone else’s bra, but they might as well have. It takes a real effort to get the right bra size. Bra cup sizes can range from A to H, with stops in between at B, C, D, DD, E, F, FF, G and GG. There are also a large number of options for rib cage and back sizes.

If you compare the chests of two women who wear 36-C bras, their breasts can be shaped very differently. One woman’s breasts might be shaped like eggplants, another’s like cones.

Many women ignore that their breasts change size and shape over time. Just because you were a 36-B two years ago doesn’t mean you are a 36-B today. Some breasts undergo significant changes in tenderness and size during the menstrual cycle. A bra that might have been just fine on day one might be uncomfortable on day 27. Also keep in mind that your breast size can increase if you go on the birth-control pill, and might decrease if you go off of it.

Bra shopping is not the sort of thing you should do by mail order, and you would be well-served to seek out a lingerie shop where the sales help has been fitting bras since the beginning of time. Avoid the sales clerk who is chewing gum and hasn’t finished high school. Also avoid bras where there are bulges in the armpits or if the bra makes your breasts go out to the side. Your breasts shouldn’t bulge along the top of the cups. And keep in mind that one company’s 40-DD might be another company’s 38-E.

Not only do you want a bra that fits and feels great through a full range of body motions, but you want one that holds up to repeated washings. It needs to support you in a way that keeps the ligaments in your breasts from stretching. Otherwise, there’s not much point in wearing one.

Purchasing a bra isn’t something a woman should do on the fly, and she shouldn’t try to do it with two small children in tow. A caring partner will make sure that a woman has plenty of time to try on every bra in the store if she needs to.

Whether breasts are large or small, they are attached to the chest by suspensory ligaments. These ligaments are not elastic. Once they stretch they don’t snap back. In her
Breast Book
, Dr. Miriam Stoppard recommends that young girls be given good supporting bras to wear, and that a woman should not go braless for long if she does not want her breasts to sag. (This would be a hard sell in places like Papua.)

NOTE:
A Consumer Reports test compared a $127 LaPerla Vintage bra, a $45 Victoria’s Secret Ipex demi bra, and a $11 Gilligan & O’Malley padded demi bra from Target. Of the three, the $11 bra from Target had better cup molding, more comfortable underwiring, fit well and held up better after three washings.

Highest Recommendation:
You will be hard-pressed to find a more interesting book on the bra than
Uplift–The Bra in America
by Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau, University of Pennsylvania Press. This book is the kind of marvel that should be—but seldom is—the staple of America’s university presses. It is better researched than most of the other books on women’s foundations, but it doesn’t insult the reader with poor editing or incomprehensible sentences. In addition to exploring changes in fashion,
Uplift
shows the evolution of the bra within different social and economic contexts. If you want a good read about a fascinating subject,
Uplift
is a great choice.

If you are interested in more about corsets, consider the highly intelligent writings of Valerie Steele. Ms. Steele has managed to anger male corset enthusiasts because she calls their practice of wearing women’s corsets a fetish. (Where would she ever get a silly idea like that?) Men who are strapping themselves into women’s corsets are concerned that Ms. Steele is giving them an undeserved stigma. She’s also managed to anger some academic feminists, because she has discussed how wearing corsets has had erotic associations and how the dangers have been blown out of proportion. They see her as being an apologist for the “corset torture” of women.

CHAPTER

69

Men’s Underwear — The Fruit of His Loom

W
hat would you think if a guy phoned his partner and said, “God, honey, I start to get hard when I think about the new briefs I’m wearing.” Contrast this with a woman who calls her partner and says, “God, honey, my nipples start to get hard when I think about the new bra and panties that I’m wearing.”

In our culture, it’s cool for a girl to get excited about her lingerie, but we would consider a man who talked this way about his own briefs to be strange. Then again, if he just spent $20 for a single pair of tightie-whities with a fancy name on the waistband, hopefully they would give him a rise.

Calvin Klein—The Pricey Jockey in Your Underwear Drawer

In the early 1980s, manufacturers like Calvin Klein teamed up with famed homoerotic photographers like Bruce Weber to help make men look sexy in their traditional white briefs. Mind you, the men they used in their photo shoots would have looked sexy wearing a loincloth of cornhusks. Some people might say that the real emphasis of these ads boiled down to the bulge in the crotch—with all visual roads in those huge billboard ads drawing your eye to the package behind the fly.

The Calvin ads had two primary targets—gay men and straight women who buy underwear for their husbands and boyfriends. Nail these two groups, and straight guys are putty in the corporate hand.

