Raising the Girls

Okay, I’ve never breast fed, haven’t even lactated. So the girls are pretty much what the guys with vasectomies might call sport models.

However, I can identify with moms like Patricia Heaton, the actress who played the Ray’s wife Debra in the TV comedy Everyone Loves Raymond. She did breast feed. She has five kids. She had cosmetic breast surgery because, as she once said, she had to become adept at origami to get her boobs into a bra. I’m younger than Heaton by a few years. I’m not ready to go under the knife, but gravity has become the enemy. I practically have to go into downward dog pose to get into the iron maiden the bra manufacturers call "the underwire."

So I have to give shout out to Belinda Luscombe who made a plea to billionaire entrepreneur Warren Buffett to build a better bra. Her entreaty was published in Time Magazine’s Nov 12th edition, which also featured the best inventions of 2007.

I saw the irony. If we can build a robot that will lift a beer out of the fridge and fling it to the slug/football fan in the LazyBoy, surely we can build a better bra?

Luscombe pointed out that cup sizes were invented 80 years ago and haven’t been modified much beyond the first four letters of the alphabet. Nordstroms and Victoria Secret expert bra fitters take only two measurements to determine our bra size. Luscombe noted that a team of Hong Kong researchers took 98 measurements in their effort to explore the breast sizes and shapes of Chinese women. The Chinese win, again.

But we have the technology. If Levis can do custom fit, laser cut jeans, North American women can get a bra that fits. We just need someone with leadership, someone with money, someone with a history of investment in the undergarment industry. Someone with man boobs—someone who can share our pain.

Warren, where are you?


Technorati Tag: Childfree