Women should be wary of romanticising Islam

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

08 January 2010

I am keen to meet Allegra Mostyn-Owen and support her invaluable work at the mosque in Forest Gate, east London. She runs art classes there for Muslim women and children. Muslim minds and lives are being closed down worldwide by fanatics who deny young people art, music and books. This intrepid white woman dares to push aside the curtain of ignorance.

She was the first wife of Boris Johnson — clearly not a woman to shirk challenges. But then I find out that she has married a much younger Lahori man and imagines her future as an ageing wife who will happily accept her lot within an orthodox Islamic set-up and welcome a younger wife to produce children. It is her choice and one wishes her well.

Several of my close Pakistani and Arab friends are happily married to European wives, with both sides compromising on lifestyles and values.

That is not what Mostyn-Owen has opted for. First she has married a much younger, fit man and maybe feels excessively grateful. Then she is going for complete surrender, an uncritical acceptance of the most regressive practices of some of my co-religionists. The reactions of her family are subtly xenophobic and must hurt. But her actions are as inexplicable to Muslims like myself too. My mother's generation fought for equality and monogamous marriages, a struggle that carries on. To see the daughters of Britannia carelessly surrendering these rights is almost unbearable.

It is happening elsewhere in Europe too. Since 9/11, vast numbers of educated, privileged middle-class white women have converted to Islam, often the most restricted forms with tediously long rulebooks. Surveys suggest they are the fastest growing group of converts in the West. Here they include women at investment banks, TV stations, universities and in the NHS.

Four years ago, when the trend first became clear, Dr Haifa Jawad, of Birmingham University, said: "The women were reacting to the moral uncertainties of the Western world. Many convert out of conviction and not because they are in love."

Mostyn-Owen says her husband is "untainted by the jaded confusion of western urban life". Such images of contamination and purity are often used to explain the decisions. Three such converts told me last year their nun-like apparel makes them feel less objectified and they feel "cleansed".

Islam gives women their own property and money and the right to sexual pleasure within marriage — radical stuff at a time when females in the world were but chattels. Most Muslim women I know are blissfully happy and able to be what they want. Not one of them would accept polygamy. The religion was born at a time when men around the world had several wives. It has no place in today's world.

Mostyn-Owen and other such submissive converts may think their new lives are excitingly exotic but their choices drag the faith back to the dark ages. And why? Just because they are a bit bored with liberty? Progressive Muslims have enough to contend with without these whimsies. The good lady must make hers a modern Muslim marriage between equals, otherwise I fear there will be many tears before bedtime.

Darfur exposes trait of Arab politics

By SALIM MANSUR, The London Free Press WEDNESDAY 18 AUGUST 2004 MONTREAL, Aug 18, 2004 — After Rwanda, the world learned once more the peril of genocide in rogue states.

Yet the world, or the United Nations as its representative body, is seemingly a reluctant learner with flawed memory.

Darfur is a remote part of Sudan — itself remote from cosmopolitan centres of Europe and North America.

There, in the arid deserts of the eastern Sahara, where living is a bitter daily struggle against sand and sun, a genocide is unfolding, with nary a whimper from the folks at the UN and sophisticates in cosmopolitan centres who remain outraged over American "imperialism" dismantling brutal rogue regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Over the past 18 months, nearly 50,000 Darfurians have been killed and more than a million made refugees by Arab Janjaweed militias, allegedly supplied with military support by the Sudanese government of Gen. Omar al-Bashir in Khartoum.

For more than two decades, Sudan, with an estimated population of 35 million, has been torn apart in a bitter civil war between a predominantly Arab-Muslim north, and a Christian-black south.

This conflict has resulted in an estimated two million dead and another four million made homeless in their own country.

Darfur, however, exposes another dimension of the internal conflict in Sudan.

Here, the victims are Muslim, black and non-Arab. Those perpetrating the brutalities are Muslims of Arab origin.

Under the prodding of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan — both of whom recently visited Darfur — the UN Security Council produced a resolution demanding the Sudanese government, within a month, disarm the militias and restore security in Darfur, or be faced with sanctions.

The tragedy unfolding in Darfur has been well-documented by reputable international human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch. There is no disputing in this instance the facts of a state-supported ethnic cleansing being repeated in the heart of Africa.

But Sudan is a member of the Arab League, an organization representing 22 Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Hence, the Arab League immediately rallied around Sudan at the UN to ease pressures being placed on Bashir’s regime.

