Myth busted

 Look, I know most women hate their bras.  It’s common to say or think that they must have been invented by a man – I hear it all the time on TV and in Real Life.

*most women, according to an Oprah show I watched, wear the wrong size bras – the band is way too tight, when what they really need is a bigger or differently sized cup*

I’m sorry girls, most men would be happy to take ’em off you – I mean, it’s a myth, that men invented them.

From Wikipedia:

In 1913, a New York socialite named Mary Phelps Jacob changed women’s fashion forever when she created the first brassiere by tying two handkerchiefs together with ribbon. Jacob’s original intention was to cover the whalebone sticking out of her corset, which was visible through her sheer dress. Jacob began making brassieres for her family and friends, and news of the garment soon spread by word of mouth. By 1914, Jacob had a patent for her design and was marketing it throughout the US. Although women had worn brassiere-like garments in years past, Jacob’s was the first to be successfully marketed and widely adopted.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergarment

In ancient times, women wore strips of cloth across their chests – bands, to protect the tender parts and for modesty, but the brassiere was invented by a woman.  Wikipedia says so.

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It’s rather interesting what MSN has on their homepage – the history of underwear was on tonight’s page, and, well, I was interested.

True story:  I had a cyst on my tailbone – not the most pleasant place, but it had been there for a long time (ahem. years) and didn’t cause me any real problems.  The toilets in Japan were/are different than the "throne" we sit on here in the US – toilets there are commonly a slit, or a trench-like porcelin fixture in/on the floor that you squat over to do the deed, and one morning, cleaning up afterwards, the tissue came up red with blood – that cyst had burst, and I freaked out.

I was freaked, and told my wife, and you know, it’s hard to see that area by yourself, and my wife looked at it for me and saw that we’d be making a trip to the hospital, like, right now.

(the joys of married life, eh?)

I got admitted pretty much that day, and a nice lady doctor explained, with a German accent (German is the medical language of Japan) that surgery was necessary right away to excise that cyst.  I was in the hospital there in Kobe ten days, after the surgery, to recover and to let the scar heal.  For underwear, I was given a fundoshi, a loincloth.  A fundoshi is a thin strip of material with a long piece of cloth sewn in the middle of it – you wrap the thin cloth around your waist, and pull the long cloth up between your legs and under and then over the thin strip, covering your package – yours too, ladies.  it works the same way for us both.

It was rather comfortable, actually, and I sometimes miss it – I left it there in the hospital when I got to go home.

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One more story.  The operation was that same morning, and I was the only man in the room, lying on my chest with my butt up as they cut that cyst out and excised its threads and root-like ends – the surgeon showed it to me with pride – "look at how big it was!"  It was a good thing I was totally wasted on the anesthetic – otherwise i would have freaked out again – it was that ugly.  6 women and me naked on the table.  Prior to that, I had been uncomfortably lying on, umm, myself, and I was too embarrassed to say, in Japanese OR English, hey, let me move, my unit’s getting squashed.

Got a neato two inch scar that I’ve never seen "in person" there – my wife told me.  That’s not why we got divorced, by the way, but it probably didn’t make me any dearer to her, lol.

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btw, this is my 3,400th entry.

 

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