...I'll finish it here.
Og, the Neanderpundit must have insomnia problems, a sure sign of aging. So he watches TeeVee during those sleepless periods. Nothing wrong with that. Of late, the raging infomercial on late-night TeeVee is a brassiere commercial, either for the "Ahhh-Bra" or the "Genie Bra", which both appear to be the same thing, an elastic piece of women's underclothing to hold the mammaries in place, but just so.
It's the "just so" that gets me. As a guy, I don't need a bra, so maybe it's hard to figure out why there is so much room in this "just so" market. I'll translate the need for a bra to the man's need for support at a lower level. Men can buy briefs with varying levels of support, or boxers with none. There is no need for men to not have their "junk" supported at the exact level they desire, and we don't even measure our "junk" for that purpose (well, Og does, but he's strange).
Women ALL have a measurement issue, though.
Some wimmen (wimyn?) want to be free of bras. That started in the '60's. I grew up in the late '50's, when my teenage lust had to be satisfied by "sweater gals" who were basically strapped down tight, and if they were daring, wore bras with padding to emphasize the idea that tits end in nipples, i.e., they got that point across. No jiggle, or anything resembling it, unless the sweater gal really tried to make that happen.
Then, the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties had Brigitte Bardot and other women of ideal shape wearing clothing with no bras underneath, and jiggle came to be the thing that we horny men looked for, so the bra-builders crafted their wares to allow jiggle. Women's fashion is, after all, all about titillating the men, admit it, ladies.
As an offshoot of the Sexual Revolution, more men's magazines came into print. No, I'm not talking about Esquire, or Gentleman's Quarterly, I'm talking about Playboy, Hustler, etc. These magazines all featured women who were endowed with more tittage than most ladies, and Holly-WOOD caught on, fast: the bigger the boobs, the hotter the movie actress and the more tickets she would sell at the box-office, making those horny OLD Holly-WOOD types rich, so they could indulge their fantasies with luxo mansions in Beverly Hills, each manse having a swimming pool, and each pool HAD to be decorated with actresses having big boobs and ever-smaller bikini tops to cover them.
Note, as you must have by now, that bare breasts in public were generally frowned upon by those who wrote our laws. Up until the 1990's, there weren't even many legal nude beaches in this strict nation. Europe had as many of them as there were sandy strands, but we didn't, so the sight of naked wimmen (womyns?) had to remain fig-leafs of our male imaginations.
Until the Internet, that is.
With the advent of "universal publishing", aka The Internet, everyone has access to photographs of naked women, near-naked women, and especially, well-titted women. Jiggle of barely-restrained boobs is now acceptable everywhere but in nunneries (where Og goes to see women, I'd guess).
So, we're finally back to bra design. The use of woven stretch fabrics with variable-compression cloth engineered into the weave has allowed bra designers to craft bras that offer some support, and some jiggle. There is still one fault of these bras, though, from a technical point of view: they need to be designed according to the support level needed, and the only measure of boobiness is Cup Size. Cup size is generated by protrusion of the overall tit from the woman's rib cage, and it is measured in inches, then translated into letters. A rack of boobs which protrudes only an inch from the ribcage below it is an "A" cup, but the letters go way up to huge numbers such as "FF" (7-inch protrusion, I believe). Any woman of average body weight for her height with "FF" cup size has other problems, as those huge boobs weigh over ten pounds each, and the body (especially the spine) has to compensate for the gravity-induced leverage on the spine, at times the woman is vertical. On the other hand, a woman with "A" cup size probably has a total tit-mass of less than two pounds.
You can't tell me that an elastic woven fabric can be built that properly supports both of the weight classes discussed above.
Can't happen, so I call BeeEss on the Ahhh! and Genie bras. In fact, I call BeeEss on almost all the bra designers in the entire world, because they are trying to solve an engineering problem without engineering process.
Engineering is all about Metrics, the science (not art!) of measurement.
Boobs are all about MASS (as measured by the Avoirdupois system of pounds and ounces, or the Metric system of kilograms if you live anywhere else but here), as well as protrusion size, but there is no current system for measuring the weight of the mammaries. It's not that measuring weight is hard to do, scales have been designed to measure the weight of just about everything else. The other way to measure would be to depend on the human sense of experience and proportion.
Just as an experienced mechanic can look at a machine screw and tell you what size and thread-count it is, an experienced boobie measurer ought to be able to heft boobies and assay their actual weight within a close tolerance, say 5%.
Bras need to be built according to weight-supporting capacity as well as protrusion-size, but they aren't, and I maintain that the lack of metrics is the reason they are not built properly.
I've had and retired from two complete careers, but I could easily take on the assignment of training myself to be an accurate titmass assessor. I can envision retiring from such a position, after decades of worthy measurements in that cause. I can even imagine a conclave of such retired titmass assessors getting together for coffee on a weekly basis, and the discussions that would ensue from that gathering...
