Carpooling Loonies
By Jinki Beldia

The breast redemption

Where there’s coffee there’s good conversation. Or a healthy argument. Or an odd song to sing. Or there’s the brassiere to talk about.

My best friend and I were sprawled on the floor one lazy Sunday afternoon (lazy Sundays are so cliché but sometimes I can’t help but to cut through it). We would just occasionally lift our heads up to make long sips of the tasty coffee that came straight from Florence Hibionada’s pantry. The day was just another one of those sweet, slothful moments.

The talk about the bosom just pounced out of nowhere. I guess it started when he (oh yes, a bonafide member of the male band) expressed his amazement about all this raving about the ‘wings’ on sanitary napkins. I just briefly told him, “It saves the day.” After all, it makes a lot of sense and saves women from those horrible little accidents that happen even when they’re in a public place. There’s nothing so amazing about it, it’s just something good. What is mind-boggling are these whitening colognes I saw somewhere. So many Pinoys have been obsessing about every whitening product there is in the market, and surprisingly, most of them fail to see how atrocious they look with uneven skin tone, a daunting effect of over-the-counter chemicals. The result:  bleached face, dark nape, pallid upper arms, armpits we don’t want to talk about, and so on and so forth. Interesting. A horror poster that stands on its own. Say, if a whitening cologne really does its job, what will it do for the average Pinay who just wants anything that has whitening agent in it? A lot of them end up a disgrace to morticians who can do a lot better with their bare hands.

Oh, the breasts. I already had my back flat on the floor and even if I was in any other position, I still would not have stirred the dialogue about breasts. Beyond the walls of  science, an hermaphrodite doesn’t inspire talks about body parts. However, I had to counteract my best friend’s drolling about the brassiere being invented in the 30’s. It was a supposition that women were ‘left hanging’ before that era, and if Mary Phelps Jacob were alive, she would have tied a corset around his waist until he turned purple.
The boob redemption happened in 1913 when New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob realized she needed something that did not poke out visibly from under her silk garment and the plunging neckline of her sheer evening gown. The corset was the only acceptable undergarment that time (I was saved by being a male Indian warrior in my past life) and that pushed her to create something that women would be thankful for the rest of their lives. Her first clients were family and friends (human beings bearing the Most Supportive title in any culture), and then the backless brassiere was patented sometime in 1914. Surprisingly (and like most women who get bushed easily), Jacob got tired of her business and sold it to the Warner Bros., the bra-makers, not the movie-makers (as strongly pointed out by “The History of the Brassiere”).

Although it was Jacob who revolutionized the brassiere, there were already interesting things going on for the benefit of the bosom long before her era. For instance, in 1875, a no eyelets, no bones, no laces or pulleys under-outfit was manufactured. Everything they removed from that undergarment made it sound a little less barbaric… but still scary. So, from the no-more-menacing-attachments called the ‘Union Under Flannel’, it improved to the ‘Breast  Supporter’ in 1893, this time with the less complicated hook-and-eye involved. The ‘Well-Being’, came about in 1889, and finally, in 1917 during the World War II, the War Industries Board called on women to stop buying corsets. Halleluiah! It was the time in history when 28, 000 tons of metal were saved, and women actually started to breathe.

Hail to the Filipino women whose bosoms were liberated from whalebones since the dawn of time… and now have become liberated at the advent of the wonder bra.
(E-mail the author at jinki_young@yahoo.com)