FOR ALL TOO LONG I did not know that Saudi women had to buy their bras from men. And while those days are now nearly in the past, don’t for a second be fooled into thinking that this change came easily. Protests, boycotts, an online campaign, and finally, intervention from the king decreed that women in Saudi Arabia no longer have to talk cup size solely to men. Well, better late than never, I guess.

As it stands, the majority of workplaces in Saudi Arabia are staffed by men. In fact, women make up less than 15 percent of Saudi nationals in the workforce, as dictated by the country’s employment regulations. Deeply conservative, the country continues to prevent equal employment, shutting out of the workplace 10 million Saudi women.

The best piece I can find on this is here, and comes from Ellen Knickmeyer, writing from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who reminds us that exceptions to the equality ban include only the fields of “female education and health care, and segregated women-only malls and “ladies’ levels,” where women can shop alone among other women, at a price premium.”

Keep in mind that even though women in Saudi Arabia can now speak to another female clerk abut the bulge and spill of the bra, they have to be driven by  man to the mall to do so.

And why would that be, you might ask? Simple. Saudi women are not yet allowed to drive.

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WOMEN AREN’T ALIKE. Or so it took me to paragraph 21 of the cover piece of this Sunday’s Week in Review to be told. As we say in my house: Duh. A massive, longitudinal study on women, and this is the best they can do? And then bury it deep in the piece? I’m quite sure those of you who did not read this on Sunday need to read this now.

Called The Body Politic,  the piece by Tara Parker Pope reviews the 160,000-woman, $625 million-dollar, 10-year study ordered in 1991 by Dr. Bernadine Healy, the first woman to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And while Parker Pope’s lede is compelling – about an 1898 attempt to feed fresh cow ovaries to a severe hot flash sufferer – I would have led with that eensy-weensy little item she chose to leave until paragraph 21 to relate, that “One of the most valuable lessons may be that not all postmenopausal women are medically the same,” and then shamelessly taken the whole shebang to task for overlooking this for all these years while each of us was fed the level-same dose of nonsense about menopause by our varying providers of bad medicine.

Angry? My husband actually patted my hand as I railed. Of course, this is the same man who has seen me through many a bra rant, as well as hot flash, but this was neither of those. This is our lives we’re talking about.

Did not see the piece? Here it is.

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OUR BRAS. IN TRANSLATION. Is it just us, or do they look bigger in French?

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MENOPAUSE MADE ME DO IT.  It’s my new favorite shield phrase, though I do find that from behind its protection come some of the more surprising things I’ve said in my lifetime. These phrases just seem to hurtle from me, and while I must admit that they feel so good as they tumble out, even I am sometimes surprised when I hear them go whizzing by. Consider, for instance, what I recently screamed out my car window about my boobs.

There we were, having a perfectly lovely drive in the country. Just my husband and me, zipping along, talking, a rare time alone. No one was over-caffeinated, everyone was sober. In fact, I remember quite clearly that it was a rather lazy afternoon all around. Relaxed, and with no deadlines, we were simply going to our favorite bicycle store to see what was new.

I mean I’d like to blame it on the caffeine—but I can’t—and I don’t drink, so it’s not that influence that propelled me to say what I did when yet another car zipped by with one of those oval stickers on the bumper portraying merely a number.

Have you wondered what they mean? I have. Those little oval stickers used to mean only that someone had touristed in some European city, perhaps even purchased there the vehicle they are now driving and proudly want to display that. Then those little oval stick-ons started to mean more (or less) than that, and I got confused.

The sticker on the car next to us read “70.3.” Nothing more.

And as it whizzed into view I gave no time to the fairly sane man whose job in life it has become to put his index finger in the back of the neckline of my shirt and reel me in. Instead, before I asked what the sticker could possibly mean, I merely stuck my head out the window and yelled, “38 Double D!”

You know that feeling? Like you’ve passed a clot, or dodged a bullet, or otherwise just cleared the air of something you’ve long wanted to do? Maybe cats feel this way after the hurling of a hairball. I hope so. I felt good. Real good. Like I had the last time I went on a bra rant. That good.

My husband was silent for a moment; the look on his face the one he gets when he is forced to quickly shove together the evidence before him into some narrative he can live with. He looked at the bumper sticker. He looked at me. And then he began to laugh in that way I have come to value as the ultimate paycheck of my life. If marriage is the hardest room to work in Vegas—and it is—at that moment all the slots were pouring out in my bucket as he laughed and laughed and laughed.

When he was finally able again to speak, he asked calmly, “You don’t know what those are, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Triathalons. Iron Man competitions. Those are the distances the people have gone.”

“Huh.”

Now I know.

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WOULDA COULDA SHOULDA. Oh, how we wish we were there. But the next best thing to being there is when somebody tells it as you have, about your bras. Oh, sisters we just love you for it. And the hits just keep on coming.

Newly anointed TSP-sister Roadchick sent us this, after reading a TSP post on bras. We’re still laughing.

“Oh, if you could’ve heard the conversation in my office after I read this post! Hilarious.

I was fully developed at the tender age of 13 and of course I was mortified by the changes that seemed to happen overnight. My mom decided that in order to corral my new assets, we would visit The Bra Lady.

The Bra Lady was ensconced in a high rise office building somewhere in downtown Chicago. When we got there, it was no over-the-clothes measuring in the middle of ‘Intimates’, it was topless in a cramped fitting room with my mother and the scary Bra Lady.

I was measured sixteen ways to Sunday and the size (32DD) pronounced and The Bra Lady marched off to find the proper ‘garment’ after instructing me to stay “just like I was”. So I stood there, naked from the waist up, with my mom for what seemed like an eternity.

I would have stayed naked forever if it meant The Bra Lady would not have come back with a ‘nude’ bra with about 16 hooks on the back of it. I was way ahead of Madonna because no longer was I gently rounded – I had the Atomic Warheads of Doom.

It was pronounced perfect, my mom (curse her) requested five more just like it, and after writing a check that would’ve bailed out AIG, we were done.

I probably still need therapy from the humiliation of having to change for gym and everyone seeing my bra from 1948. The bra that won WWII and came home victorious.

Ugh.”

Want to rant about bras? Who doesn’t? You can. Here. And here. And, of course, you could read your own tale of woe-is-my-bra here on TSP, if you’ll send it along for consideration, to thesisterproject at gmail dot com.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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