gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Boobs.

Boobs are, in many ways, like show dogs.

I don’t have any show dogs of my own, but i appreciate the efforts of those people who do have them.

These people take hours preparing their dogs, grooming them, training them, and going to great lengths to show them off to their best advantage.

Like boobs.

Unlike boobs, however, we have a window into what goes on in preparing a show dog. At a show, you can watch the owners brushing the coats, combing talcum powder through the Samoyeds, spraying hairspray onto the ear-hairs of… whatever those little yapping dogs are called, and so on.

The care and maintenance of boobs, however, is a black art, guarded from all but the most privileged of men.

And that’s not even to mention the presentation tips!

So imagine how interested we boob fans were in the chance to perform a structural analysis on the bra of one of the most noted boob owners of the twentieth century, “Marilyn Monroe”.

“Marilyn” (the stage name of Norma-Jean Baker, of course) was something of an expert on presenting herself well. I remember watching a documentary in which it was revealed that she was reduced to tears of frustration onetime while trying to convince a male companion (one with some influence in Hollywood, no doubt) not to be fooled by the apparent bubbling bustiness of an up-and-coming young starlet competing with Norma-Jean for attention at a swish industry party.

Oh, don’t fall for that! You don’t even *know* what she’s doing! She’s taped her breasts underneath, to give them extra lift… can’t you understand?

Poor Norma-Jean. Not only put in the shadow of a younger woman, but a younger woman using one of the oldest boob tricks in the book, and the men were too stupid to even realise it.

But she had some pretty good tricks of her own.

For example.

It’s pretty well known that Norma-Jean had inverted nipples. That was the least of her troubles. She simply sewed buttons onto her bras to simulate nipple erection. It wasn’t until the wrapping came off in the bedroom that her suitor would discover the truth, and Norma-Jean was such a reputedly dud root that by that stage inverted nipples would have been easily the least problematic thing about the encounter.

But her chiefmost subterfuge lay in the use of something called a “sling bra” [sometimes quoted in the media as a "fling bra"]. This is the so-called “Wonderbra” that has been in the news this week.

The sling bra is a device usually employed by burlesque performers.

It is essentially a push-up quarter bra with a second set of cups overlayed on top of the actual boob-holding cups.

So the push-up pads lift the breasts, and the outer cups “enhance” the profile of the bosom.

Ingenious.

One drawback for “Marilyn” was that the sling bra typically exposes the nipple, which to her was of no use. Happily for her, in the Hollywood films of her era, erect nipples were generally not allowed by the censors anyway.

Nonetheless, she needed to give the impression that her bust was all natural, all the time. So she began promulgating the myth that she never wore underwear. The strategy being that if she wasn’t wearing underwear, she wouldn’t be faking her bust profile.

It was no problem for her to get about with no underpants, and it was equally no problem for spectators to see that she wasn’t wearing underpants. Plus, her arse (US: ass) was amply bootilicious, so she had no need to fake anything there. So, while her bare cheeks and blonde muff were clearly on show beneath her dresses, her boobs were carefully orchestrated by bras cleverly concealed by her clothes. For instance, the famous subway grid halter neck dress featured in The Seven Year Itch is known positively and indisputably by Marilynologists to have hidden a sling bra, despite giving the appearance that she was totally unslung.

The few images we have of Norma-Jean stark naked reveal a somewhat volumetrically smaller bust than she ever showed when fully clothed. Marilynologists have done hundreds of hours of careful research on this, and we thank them for their untiring efforts.

You may wish to carry out your own research: compare the breasts in the image below with those in the image above. Interesting, no?

Norma-Jean also had to contend with the fact that her boobs were a little pointy in their natural state. “Ski slopes” we would call them nowadays.

So even when she was in the pre-”Marilyn” cheesecake stage of her career, she was experimenting with pushups…

…in an attempt to turn her white pointers into softly rounded hillocks.

So that was what women were doing with their boobs a half century ago.

Switch forward to the modern breast era, and what do we find?

There are many little tricks, fimbles, and wiggins available to the lady who finds herself with what we used to call an ‘athletic’ figure. There are the engineering marvels of the push-up bra (without “Marilyn”’s fling bra outer shell), and the brilliantly ingenious U-bra, which supports the boobs independently, allowing them to move autonomously while being shaped by the cups, thus giving the impression of their being unslung.

There are also the tacky “chicken fillets” and, of course, the horrors of surgical implants; let us speak no more of these latter aberrations.

So our flat-chested breastulants are well catered for.

But what about our larger-busted boob owners?

One Annalise Braakensiek, a lass who’s career i’ve followed for some time, and whose calendar (from 2000) i continue to recycle here on the wall of my studio, has released a range of bras for girls who don’t need to augment their boobs so much, but rather contain and hold them in place.

If you are a lady with a larger bosom, or you are a fan of someone with this condition, you will know that anything over a D cup is starting to get into what retailers call a ‘Niche Market”.

Annalise is the proud possessor of an E cup bust, and she wholeheartedly took on the opportunity offered by Bras n’ Things to manufacture a bra collection for “larger women” that didn’t look like it had been welded together in a Soviet tank factory.

“It’s been a dream of mine since I started modelling and a lot of my modelling was in Italy with beautiful brands like La Perla. So I was wearing these beautiful garments but they only go up to a maximum D cup and I’m an E cup. It was so frustrating,” she says.

Good on you, Annalise!

Plus, her range of bras are eco friendly, allowing women with larger bosoms to have a smaller footprint that they might otherwise have.

“It’s green. No toxic ink, organic cotton, organic bamboo, sustainable produce, the swingtags are recycled cardboard and even attached with organic twine. As eco-friendly as I can possibly make it. Looking after girls with bigger boobs and looking after the environment at the same time.”

So now women no longer have to be afraid of having large boobs, and can bravely take their boobs with them wherever they go, without having to fear that they are going to destroy the environment.

And i think the whole world is a better place for that, don’t you, dear Reader?

Yours,
Gullybogan