SOS double-D

Jogging bras can save your life!

Published June 23, 2008 5:15PM (EDT)

You know those alarmist "female safety tips" e-mails your aunt just can't stop forwarding? Looks like they're about to get a new addition: When mountain climbing, always wear a bra.

Jessica Bruinsma, a Colorado woman who was hiking alone last week in the Bavarian Alps, lost her way in bad weather, fell 18 feet down a crevasse and ended up stranded on a crag for three days. Search-and-rescue teams were looking in the wrong place, so Bruinsma found a way to get their attention. She ran her sports bra down a cable used to move logs to the valley below, where it was spotted by a logger, who made the connection to reports of a missing woman and called rescuers.

Reports don't offer much more information than that, but all the fun of this story (apart from Bruinsma's rescue and expected full recovery, of course) is in the headlines. Among my favorites are "Bra-vo as Woman Flashes Her Way to Safety," "Bra Gives Support to Lost Hiker," the inevitable "Wonderbra" and the clear winner: "Bra Saves Woman From Twin Peaks."

Readers, can you top that?


By Kate Harding

Kate Harding is the author of Asking For It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do About It, available from Da Capo Press in August 2015. Previously, she collaborated with Anna Holmes, Amanda Hess, and a cast of thousands on The Book of Jezebel, and with Marianne Kirby on Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere. You might also remember her as the founding editor of Shapely Prose (2007-2010). Kate's essays have appeared in the anthologies Madonna & Me, Yes Means Yes, Feed Me, and Airmail: Women of Letters. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a B.A. in English from University of Toronto, and is currently at work on a Ph.D. in creative writing from Bath Spa University

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