The diplomatic manoeuvres of the Arab League are predictable. It exists to defend the interests of Arab states — meaning regimes in power — and not the Arab people.

The one constant in the history of Arab states over the past five decades is the abuse of people by power-holders in a part of the world — between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf — where regimes rule without popular legitimacy.

It is understandable, though inexcusable, that there are no demonstrations in the streets of Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Tunis, Algiers or elsewhere in the wider Arab-Muslim world, denouncing the Khartoum regime for its crimes in Darfur.

Freedom and democracy are sorely lacking among the Arab League members, and popular condemnation of an Arab regime would not be tolerated.

Arabs and Muslims, however, now live in growing numbers in cosmopolitan centres of the West, and enjoy freedoms denied their people elsewhere.

Here they came out in unprecedented numbers, protesting American-led wars to liberate Afghans and Iraqis from despots. But in their unconscionable silence over Darfur, they disclose how selective is their outrage.

This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.

Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks (’abed) is a derivative of the word slave (’abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.

Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.

The tragedy of Darfurians ironically has exposed to the world the racial dimension of Arab-Muslim culture and the hollowness of rhetoric proclaiming the brotherhood of Muslims.

Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

The Great Taboo: Arab Racism

Rebecca Tinsley Journalist and human rights activist
Posted: 09/09/11 01:04 PM ET

With the liberation of Libya come less happy reports from Amnesty and Physicians for Human Rights of rebels slaughtering scores of black Africans, believing they were all pro-Gaddafi mercenaries. While the dictator did hire some fighters from sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of black Africans in Libya are entirely innocent immigrants, one million of whom are guest workers.

According to a Cairo-based think tank, many of the Sudanese being targeted by Libyans are refugees escaping the ethnic cleansing of black Africans in Darfur and the South Kordofan region of Sudan. They have escaped one form of Arab racism, only to find another.

None of this has happened in a vacuum: in 2000 there were deadly anti-immigrant riots in Libya. Nor is there anything unusual about Libyan attitudes: Arab racism toward black Africans is commonplace, even if it remains a taboo subject. For the Nobel Prize winning novelist Wole Soyinka, the unwillingness to confront Arab racism is rooted in the role of Arabs in the slave trade. "Arabs and Islam are guilty of the cultural and spiritual savaging of the Continent," he writes.

The Ethiopian academic Mekuria Bulcha estimates that Arab traders sold 17 million Africans to the Middle East and Asia between the sixth and twentieth centuries. Yet, there is an almost total reluctance on the part of Arab intellectuals to examine their central role in slavery, past or present.

According to Naiwu Osahon, of the Pan Africa Movement, "Africans are treated like the scum of the earth" throughout the Arab world. He claims that the Arab policy has been"elimination, displacement, separation, marginalization and suppression" of black Africans since the 7th century.

Arguably it continues to this day. Black African guest workers in Egypt, Algeria and Libya tell of being publicly ridiculed and physically assaulted by Arabs. Egyptian writer Mona Eltahawy tells of watching a Sudanese girl being assaulted and tormented on the Cairo Metro, concluding, "We are racist people in Egypt and we are in deep denial." She makes awider point, that the Arab world has ignored the suffering of Darfur because the victims are black. "We only pay attention when America and Israel behave badly."

The Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have repeatedly refused to censure totalitarian regimes like Sudan for killing their own black African citizens, even when the victims are Muslims. Their conferences are on safer ground offering routine condemnation of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.

The argument goes that Arab and Muslim leaders refuse to criticize their own while they perceive a U.S.-orchestrated crusade (to use George Bush's ill-advised word) against them. Less acknowledged is the syndrome whereby they embrace their own victimhood and persisting grievance, ignoring atrocities and human rights abuses toward minorities in their own lands.

But there is another reason for Arab indifference to the suffering in Darfur and Somalia. The victims are "the wrong kind of Muslim"; black African, rather than Arab.

In the early 1900s Winston Churchill was appalled to see the Arab Sudanese armed forces using the black African Nuba people for target practice. Nothing has changed, except that now they shoot them from helicopter gunships hovering over the Nuba Mountains where the black Africans citizens have fled. In modern Sudan it is standard practice for those Sudanese who define themselves as Arab to call black African Sudanese 'abid' or slave to their faces; the fact that there has been intermarriage for years is ignored.

The Canadian academic Salim Mansur claims: "Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record."

