A new Mystery of the Universe: The Bike Trail Falsie

An essay in which I needlessly add to our already existing Sexual Stereotypes…

Mankind has always been plagued by mysteries. (Womankind not so much because they tend to have a much longer to-do list and don’t have time to worry about the goofy stuff guys think about. Anyway…back to the chronically underworked brains of Mankind.)

Let’s try that again.

Mankind has always been plagued by mysteries: Who built the Sphinx? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? And why don’t more big league hitters bunt against the shift?

Somewhat-related story alert

OK, as you might have already noticed my mind does not tend to work in a straight line. I toss off a joke about what Mankind worries about and say Womankind doesn’t have that kind of spare time and then start thinking, “Wait…is that actually true?”

So then I look up “Loch Ness Monster searches” and there’s an article from the BBC and I figure that’s the one I should probably read because they’re British and everything so they probably have a truckload of high quality Loch Ness Monster information and they quote people like:

• Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from New Zealand.

• Neil Clark a paleontologist from Glasgow.

• Gary Campbell, the keeper of a register of Loch Ness Monster sightings.

• And Steve Feltham who is recognized by the Guinness Book of records for the longest continuous monster hunting vigil of Loch Ness and I can’t help but notice it’s: dude, dude, dude, dude and at least 50 percent of the people who search for the Loch Ness Monster are named Neil.

(Which explains a lot about Neil Armstrong; he probably went to the moon to see if the Loch Ness Monster was hiding there.)

In fact the only woman mentioned in the BBC story was one Aldie McKay who in 1933 told a newspaper reporter Alec Campbell (another dude) she’d seen the Loch Ness Monster and then probably went off and had a good laugh about it with all her female friends.

“Ochh, you canna believe what I told th’ dumma from yon newspaper” – which is my idea of a Scottish accent and is totally derived from that character on The Simpsons.

Also, Neil Gemmell came all the way from New Zealand from the University of Otago (which to my surprise is an actual place) to check out Loch Ness for eel DNA and someone at the U of O approved that trip?

Gee, I wonder what sex he was.

This is a picture of a dude looking for the Loch Ness Monster.

This is another picture of a dude looking for the Loch Ness Monster.

This is a third picture of a dude looking for the Loch Ness Monster and it looks like he brought a submarine. Check Google Images for Loch Ness Monster searches and you know what you won’t see? Women looking for the Loch Ness Monster.

I also can’t help but notice that Monty Python and the Holy Grail  stars a bunch of dudes because women in the Middle Ages had better things to do than look for an object that probably doesn’t even exist and we know that because after a great deal of thought and research medieval historian Carlos de Ayala (what a surprise…another dude) of the University of Madrid says so.

More evidence that guys spend time thinking about this kind of stuff and if you have evidence that women do the same thing I really don’t want to hear it because I’ve spent a solid 20 minutes developing and researching my current theory.

So where were we?

OK, so I’m taking my daily walk down the bike trail a half block from my house and as you can see in the top photo there’s a little traffic island with a couple benches and lying on the ground next to one of the benches (I added a circle and arrow to help you find it) is this:

Which takes me a moment to recognize as a “falsie” which I thought went extinct sometime in the late the 70s.

Also, there was only one falsie and previous scientific research indicated they mated for life and tend to be found in pairs. Further research on the subject (OK, I skimmed one article on Wikipedia) revealed that they were used in the Victorian Era because girls were considered women at 15 (which would have suited Matt Gaetz just fine), but sometimes those 15-year-old girls hadn’t developed enough up top to fill out the dresses they wore back then, so they used falsies to make up the difference.

Another semi-related story

Back when I lived in San Diego I knew a woman who had worked in a Playboy Club and she told me they stuffed rolled up nylons in their bras underneath their breasts to make it look like they were about to leap out of their Bunny Outfits like a couple Siberian Tigers who just spotted a wild bore and yes that misspelling was intentional and uncannily accurate.

So apparently what you’re looking at it about 1/3 Leggs Silken Mist Sun Beige pantyhose and I assume this information is way more disappointing to male readers than female readers, who being breast-owners themselves probably have a much better idea of how gravity works.

In my own case, I must admit the information about Playboy Bunny breasts was vastly more disappointing than finding out Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy didn’t exist; that information, I could handle.

Despite my belief that guys spend way more time thinking about goofy stuff than women, apparently it never occurred to me to wonder why naked women’s breasts (and by then I’d seen some) didn’t defy gravity and hover three inches below their chins whenever they took their bras off.

According to the Wikipedia entry, some women are now wearing “butt falsies” and it also pointed out some women who have had breast removal surgery might wear one, so I don’t want to ignore that possibility, but still doesn’t explain how it ended up on a bike trail.

BTW:

Between falsies to make breasts look bigger and then corsets to make them look smaller and men liking women who were full-bodied and then changing their minds and liking women who were slim and first liking women with extremely white skin because it showed they were upper class and didn’t have to work in the sun and then liking women with tans and a great shot at skin cancer and wrinkles which men probably wouldn’t like all that much and liking the “natural look” during the 60s and then liking women to wear fake eyelashes so they look like Bambi’s hot step sister (and the list of what we like goes on) maybe men should quit asking what women really want because we don’t seem to know what we want either.

The female point of view

So…being completely mystified, which for me isn’t all that hard a state to achieve, I asked a female friend what she thought might be the story behind the Mystery Falsie and she said lots of women’s sports bras have padding so it doesn’t look like innocent bike path passersby are being targeted by a pair of Cruise Missiles and I thought that theory raised as many questions as it answered.

Some woman was jogging along and had a sports bra blowout?

I was willing to discuss her theory and present a Power Point presentation and construct a diorama like they did for the Kennedy Assassination so we could measure just how far the falsie was from the bench and theorize on how much force and what activity it would take to throw it that far and why there was only one, but it turned out I had overestimated my friend’s interest and she needed to get back to her job which in my highly-delusional state I think proves I’m right:

Mankind is plagued by mysteries, womankind has work to do.