reflections on the bra...

As garments go, there is none as unappealing as an nonpadded bra hanging on a door knob and nothing as silly as padded bras neatly arranged in a drawer looking like a fresh produce display. For who knows what reason, nonpadded bras are flung about with abandon while padded bras live in a perpetual state of tidiness and care.

Bras hurt. Have you every heard a woman sigh and say, "I just feel so comfortable in my bra today I hate to take it off."? I thought not.




They hurt for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is most bras have wires. Inflexible wires. Supposedly they are necessary to lift and separate. Oh, please. How many times have you, male or female, looked at a woman and said to yourself, "She looks attractively lifted and separated today."?

Those wires are alive, laying dormant in their silky casing. As the bra begins to breakdown, a technical term for wears out, they escape from their casing to commence poking and jabbing the woman in very tender places. No amount of squirming relieves the discomfort. There's no escape.

I've seen women in public restrooms yank the offending wires out and hurl them against the wall. They are no longer lifted and separated but neither are they developing open wounds and subjecting themselves to tetanus.

I would rather be whipped with a stick than buy a new bra. Consequently, I wear mine until they are no longer recognizable.

Purchasing a bra is both an exercise in cryptology as well as frustration. Bras are marvels of engineering. You can be enhanced, minimized (read flattened), smoothed, or revealed. There's a model for every wish, whim, and fantasy. There is no model for comfort.

Decoding is necessitated by the sizing. The industry sizing model is the circumference of the chest expressed in inches and the height of the breast measured from the chest surface expressed in letters. Hence the system of 34,36,38 chest size and cup size a,b,c,d,dd,ddd, and forget it.

Since no woman, naturally, has equal sized breasts, it raises the question: Do you go with larger one or the smaller one? And breasts that go in different directions...well, you've got to rein those sisters in as best you can.

In the Real World, numbers are absolute. Not so in Bra World. Thirty-six inches varies from brand to brand. Bra World is not bound by the Standards of Weights and Measures. Think I'm making this up? Go to the lingerie department with a yard stick, then get back to me.

Cup-size standardization can be summed up in one word. None.

I buy three bras a year: a black one, a white one, and a beige one. They are never the same brand or the same size for the aforementioned reasons.

I take at least a dozen at a time to the fitting room. When the fitting room sentry says "Ma'am you're only allowed three items into the fitting room." I look her right in the eye and hiss, "I am trying to buy a bra."

Without fail, she stands down.