However, any attempt to confront persistent Arab racism is shouted down by appeals to Arab/African solidarity against the neo-colonialist West. In the words of the U.S.-based Nigerian academic Moses Ebe Ochonu, 'Black African leaders bend over backwards to accommodate and protect the interests of Arab North Africans.'

But why do black African leaders remain silent about the mistreatment of black Africans in North Africa, the Middle East and Sudan, while obediently condemning the plight of the Palestinians? For the same reason that the African Union (AU), meeting at the end of August, declined to criticise Colonel Gaddafi, even after he had been ousted: he has been paying their personal bills for decades, as well as funding the AU.

For years the African Union, with an annual budget of $250 million, has been paid for by Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa. According to Peter Pham from the Atlantic Council, Libya "habitually pays the dues of members in arrears."

In addition, Gaddafi has "gleefully bankrolled a good number" of black African leaders, according to the columnist Kofi Aksoh-Sarpong. In the words of a Cameroonian official who preferred to remain anonymous, "A hospital here, a battalion of tanks there, not to mention the Series 500 Mercedes for their personal collections -- that's how the Arabs have manipulated African leaders." "King Faisal Hospitals turn up in the most unlikely places," she added.

Curiously, the same people in the West who consider themselves progressive and liberal, are often complicit in refusing to ever mention Arab racism, as if doing so is the same as being an anti-Palestinian Zionist.

Only the delusional would deny that Western racism persists, contributing to the collective failure to stop decades of war crimes against black Africans in Sudan. And only the naïve would argue that electing Barack Obama means America is 'over' racism. But slowly Western societies are facing up to their unpalatable past and outlawing racism, at least in statutes if not in their hearts. Let's hope that the Arab Spring will bring with it a new openness and the self-confidence to shrug off the suffocating cloak of powerless victimhood.

The History of the Sports Bra

It's hard to imagine a world without sports bras. Yet, this lifesaver was invented just 30 years ago, when a frustrated runner stitched two jockstraps into one Frankensteinian creation that revolutionized women's athletics. The sports bra has grown more refined since then, courtesy of real-women innovators who steered its evolution by insisting on what they and we needed.

By Kelly Bastone

"What do you do for a bra? All that flopping about, it's hardly comfortable," complained Victoria Woodrow. She'd just tried jogging, the 1970's hottest new craze, but felt flummoxed by the boob-bounce thing. So for advice she'd called up her sister, Lisa Lindahl, who'd already gotten into jogging.

"She couldn't believe it when I told her I just wore my everyday bra," recalls Lisa. "She said, 'Why isn't there a jockstrap for women?' Oh, we laughed hysterically at that. But you know, after I hung up the phone, I started to think that might not be such a silly idea."

At the disco women might've felt like the dancing queen ABBA was singing about in 1977, but on the track they felt like interlopers. Title IX legislation had been enacted merely five years before; and although much of the country was turning on to jogging, many women who tried running for fitness encountered similar frustrations: runaway bra straps, chafed skin, and breasts so sore from bouncing that jogging seemed anything but healthy. For all the things women did in their Maidenform bras, running in comfort wasn't one of them.

So in the summer of 1977, Lisa drew up her wish list of everything a jogging bra needed: The straps shouldn't fall down. There should be no poky hardware. And it should eliminate breast bounce. "Later, of course, I discovered that minimizing breast bounce was more realistic than eliminating it, she admits. But back then she was shooting for the moon," and she knew she needed someone with better sewing skills than her own to corral her bucking ponies.

She enlisted the help of costume designer Polly Smith, and together they tried out a few prototypes. But it wasn't until Lisa's husband paraded around wearing a jockstrap on his chest that the pair saw their solution. "Here's your jockbra, ladies," he clowned; and for a while the name stuck, especially after Polly stitched two supporters together and found that a jockstrap for women was the way to go.

Lisa and her husband soon split, and the divorce left her wondering if her jockbra could be brought to market. "I wanted one," she says, "so I assumed every woman wanted one. Plus, just after the divorce, I thought this could be a nice mail-order business on the side to help put me through grad school." So together with Polly and her costume assistant, Hinda Schreiber, Lisa launched the Jogbra. She drew up a business plan and sought funding. Hinda's dad lent them $5,000, and the brand-new company worked with an equally nascent apparel manufacturer in South Carolina to produce the first marketable Jogbra, in three sizes: small, medium, and large. The bras were distributed primarily through mail order in 1978, and by the following year Lisa and a handful of hired product reps started targeting sporting-goods retailers.

