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| Ann sure knew a good title when she saw it. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Youthful Boobs." Originally published in Young Beavers (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 6, no. 2, July/August 1972. Credited to "Ann Gora."
Excerpt:" The girls like to feel the material rubbing up against their breasts. It gives them a feeling of sexiness at all times . . . the soft wool . . . the tickle of the angora . . . but they are smart enough . . . most of them . . . to know that without their support it will only be a few short years until their breasts are down around their belt line."
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| A 1964 Bali bra ad. |
Reflections: When you think of feminists from the 1960s and '70s, you probably picture women burning their bras at protest rallies. That's what all those kooky women's libbers did back then, right? Torched their Maidenforms as a show of strength against the patriarchy? Well, here's the thing: they didn't. Yep, surprising as this may be, bra-burning is largely a myth. It's been debunked over and over and over. This urban legend seems to have started with media coverage of a protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant. One woman at this event was photographed throwing her bra into a trash can, along with other symbols of traditional femininity such as lipstick, and somehow that spawned a myth about feminists burning bras that persists to this day.
Ed Wood definitely believed it. A devoted cross-dresser, he was deeply obsessed with women's underwear, including bras. He must have been horrified by the prospect of these precious undergarments being lit on fire by angry feminists, so he wrote the 1972 broadside "Youthful Boobs" in response. Think of this as Ed Wood's official position paper on bras. He used his "Ann Gora" pseudonym this time around, possibly because readers would be more likely to believe a female writer on the subject of brassieres.
Eddie seems to believe that feminists burn their bras because "men are more interested in a girl's set of boobs than anything else." He also posits that radical feminists deemphasize their bustlines and affect a mannish appearance because they "want to do men's work," a la World War II icon Rosie the Riveter. There's no need to panic, though, because most women, aka "girls who are real girls," want nothing to do with this bra-burning nonsense. "Coming right down to it," Ed writes, "most girls like their brassiere."
I previously described "Youthful Boobs" as Ed Wood's position paper on bras, and he has a lot to say on the subject, beyond the mere "bra-burning" kerfuffle. He addresses, for example, the issue of women going braless. This requires women to have breasts that are just the right size. If they're too small, "there certainly can be no swinging to the action." And if they're too big, the breasts become "like the smashing of two trains on a one-way track." Better stick to wearing bras, ladies.
But what about those women who want to accentuate their nipples and don't want them hidden under brassieres? No problem. Today's lingerie manufacturers now produce platform bras or nude bras that leave the nipple unencumbered. There are also bras with built-in nipples for those unfortunate ladies whose own nipples are inverted. At this point in the article, Eddie just starts naming brand names of bras. One company he mentions repeatedly is Bali, a lingerie manufacturer that is still in business in 2022! The company's prominence in this article may simply come from the fact that Ed Wood saw one of their ads in the December 5, 1971 edition of The Los Angeles Times West magazine and decided to pilfer a lot of the ad copy.
Eddie looked far and wide for resources when assembling "Youthful Boobs." He also quotes from Ann Landers' December 28, 1971 column in which she talks about the infamous "pencil test." That's when a woman sticks a pencil under her breast to determine whether or not she needs to wear a bra. (If your boob is big enough to hold up a pencil, you need a bra.) Ann has been credited with devising this test herself, but Ed's article seems to imply that the idea came from a reader and that Ann simply publicized it. Eddie further supplements his research with an article called "Bouncy Boobies" from The National Close-Up. This is yet another of those obscure tabloids that Ed Wood must have read obsessively in the '70s. I'm sure he loved their motto: "Daring Enough to Print the Facts."
Eventually, after naming even more bra brands and discussing women whose breasts are so saggy that they look like turkeys (???), Ed/Ann delivers these closing thoughts:
And there you have it, girls. The brassiere is here to stay and once you get used to it . . . the guys never will . . . they've got to drool when what they are looking at is just the right thing. You don't see the male attracted to the cow's udder do you . . . except the Farmer at milking time? Besides if the brassiere manufacturers went out of business . . . what would the transvestites do for putting up their front?
Finally, he gets to the heart of the issue, the real reason he wrote this article. Ed Wood may not give a damn whether or not women wear bras, but the lingerie companies have to keep making bras so that men like himself can wear them!
Next: "The A.C.A.R. Revisited" (1973)