In these underwear ads, the hazy image of a penis behind the fly was sexier than if the guy had been naked or if his penis had been hanging out. With his penis behind a white cotton veil, the model was able to give attitude in a way that a man who is buck naked can’t. The combination of attitude and mystery about what’s inside the briefs was fuel for many a fantasy. So while all roads led to the bulge in the briefs, it wouldn’t have worked if the briefs had been pulled down to the hunk’s knees. Women were being exposed to the same kind of “babe-in-a-lacy-bra” eye candy that’s stimulated men over the ages, only with an urban contemporary edge.

[
Origin of the word ‘Jock’ in relation to men’s underwear:
We think of the “jock” in jock strap as referring to athletes. But it comes from “bicycle jockeys” who the supporters were invented for in 1874 by the Bike Web Company. Bicycle jockeys were bike-riding messenger boys who rode over the cobblestone streets of Boston. The cobblestones made their testicles jiggle furiously.]

Subliminal Messages?

Wouldn’t it be something if a woman could buy a pair of Calvin briefs for her man and have him suddenly look like the models in the Calvin ads? And wouldn’t it be amazing if a man could slip on his Calvin briefs and suddenly feel like the Calvin-Klein-version of the Marlboro Man, minus the horse and the lung cancer?

But the reality is, if one of the models in the early Calvin ads had walked into a room full of straight women, he would have had no trouble finding a place to spend the night, even if his day job had been collecting trash and he was wearing $2 briefs from WalMart.

Contemporary Girl Underwear—Finally, a Fly for Your Clitoris!

There have been a few interesting changes in the underwear scene in the past two decades. For one, manufacturers have started making men’s underwear for women. This has been perceived as massively cool. The boybrief as worn by women even has a fly or the suggestion of a fly in the front.

If you are in gender studies, you might assume that girls enjoy wearing boybriefs because it’s a girl’s way of taking the patriarchy’s penis and making it her own. Wearing boybriefs with a fly in the front makes the message even clearer. It also helps with pantylines.

But something more practical is involved. Women in our culture receive far more encouragement to explore and experiment with fashion than men do. For many women, fashion is a great adventure, and they have adopted zillions of styles throughout the ages—from some that were simply hideous to those that were elegant. Few of these had anything to do with trying to assume dimensions of masculinity. Quite to the contrary, much of women’s fashion is designed to win the awe and delight of a girl’s female friends.

As you will see in the next section, the road to making men’s underwear cool for women to wear is much different from the road to making women’s underwear (as in the bikini and eventually thongs) safe for men to wear.

Men with Bikini Briefs, Trimmed Pubes, and Waxed Backs

Over the last decade, males in university settings have started teaching courses on men’s studies. Of the many things these men worry about, trying to define masculinity is near the top of their list. They often say that a defining hallmark of masculinity is that it tries to be the opposite of anything that’s feminine.

Perhaps these scholars haven’t noticed that straight guys have been doing a lot of girly things as of late, such as wearing earrings, and having the hair on their entire upper body waxed or zapped with lasers. Some even shave their legs, and plenty have taken to trimming their pubes and wearing underwear that’s like a woman’s bikini bottom or even a thong.

Since this chapter is about underwear, we’ll save the earrings and shaved scrotums for another day. For now, let’s look at some of the factors that have made it safe for men to wear women’s bikini bottoms.

The Speedo Coefficient:
We have had generations of incredible-looking Olympic male swimmers and water-polo players who wear nothing but Speedos, which are basically G-strings on steroids. Hard as you might try to keep looking straight ahead, Speedos have a built-in device that forces your eyes to stare at the guy’s crotch and butt, even if this would be followed by a scream of horror if the man in the Speedo were 60 years old and 90 pounds overweight. Clearly, there is a precedent for a straight guy to wear girls’ bikini bottoms for underwear. It’s called the Speedo Coefficient. NOTE:
Competitive Swimming’s Darkest Hour.
As a spectator sport, swimming at the Olympics recently took it in the shorts when the traditional men’s Speedos were replaced by a cross between bicycle shorts and a wetsuit. Forget steroids, the women of Goofy Foot Press want the new suits banned. Thank heavens, the men’s Speedo still rules in water polo.

Men-With-Pro-Balls Effect:
It didn’t hurt the cause of the male bikini when professional male athletes in bikini briefs were hired to be in magazine ads and on posters. These half-naked athletes had women swooning, and they reassured men that they wouldn’t risk being seen as gay if they wore women’s bikini bottoms.