"I made a decision early on that this was not lingerie," Lisa says. "It was sports equipment, something you needed like you needed your shoes." But sporting-goods stores saw the Jogbra as a tough sell, and their overwhelmingly male owners reacted squeamishly to sample cases full of sports bras. Lisa was fond of countering, "You sell jockstraps, don't you?" That always stopped them cold.

The stores that did take the gamble discovered that the Jogbra sold and sold well. Before long, new players entered the fledgling sports bra market, many with novel configurations whose designs were all over the map. "Early on there was this big push away from conventional bra construction," recalls LaJean Lawson, an exercise scientist who has been conducting sports bra research at Oregon State University's biomechanics lab for nearly 20 years. She recalls how some designs turned the cups upside-down; others, like the Damon Jogger, included leg loops. Still others were produced by athletic supporter companies, which dabbled briefly in bras. These models, like the Lady Duke, featured thick, heavy-duty fabrics that were "not pretty," says LaJean.

The bulletproof Lady Duke didn't fly in an era defined by Jane Fonda's glittering aerobics outfits and superstyled hair. By the 1980s aerobic dancing had become the new fitness fad, inspiring women everywhere to pull on their leg warmers, lace up their Reeboks, and pogo around wearing colorful Lycra tanks. It was in this glamorous age that lingerie companies ventured onto the sports bra scene: Olga, Warner, Vanity Fairthese and other intimate apparel manufacturers began reaching for the growing athletic share of the market. They turned to Christine Haycockaka -aka Dr. Bra- for direction.

A softball player herself, Christine conducted pioneering research throughout the 1970s and 1980s that measured breast movement by observing women running on treadmills. Coaches and other sports officials were most concerned about women's potential for injury. But Christine's prime motivator was solving soreness because she personally experienced breast pain every time she pitched a game. My mother suggested I try a maternity bra, Christine muses. But instead of experimenting with bra design, as Lisa Lindahl did, Christine turned to science. As associate professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Christine represented the needs of female athletes by serving on the American Medical Association's Committee on Medical Aspects of Sports. She also conducted key studies investigating breast support and protection.

"On the one hand, the studies were debunking the myth that women shouldn't be in contact sports because they'd hurt their breasts," Christine says. "But on the other hand, the research gave credence to women's complaints of breast pain." In one study she actually measured the force of a breast in motion. "It was quite impressive," she recalls. So when bra manufacturers started looking at Christine's work and asking for her advice, she gave it freely: wide bottom bands for extra support and straps not so elastic that they let breasts bounce.

In response intimate apparel companies started making beefed-up everyday bras built for sport - not exactly ideal gear, but a sign that the needs of female athletes were moving into the mainstream. Even upstart Jogbra had grown big enough to attract corporate attention. Although its signature product remained essentially unchanged over the years, the company had expanded its line to offer a variety of designs, and in 1990 Playtex purchased Jogbra from Lisa and her partners.

One segment of the female population, however, remained firmly on the periphery: large-breasted athletes. The pullover shelf-bra design established during the aerobics craze worked reasonably well for A and B cups but was woefully inadequate for D-plus sizes. "It was ridiculous," says Renelle Braaten, a Montana hairdresser who struggled to contain her double-Ds while playing racquetball and volleyball. "Anything stretchy enough to fit over my head just let them bounce all over the place," she says.

So in 1988 Renelle collaborated with her mother, an accomplished seamstress, and the two started from scratch to design something for well-endowed women. Renelle knew that her bra would need really strong, relatively nonelastic material; a crisscross design for better back support; exceptionally wide straps; and a front or back closure to zip 'em in tight. In fact, her first prototype did use a zipper, though she soon switched to hooks and eyes to achieve the supersnug fit she sought. Before long she'd dialed in a design that actually worked.

"It made a huge difference," Renelle recalls. She stitched a few for herself, then for friends, and that set her wondering about the larger population. "I knew I was not the only DD out there," says Renelle. "There had to be other women in the same position I'm in. And I knew if I could find them, they would love the bra."

