The birth of feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s featured young women burning bras as a counterpoint to young men burning their draft cards. They were considered statements of feminine independence. Now there’s discussion regarding the medical merits of those demonstrations.
Controversial findings have been made that at least associate excessive bra wear to non-malignant breast fibrocystic disease as well as malignant breast cancer. Some assert there is a definite link.
Ironically, it was an American woman who invented the bra around the turn of the 20th Century. Up until the beginning of the 20th Century, corsets are what made women exhibit that desired hourglass figure and inadvertently pushed up the bust line for fashionable clothing of that time.
Problem was, corsets messed with internal organs while shaping those hourglass figures, and their tightness resulted in women fainting easily and often.
The Birth of the Bra.
In 1893, Marie Tucek made a “breast supporter” that looked like a modern brassiere. But a little later Mary Phelps Jacobs designed a better version and called it a brassiere. She patented it and sold the patent to a company named Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for $1,500. It caught on.
By the 1950s, teenage girls were urged to buy and use training bras to hold their breasts firmly in a desirable way and prevent sagging. But even the brassier industry admits that the only time bras prevent sagging is while wearing them.
It’s been observed that using artificial breast support long enough will cause the breasts’ cup shaped suspensory Cooper’s ligaments to atrophy, allowing the breasts to sag over time anyway. Exercises that strengthen pectoral muscles can be helpful.
It’s recommended to use a one piece sport bra for exercising. Some women use one piece sports bras as a healthier alternative for regular bras when not exercising.
Bras and Breast Health Consequences
The connection between wearing bras and painful and bothersome non-malignant breast fibrocystic disease as well as malignant breast cancer was hardly mentioned until the book Dressed to Kill by researchers Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer came out in 1995.
They surveyed 5,000 women and discovered that women who wore bras for 12 hours or more greatly increased breast cancer risk than women who wore bras less.
Dr. Gregory Heigh of Florida has discovered that over 90% of women with fibrocystic breast disease find improvement when they stop wearing their brassieres. There are case testimonies (source below) from breast fibrocystic disorders who realized this when they stopped or at less lessened brassiere use.
The connection between breast tumors, non-malignant or malignant and bras has merit when considering the lymph drainage issues from wearing bras too often. The lymph system, which includes lymph nodes in the breasts, requires body movement to pump out the lymph nodes accumulation of toxic waste materials. That’s what bouncing on a rebounder is about.
Not only are breasts’ movements inhibited by bras to not allowing proper lymph nodes draining, but the actually tight enclosures of bras constricts the breasts and restricts lymph material flow.
There was a study that attempted to debunk the link of excess bra wearing to breast fibrocystic disease and breast cancer.
As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the others, she’ll come home in the middle of the night, crawl into bed beside me, and tell me all about how she and Paulo had sex. I won’t explode with anger or seethe with resentment. I’ll tell her it’s a hot story and I’m glad she had fun. It’s hot because she’s excited, and I’m glad because I’m a feminist.
Before my wife started sleeping with other men, I certainly considered myself a feminist, but I really only understood it in the abstract. When I quit working to stay at home with the kids, I began to understand it on a whole new level. I am an economically dependent househusband coping with the withering drudgery of child-rearing. Now that I understand the reality of that situation, I don’t blame women for demanding more for themselves than the life of the housewife.
Still, as a man, I could, if I wanted to, portray what I’m doing as “work,” and thus claim for myself the prestige men traditionally derive from “work.” Whenever I tell someone I stay home with the kids, they invariably say, “Hardest work in the world.” They say this because the only way to account for a man at home with the kids is to say what he’s doing is hard work. But there’s a subtext in the compliment that makes it backhanded: We both know no one ever says it to a woman. Mothers care; fathers provide care. The difference is crucial. Despite my total withdrawal from the economy and the traditional sources of masculine identity, I can still argue I am a provider. I provide care.
In this way, my masculine self-image was stretched but not broken. Diaper bag notwithstanding, I was still a Man. It wasn’t until my wife mentioned one evening that she’d kissed another man and liked it and wanted to do more than kiss next time that I realized how my status as a Man depended on a single fact: that my wife fucked only me.
When people ask how it started, I say this: We married young. She’d had sex before me, but only with a handful of people a handful of times. She never had a boyfriend, never had a lover. I was the first man she ever had the chance to get to know intimately. By her mid-30s, having already had our children and entering her sexual prime, she felt keenly her lack of sexual experience. Happily for me, she was willing to talk about it, willing to ask if I’d be open to exploring other options. We opened a bottle of wine and started talking, and talking, and talking.
She didn’t present it as an issue of feminism to me, but after much soul-searching about why the idea of my wife having sex with other men bothered me I came to a few conclusions: Monogamy meant I controlled her sexual expression, and, not to get all women’s-studies major about it, patriarchal oppression essentially boils down to a man’s fear that a woman with sexual agency is a woman he can’t control. We aren’t afraid of their intellect or their spirit or their ability to bear children. We are afraid that when it comes time for sex, they won’t choose us. This petty fear has led us as a culture to place judgments on the entire spectrum of female sexual expression: If a woman likes sex, she’s a whore and a slut; if she only likes sex with her husband or boyfriend, she’s boring and lame; if she doesn’t like sex at all, she’s frigid and unfeeling. Every option is a trap.
