As I look through 'All-American Ads of the '50s' (I'm rereading some of my old books), I find that there are several ads devoted to 'foundation garments' - ladies' girdles, corsets and the like. Those rubberized things pretty much disappeared by the late 1960s.
Feminist writers claim that the demise of these garments was due to the liberation of women in the 1960s. Conspiracy-theorist that I am, I wish to point out that the rate of decline of foundation garment sales in the 1960s exactly equaled the rate of increase in radial tire usage on cars. I believe that much of the machinery used to produce women’s undergarments was converted to making radial tire components, thereby increasing tire manufacturing capacity. I posit that this was part of a sinister plot by tire manufacturers to boost the prices of the average tire.
In the 1960s, radials costs two to three times as much as conventional bias-ply tires. And were much more profitable. And ... let's face it, any technology which could contain a 200-pound woman in a Jackie Kennedy-sized dress without causing either the woman or the dress to explode, could easily contain 34 psi of air while screeching around a corner at, say, 40 mph.
It seems logical to me that Goodyear could have been behind the entire women's liberation movement. And that Playtex was paid off to keep their mouths shut by setting them up as a subcontractor (at very fat profit margins) to produce goods made from rubberized fabric for Goodyear's large Military Products Division.
The bigger the Vietnam war got; the bigger women's lib became. And the more radial tires were sold to the public at inflated prices and profits.
Why was this outrage not investigated by the FBI, you ask? Because J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser. And was paid-off - with foundation garments in his size - to look the other way. And the pieces of the puzzle all begin to fit together, you see.
What we have here is a vast conspiracy involving tire manufacturers, titans of the ladies' underwear biz, the head of the FBI, the military-industrial complex and feminists. And, it appears that it all began because tire companies were greedy and a select group of women wanted to 'let it all hang out' and not wear girdles anymore!
But, by shining the flashlight of logic into the dark and dusty corners of the hidden past, the truth now emerges and history is once again rewritten and corrected. (posted 11/14/08)