Renelle planned to sell her product to an existing company, but each manufacturer gave her the same response: "What can this crazy broad from Montana possibly offer that our fabulous designers haven't already thought of?" Renelle recalls. They also doubted that there could be many large-breasted women in sports - a skepticism that never fails to spark Renelle's indignation since she blames that dearth on inadequate gear. The rejections roused what Renelle calls her "Norwegian stubbornness" and inspired the hairdresser to bring the bra to market herself. A stroke of luck introduced her to freelance apparel designer Heidi Fisk, who made aesthetic improvements to Renelle's bra and helped locate a product manufacturer. Renelle's own savings funded Enell Incorporated, and the minimal startup cash made for a low-profile launch.

Fourteen years later, Enell Inc. sees about 40 percent growth annually and receives daily e-mails from women who have resumed or begun athletics thanks to the Enell bra. Renelle says getting those grateful e-mails is the best part of her job. "Some of these women had been hunting so long for something that worked and were always disappointed," she says. "They try the Enell bra, and it's, like, Oh my gosh! And suddenly these women are playing tennis and basketball again. It's great to make money with the business, but that's nothing compared to the satisfaction of getting this product to women who really need it."

The happy customer who's had the greatest impact on Enell is Oprah Winfrey. For years Renelle implored Oprah to try her bra, sometimes sending polite invitations, sometimes scolding the superstar for letting her boobs bounce around on national TV when she should be buckling them into the Enell bra. Finally, one day Oprah did just that, which prompted glowing product reviews in O, The Oprah Magazine and a 2001 appearance for Renelle on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The result was a surge in demand that depleted eight months worth of inventory in just three days and a valuable endorsement that boosts Enell's sales to this day.

Renelle now targets adolescents because she feels that large-breasted teens tend to give up sports once their ballooning chests make it too embarrassing to participate. "They just won't go through the humiliation of playing basketball in front of their peers if they're bouncing all over the place," Renelle sympathizes. She also believes that a properly supportive bra enhances athletic performance. She's often watched women running with their arms held tight at their sides, trying to stabilize their breasts. "You put those same women in a good bra and they forget all about holding onto themselves and really start concentrating on their sport," she observes.

And with the average breast size on the rise, more women need bras that offer greater support than those engineered for B cups. Americans in general are gaining weight, and for women those extra pounds have translated into plumper bosoms. Ten years ago 34B was the average; now it's 38C. That increase means larger-breasted athletes are no longer seen as a niche market. Profit potential is motivating big corporate players to cater to C and D sizes, which translates to more options for consumers, who are finding that the big brands are serving a wider spectrum of women than ever before. They're also producing sport-specific bras, meaning styles for low-impact activities like yoga and walking are engineered differently from those intended for running. And many bras now combine compression designs with encapsulation (a bra design that lifts and separates the breasts) for support without the monoboob look.

Along with advances in support, sports bras now offer high-performance moisture management; and technological advances made for outdoor sporting goods like parkas and tents have crossed over to sports bras. Welded and molded parts now replace stitched seams, which were too often the source of chafing and discomfort. The first high-support seamless bra, introduced in 2003 by Champion (Jogbra's current owner), combined slick nylon fabric with seamless design for friction-free performance. And Champion's brand-new Vapor bra uses Cocona fabric technology, a superwicking fiber made from coconut shells that makes CoolMax seem so last decade.

Having access to performance-oriented sports bras may not have made women more athletic but it definitely supported them to greater sporting accomplishments. "The history of the sports bra really tracks with the history of women in athletics," observes Lisa Lindahl. Prior to Title IX, women played half-court basketball, and running more than a mile was seen as a big accomplishment. But the bra that might've been tolerable on a 10-minute jog became a torture device during a 26-mile marathon. As women upped the intensity of their sports, they demanded equipment equal to the task. In turn that equipment made it possible for women to go longer, harder, and faster.

"It's been a transformative piece of clothing," says LaJean Lawson. "Finally, we have what we need to play hard, play well, and be comfy."

As the industry grew, profit motivated corporate players to join the effort, but the sports bra's inventor and innovators were real-women athletes fueled by passion for sports and the need for comfort. Lisa Lindahl is back in the bra business, this time with Bellisse, a company offering a bra for women experiencing the pain of truncal lymphedema following breast cancer surgery. Although she prefers to work on the leading edge rather than in an established industry, she still derives satisfaction from knowing that her invention is no longer a novelty. "I can't tell you what a kick it is to walk into a storea big store, like a JCPenney and see an entire wall of sports bras," she marvels. "It's an uncontested reality" - one for which active women can be profoundly grateful.