Feminism always comes back to sex, even when we’re talking about everything else. The point isn’t that all women should be sexual adventurers. Celibacy is as valid an expression of sexuality as profligacy. The point is that it should be women who choose, not men — even the men they’re married to. For my wife, the choice between honoring our vows and fulfilling her desires was a false choice, another trap. She knew how deep our love was, and knew that her wanting a variety of sexual experiences as we traveled through life together would not diminish or disrupt that love. It took me about six months — many long, intense conversations, and an ocean of red wine — before I knew it, too.
When my wife told me she wanted to open our marriage and take other lovers, she wasn’t rejecting me, she was embracing herself. When I understood that, I finally became a feminist.
That was two years ago, and today we’ve never been happier, more in tune, closer, tighter, stronger. Whatever power I surrendered, I don’t miss. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but I tell everyone it works for us.
How does it work? We take turns going out. Because we have small children (ages 6 and 3), one of us stays home. (We don’t like to use babysitters because it gives us a curfew; we’d rather go out unfettered than worry about turning into a pumpkin at midnight.) Going out alone to hooking up with others was an easy transition. It does work both ways and, yes, I too enjoy sexual carte blanche. I just don’t use mine as much as my wife uses hers. What’s important is equality of opportunity, not outcome.
How does it feel? It feels great … mostly. Most of the time, it feels like a mature, responsible way to address our needs and desires within our loving, mutually supportive marriage. It feels very adult, especially because it depends on open, honest communication. We take great pride in all the talking we do. I meet a lot of people who say they’ll never get married because they don’t want to get divorced, and hearing it always makes me sad, because they are cutting themselves off from the possibility of the magic that happens when two people share their lives. People don’t divorce because they can’t stand sharing anymore; they divorce because they feel like they can’t share enough. I never forget that my wife is a whole person unto herself, a complete and dynamic individual, and though we are together, we’re not one. Too often people get trapped in the roles of husband and wife, and a gulf opens between what they think they should be and who they really are. Opening our marriage has allowed us to close that gap so that the person I call “wife” is the same person my wife sees in the mirror. Lying to each other begins with lying to yourself, and now we don’t have to lie to anyone.
There are of course moments of jealousy, resentment, and insecurity. Recently, my wife went on a date and fell asleep at his apartment. I hadn’t heard from her since 10 p.m., she still wasn’t home at 6 a.m. My texts went unanswered and my calls went to voicemail. A tight knot of dread lodged in my stomach as I imagined all kinds of dire scenarios and realized that I not only didn’t know where she was, I had no idea whom she was with. I pictured myself going to the police saying, “I think she’s in Red Hook with a guy named Ryan. I don’t know his last name, but I think he’s a graphic designer?” I’m not sure there’s actually a word for the unique blend of acute terror and unforgivable shame I felt that morning imagining that I’d lost my wife to Ryan, the maybe graphic designer. When she finally texted me at 7:30 a.m., relief coursed through me like morphine. She wrote, “fuckfuckfuckfuck Im soooooo sorry. Fell asleep.” I replied, “Just glad you’re ok, but next time, no radio silence. Remember: you’re not alone.”
What surprises most people is when I tell them it’s not the sex-with-other-men that bothers me. The sex is the easy part, the fun part. It’s what the sex connects to, stands for, reveals that can be difficult. I don’t want her to fall in love with anyone else, and every time she goes on a date, I confront the possibility that she might. It happened at the beginning: The first person she dated after we opened up fell hard in love with her, and my wife, overwhelmed by his ardor, tried to love him back. Watching it happen, I was confused, angry, and terrified that she wanted to leave me. She assured me she didn’t, and whatever feelings she had for him didn’t lessen what she felt for me. Believing her then was the ultimate trust exercise. We survived because eventually I did believe her, and also because I learned to trust myself.
This has been the great challenge of my open marriage: to draw strength from vulnerability. Doing so requires supreme self-confidence. You must first really, truly love yourself; it is the foundation upon which all the other love is built. From everywhere comes the message that what I’m doing is for weaklings, losers, failures, pussies; that if I had money and status, I could keep my wife “in line”; that her self-discovery comes at the expense of my self-esteem. My open marriage has made heavy demands on my ability to silence the voice of doubt in my head, that gnawing feeling of worthlessness. But I find I can meet those demands, and that I am able to build my self-confidence out of nothing more than the basic dignity we all possess. I’m grateful to my wife for pushing us to take this leap, and whatever happens to us in the future I would do it all again. And when she comes home tonight and crawls into bed beside me with a hot story about her date with Paulo, she’ll do it all again, too.
Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, philosopher, journalist, and author of the bestselling novel The Transhumanist Wager. He writes an occasional column for Motherboard ruminating on the future beyond natural human ability.