Major Moments in Sports Bra History:

A.D. 300 Roman mosaics in a villa near the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina depict women exercising with bound breasts.

1906 American inventor Laura Blanche Lyon secures a patent for the bust supporter, a back-fastened canvas camisole with gathered cups now regarded as the first sports bra.

1917 American artist Ethel Quirk invents a breast supporter intended for theatrical, acrobatic dancing.

1972 Title IX of the Educational Amendments bans sex discrimination in schools, including unequal athletic opportunities.

1977 Lisa Lindahl, Polly Smith, and Hinda Schreiber stitch two jockstraps together to create the Jogbra, the first modern sports bra.

1982 Jane Fonda's Workout video launches the aerobic dancing craze and inspires millions of women to jump around in front of their TV's sporting shimmery, gem-hued Lycra tanks.

1984 In Los Angeles 27-year-old Joan Benoit wins the first-ever women's Olympic marathon with her lingerie-style bra strap showing as she completes her closing lap, an indiscretion that caused an uproar load enough to upstage her athletic achievement.

1988 Montana hairstylist Renelle Braaten constructs a front-fastening sports bra designed especially for large-breasted women.

1999 Soccer player Brandi Chastain celebrates her team's World Cup victory by stripping off her jersey and revealing her black Nike sports bra, which ignites inexplicable furor in a nation mesmerized by Baywatch. Others, however, see this as the moment when female athletes come out of the locker room to declare breasts as symbols of power and proficiency rather than impediments.

2000 Champion responds to women's complaints that sports bras flattened and de-feminized their bust lines by introducing the Shaper bra, which uses a unique nonfoam spacer fabric to maintain women's curves without compromising performance.

2003 Seamless sports bras virtually eliminate chafing and end the practice among distance athletes of covering themselves in Vaseline to prevent painful abrasions.

2007 High-tech fabrics improve bras' moisture management: Champion's Vapor sports bra features Cocona, a superwicking, odor-squelching new material made from coconut shells.

Fitting in, tips on finding a sports bra that fits:

Shop around, use your regular bra size as a guideline, but experiment with larger and smaller sizes to see what fits best. Sizing varies even among bras made by the same manufacturer.

Beware the band. Most of a bra's support comes from the band at the bottom, which restricts breasts vertical movement. The band should fit snugly against your rib cage; a too-big band lets the bra creep up your back. If the bra has an underwire, it should lie flat against your chest. If it's riding up onto your breasts, the bra's too small.

Go wide. Broad, nonstretchy shoulder straps provide the most support. If straps dig into your shoulder, they're either adjusted too tightly or the band size is too big.

Check the cups. Skin bulging out of the top or sides means the cup is too small; the fabric must completely cover your breasts to effectively contain motion. Wrinkling across the cups, however, means the bra's too big.

Dance around. Jog, jump, bend, reach - do whatever you can while trying on the bra to replicate the activity for which it's intended. Wear the bra for 5 to 10 minutes to give hot spots and other fit issues time to develop.

Trade up. Recent sports bra advances make today's models better than ever. If you're still wearing 1980s' technology, it's time to graduate to the twenty-first century.

The Problem of Breast Pain in Women Who Exercise

Brent Holland/Getty Images

PHYS ED MAY 1, 2013, 12:01 AM

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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In the days before the London Marathon last year, scientists from the Research Group in Breast Health at the University of Portsmouth in England approached female racers at the event’s registration center and asked them to complete an anonymous questionnaire about their exercise habits and breast health.

PHYS ED

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

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Marathon, half-marathon, 10K and 5K training plans to get you race ready.

Sore breasts are a common experience among women of all ages and sizes, athletes and nonathletes alike.

But scientists had not examined whether and to what extent exercise contributes to breast pain and, conversely, whether and to what extent breast pain alters how women exercise.

So they surveyed almost 1,300 of the women registered for the race and learned, as their new study, published in March in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, makes clear, that exercise does significantly impact breast pain and vice versa.

It should surprise no one, of course, that exercise influences breasts, just as it does virtually every tissue in the male and female body.

Female breast tissue is unusual, however, being weighty, even in small-breasted women, but with little natural anatomical support. As a result, unconstrained breasts move independently when a woman does, and that movement is exacerbated during exercise.

Earlier motion-capture research by the Portsmouth scientists established that unsupported female breasts — that is, those not contained within a bra — oscillate as much as eight inches in space when a woman runs, and not just up and down, but also side to side, forward and backward.

Even when the volunteers wore a standard sports bra, the scientists found their breasts often continued to sway considerably during running.

But whether this breast motion was linked to later soreness was unclear.

Which is why the researchers now set out to examine the real-world consequences of being an active woman and having sore breasts.

“It is an important quality of life issue for women,” said Nicola Brown, a member of the Research Group in Breast Health at Portsmouth, a lecturer in exercise science at Saint Mary’s University College in London and the lead author of the study.

It is also an issue with too many dimensions to effectively study in a single laboratory experiment, so the scientists decided instead to survey a cross section of active women. And contrary to popular belief, a cross section of active women is what the registration roll of a major marathon conveniently provides.

“Some people have the perception that female marathon runners” are all slender and boyish, as elite racers often are, “and don’t have breasts,” Dr. Brown said, but she and her collaborators focused their study on the London Marathon’s “mass-participation runners, who are a variety of shapes and sizes,” she said.

When the scientists analyzed the surveys from these runners, they found that they had data about women with 56 different bra sizes, from an AA cup to an HH and chest-band sizes from 28 to 40 inches. The women ranged widely in body weight, too, with the average being about 148 pounds.

More than 90 percent reported that they always wore a bra, including during exercise.

But these active women were not immune from breast pain. More than a third reported that their breasts were frequently were sore, although not necessarily because of exercise. Sore breasts most commonly were because of hormonal changes associated with the menstrual cycle, the runners reported.

The incidence of breast pain was highest among the women with the largest breasts. More than half of those wearing an F cup or larger reported frequent breast pain. But smaller-breasted women also were affected; about 25 percent of those who wore an A cup or smaller said that their breasts often were sore.

Motherhood reduced the likelihood that a woman would report breast pain, perhaps, the authors speculate, because pregnancy and breast-feeding alter the composition of the breasts.

What the researchers found particularly striking was that, for many of the women, exercise induced or aggravated breast soreness and, in consequence, breast pain often altered how the women trained. About a quarter of those with sore breasts said that they reduced the intensity of their workouts when their breasts hurt — walking in lieu of running, for example — while others skipped exercise altogether.

In aggregate, Dr. Brown said the results suggest that exercise-related breast pain can compromise the quality and quantity of physical activity for many women.

Of course, many of us might consider that a self-evident finding — anecdotal evidence suggests that my friends and I complain all the time about how our breasts feel when we’re running. But this is the first study to formally examine and validate the issue.

It also, Dr. Brown said, “highlights the importance and significance of research into the treatment of breast pain.” A well-fitting, supportive bra, she said, has been shown to lessen breast pain in about 85 percent of women with the condition. But a large number of women, including by inference many of the London runners, are not wearing the right bra.

The Research Group in Breast Health has published a handy online guide to bra fitting. But far more research is needed into sports bra design, Dr. Brown said, an undertaking that she hopes will progress rapidly, having herself just completed her first marathon and been hampered occasionally during training by sore breasts.

Kiket képvisel a FIDESZ?

Tudjuk, kiket képviselnek a fiatal szocialisták:

1 Orbán Viktor, Magyarország miniszterelnöke — volt egyetemi és gimnáziumi KISZ-titkár;

2 Matolcsy György, nemzetgazdasági miniszter — volt MSZMP-tag, III/2-es ügynök

3 Varga Mihály, a Miniszterelnökség vezetője — volt KISZ-titkár

4 Martonyi János, külügyminiszter — volt MSZMP-tag

5 Pintér Sándor, belügyminiszter — volt párttitkár

6 Kövér László, parlamenti házelnök — volt KISZ-titkár, az MSZMP Központi Bizottsága alá tartozó Társadalompolitikai Intézet munkatársa

7 Deutsch Tamás, a Fidesz EP-képviselője — volt KISZ-titkár

8 Stumpf István, alkotmánybíró, az első Fidesz-kormány minisztere — volt MSZMP-tag, a Hazafias Népfront egykori alelnöke

9 Orbán Győző, Orbán Viktor apja — volt párttitkár

10 Pozsgai Imre, a Fidesz Orbán Viktor által vezetett Nemzeti Konzultációs Testületének tagja — az MSZMP Központi Bizottságának egykori tagja