Of all the transhumanist technologies coming in the near future, one stands out that both fascinates and perplexes people. It’s called ectogenesis: raising a fetus outside the human body in an artificial womb.
It has the possibility to change one of the most fundamental acts that most humans experience: the way people go about having children. It also has the possibility to change the way we view the female body and the field of reproductive rights.
Naturally, it’s a social and political minefield.
The term ectogenesis was coined in 1924 by British scientist J.B.S. Haldane. He predicted by 2074 only 30 percent of births would be human births. Science has grown much quicker than he realized, and his take is probably much too conservative. Some futurists like myself (I’m also married to an ObGyn) think ectogenesis will be here in 20 years, and widely used in 30 years around the world.
It’s not an entirely speculative concept; scientists are actively working on developing the technology, primarily for medical reasons. In an article for Reproductive Health and Social Justice, a daily nonprofit publication providing news and analysis on sexual and reproductive health and justice issues, journalist Soraya Chemaly discussed two leading scientists in the ectogenesis field and their projects:
There are two commonly cited endeavors in progress. Focusing on finding ways to save premature babies, Japanese professor Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University, has successfully gestated goat embryos in a machine that holds amniotic fluid in tanks.
On the other end of the process focusing on helping women unable to conceive and gestate babies, is Dr. Helen Hung-Ching Liu, Director of the Reproductive Endocrine Laboratory at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University. Quietly, in 2003, she and her team succeeded in growing a mouse embryo, almost to full term, by adding engineered endometrium tissue to a bio-engineered, extra-uterine “scaffold.”
More recently, she grew a human embryo, for ten days in an artificial womb. Her work is limited by legislation that imposes a 14-day limit on research projects of this nature. As complicated as it is, her goal is a functioning external womb.
The ectogenesis technology itself is highly complicated, though somewhat simple looking. Basically, it appears as an amniotic fluid-filled aquarium with a bunch of feeding tubes and monitoring cables attached to a live, developing organism. Those tubes bring the nutrients, oxygen, etc needed to grow an organism and help it survive; the cables monitor everything going on inside the tank. There’s certainly a Matrix feel to it all.
While much of the technology for starting to experiment with artificially growing a human fetus already exists, bona fide human trials are likely at least a decade off, largely due to the murky legal and ethical implications of the controversial concept.
No doubt, propagating the species without the need for the human body sounds insanely far-fetched. And even if it’s achievable, there’s the question of whether people would be comfortable using it. I would argue yes, and the reasons are simple: Besides being painful, laborious, and time consuming, giving birth is still medically dangerous to mothers.
Furthermore, the advent of ectogenesis would mean females would no longer have to solely bear the responsibility of childbirth, or ponder the stressful questions often faced while carrying a child in one’s body for nine months: Is there lead in the house water I drink, potentially affecting my child’s neurological development? Will the flu virus I caught at work damage my baby’s forming body? Did the half glass of wine I drank the other night lower my kid’s potential IQ?
But perhaps an even more important reason has to do with the health of the babies themselves. Natural birth is filled with perils, and ectogenesis could potentially offer a safe alternative. The theory is that every heartbeat, kick, and moment of a fetus’s life could be carefully monitored, from zygote to the moment the baby takes its first breath of air. Every nutrient the fetus gets would be measured, every movement it makes would be filmed, every heartbeat would be analyzed for proper timing.
As with all new technology, traditional biological and social customs could give way to newer practices promising safety, efficiency, and practicality. However, if ectogenesis seems like a slam dunk, it’s not. It’s rife with both philosophical and political concerns.
It would further unchain women from the home and extend the age women can have children
The most frequent philosophical issue brought up about ectogenesis is how it might change the way society views women. Will the feminine mystique be lost by such an artificial process replacing what’s been long a mainstay of the female domain? My short answer is no; rather, ectogenesis could further unchain women from the home, spare them and extend the age at which women can have children.
Still, some feminists view ectogenesis with skepticism, saying it will hand over women’s sacred birthing ability to science. In an essay in the book Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, Julien S. Murphy, chair of the philosophy department and professor of philosophy at University of Southern Maine, wrote that ectogenesis has sparked “disagreement among feminists.”
The politics are just as complicated; after all, reproductive rights and procreation are some of the most divisive and loaded topics in Washington right now. It’s likely people with conservative social views or certain religious concerns would rally hard against the technology, which threatens to disrupt the symbiotic bond that the sexes have in traditional society.
Some have also suggested an artificial womb leaves a growing fetus without the immediate intimacy its mother’s body provides. Professor and journalist John Nassivera writes in America, The National Catholic Review, “I can tell you that this deprivation is a very serious thing.”
Meanwhile, the pro-ectogenesis argument is that artificial wombs could make life easier and safer for mothers and fetuses, not to mention allow women who have damaged or medically dysfunctional uteruses to bear children. Similarly, some bioethicists have suggested ectogenesis could also free up homosexual couples and single men from having to use surrogate mothers to bear their children.
Regardless what happens in the future, ectogenesis is destined to become one of hottest topics of the transhumanist future, providing a gateway for how our tech-imbued species views itself, and the way our children will enter the sphere of life.
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