11 Járai Zsigmond, az első Fidesz-kormány pénzügyminisztere — az utolsó kommunista kormány államtitkára, volt MSZMP-tag

12 Mikola István, az első Fidesz-kormány egészségügy-minisztere — a Hazafias Népfront volt alelnöke

13 Chikán Attila, az első Fidesz-kormány gazdasági minisztere — volt MSZMP-tag

14 Fónagy János, az első Fidesz-kormány közlekedési és vízügyi minisztere — volt MSZMP-tag

15 Vonza András, az első Fidesz-kormány mezőgazdasági és vidékfejlesztési minisztere — volt MSZMP-tag

16 Ligetvári Ferenc, az első Fidesz-kormány környezetvédelmi minisztere —volt MSZMP-tag

17 Szabadi Béla, az első Fidesz-kormány mezőgazdasági államtitkára — volt MSZMP-tag, volt munkásőr

Igy a magyar képviselőknek és polgármestereknek nem számít sem morál, sem etika, sem a választókkal szembeni bármiféle tisztesség.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud

TALKS

FILMED FEB 2013 • POSTED FEB 2013 • TED2013

What is going to be the future of learning?

I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage.

I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?

["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]

So that's a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. I'm not saying they're broken. It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.

The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?"

And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know." (Laughter)

They said, "Why have you put it there?"

I said, "Just like that."

And they said, "Can we touch it?" I said, "If you wish to."

And I went away. About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, "Well that's impossible, because -- How is it possible? They don't know anything."

My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse."

So I said, "Yeah, that's possible."

So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it.

When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse."

(Laughter)

So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"

And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, "You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it." (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "teach ourselves" said so casually.

Here's a short glimpse from those years. That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On your right is an eight-year-old. To his left is his student. She's six. And he's teaching her how to browse. Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. ["Hole in the wall film - 1999"] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "There's a processor inside."

So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.

But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "Keep talking into it until it types what you say." (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this.

Computer: Nice to meet you. Child: Nice to meet you.

Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent.

So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where does it stop? I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer? And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand.

The children came rushing, said, "What's all this?"

So I said, "It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English."

So they said, "How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?"

So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, "I haven't the foggiest idea." (Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away." (Laughter)

So I left them for a couple of months. They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said, "We've understood nothing."

So I said, "Well, what did I expect?" So I said, "Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything?"

So they said, "We haven't given up. We look at it every single day."

So I said, "What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?"

So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, "Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven't understood anything else."

(Laughter) (Applause)

So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thirty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time.

So I asked this girl, "Can you help them?"

So she says, "Absolutely not. I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you."

I said, "I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother."

So she says, "What's that?"

I said, "Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what grannies do."

So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.

Here's Kallikuppam.

(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.

I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. At 12.

So what are jobs going to be like? Well, we know what they're like today. What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.

What will it be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be -- a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement that is. But we have to integrate that into our own future.

Encouragement seems to be the key. If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I did, it was simply saying, "Wow," saluting learning.

There is evidence from neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform." Why did they create a system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure.

I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. I put out notices and papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? I got 200 in the first two weeks. I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran. She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. She does it with only one age-old gesture. "Shhh." Okay?

Watch this.

Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me.

Children: You can't catch me.

Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man. Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.

Grandmother: Well done! Very good.

SM: So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at.

But how will we know? How will we come to know? Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments. They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. I've tried this in many, many schools.

It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, "It just happens by itself?"

And I said, "Yeah, it happens by itself." "How did you know that?"

I said, "You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from."

Here's a SOLE in action.

(Children talking)

This one is in England. He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around.

Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM: Australia Girl: -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons.

SM: A decade ahead of her time.

So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. You already heard about that. You know what that means. There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. But that's not sexy enough. The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, "If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?" And if he says, "Well, what? how?" you say, "There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle," and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.

So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. I've tried incredible, incredible questions -- "When did the world begin? How will it end?" — to nine-year-olds. This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. This is done by children without the help of any teacher. The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and admires the answer.

So what's my wish? My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? So we need to design a future for learning. And I've got to -- hang on, I've got to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help me build this school. It will be called the School in the Cloud. It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this. It's a facility which is practically unmanned. There's only one granny who manages health and safety. The rest of it's from the cloud. The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.

But I want you for another purpose. You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs. It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it. If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. That's my wish.

And just one last thing. I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. And there was this little girl who was following me around.

And I said to her, "You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. I don't know, what should I do?" And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.

She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, "Get on with it."

(Laughter) (Applause)

I think it was good advice. I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)