Beautiful lovelies: corset advertisements and so much more

Corset Queens: a Victorian gallery

Miss Sadist's School of Tightlacing

From the “Sheffield Independent” July 18^th 1896:

SMALL WAISTS AND EDUCATION.

Nowadays, when almost every pastime is being annexed to the use of girls and women, and when, if we fully believe the more advanced ones of the sex we are within a reasonable distance of the day when the petticoat and skirt will be abolished in favour of the knickerbocker, at least when taking exercise, the manner in which girls were trained for their after positions in life at fashionable finishing schools forty years, or rather less, ago, will, says “Hearth and Home,” surely prove interesting reading, though, perhaps, almost incredible.

Not long ago, among a number of old books, the writer came across a diary of school-girl life from which extracts have been made showing how the girls are turned out in one (the conventional) mould without regard for differences of either disposition or temperament. Nothing could be plainer than the entries of the diary itself; and in the light of modern feminine development it becomes a valuable, if a frivolous, “human document.” Let it speak for itself.

“August 15, 1858. — I am fifteen years of age to-day, and I haven't a lover. Margery has two, she tells me, but then she has such a very, very tiny waist— l can easily span it— and Mary tells me, when I say my new stays pinch me, that young ladies ought not to mind how much they are pinched in, because if they intend to make a good marriage they must have a jimp, small waist. Perhaps it is Margery's waist has got her a lover, for she is not sixteen quite.”

“September 27 (same year)— At last I am at school. I have been here three days; how long they have seemed away from little Bob, mother, and Kathleen. What a wasp-waisted lot we are, all except myself and the one or two other new girls; but we have all been measured, and when Mrs. B— sends out her stays from Brighton I suppose we shall be pulled in like the rest, and be laced up till we can scarcely breathe. What the girls hate (and what I shall hate, too) is never being allowed to loosen, except for the bath on Saturdays. And then, I have never worn stays at night. 

Last night I could hear Madge T— groaning in her sleep; she said she hardly slept at all, her new stays cut her so horribly. She has been here more than two years, and Mrs. M— says she has a lovely little waist— it is only 15 inches — and that though Madge could scarcely walk or breathe sometimes, she will have a perfect figure when she leaves at Christmas. Madge told me all about poor Sarah W—, who used to faint, and whose mother fetched her away. But Mrs. M— doesn't allow it to be talked about.”

“September 30. — Margery is in disgrace. Mlle. V—  found a note she had dropped from Harry. Madame M— is very angry at the very idea of a lover, although, after all, she is always telling us girls, if we complain of our stays pinching us, or that Marie or Mademoiselle hurt us when they rub our chests to make us develop, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, that we must have good figures and small waists, so that we can make good marriages. Madge tells me that Violet S— and some of the other girls in her room— the bigger ones, of course — wear poultices very often at night to make them plump.”

“November 7. — This morning was ‘corset parade,’ as we girls call it. Madame, before we put on skirt and bodice, came round with the measurement book in her hand accompanied by Mademoiselle, tape in hand. Martha W— got into rare trouble; she had been faint in the night and obliged to loosen. She did not lace up again quite as small as she should have, hence Madame's anger. Amy T— was much commended, though she was white as death till she put on rouge, because she was only fifteen inches. How she panted and gasped while Margery and I laced her in. 

I am always a good girl, Madame says, though I don't pull myself in till I'm almost strangled, but content myself with seventeen inches — which, alas, Madame says must be sixteen by Christmas. I often laugh and say we girls are entered up like pieces of furniture, or something of that sort. Madame always reads out each entry from the book as each of us are ‘paraded.’ Mine was ‘Figure satisfactory, waist ditto; to be reduced to sixteen by December 18th; bust improved, but to be frictioned three times a week with linseed oil. Two pairs of new stays to be ordered from Madame B made extra stiff.’ Heigh-ho wee me, and I suppose I shall be a little more uncomfortable than before.”

Then a year after comes the following entry: — “How delightful to be home for good. Nurse is charmed with my figure, and says she is sure Captain W— admires it. He was watching me all across the lawn to-day while they were playing croquet. I can scarcely eat anything when laced in like I am, but she says girls don't want to eat much, and mother [says] that many women ruin their figures by eating.”

Victorian porn: BORING!

Before there were movies, there were mutoscopes. I remember making flip books as a kid, but they weren't this good. The mutoscopes in penny arcades around the turn of the last century qualified as "peep shows", but damn it all, I haven't been able to find one that is even remotely pornographic.

I did find a link for a Victorian magazine called The Pearl, and though it is indeed sexually explicit, it's boring. The sexual encounters are all the same, the writing atrocious. The plump young maidens are all interchangeable, and no actual "lovemaking" takes place. Too bad.

I love the idea of watching a movie by turning a crank. Love the flipping images that give a jerky, eerie sense of real movement. I'm not sure how they took all these photos, didn't think they had the technology to "film" something like that. But obviously, someone was on to the basic principle of rapidly-moving still pictures creating the illusion of movement. A principle that remains to this day.

OK, here's the link to all the issues of The Pearl, but I warn you it's BORING.

http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1870s/1879-1880_the_pearl_journal/index.htm

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Mail order orgasm

This, from Wikipedia, absolutely made my day. I had never heard of vibrators for sexual purposes until the mid-'70s, and assumed they were a recent innovation. Why was this fascinating bit of medical history censored?

Take it away, boys.

"The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times; in ancient Greece it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic corpus, which date from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Plato's dialogue Timaeus tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman’s body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek word for uterus, hystera.

"Galen, a prominent physician from the second century, wrote that hysteria was a disease caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women: hysteria was noted quite often in virgins, nuns, widows and, occasionally, married women. The prescription in medieval and renaissance medicine was intercourse if married, marriage if single, or vaginal massage (pelvic massage) by a midwife as a last recourse.

"Rachel P. Maines has observed that such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death, but needed constant treatment. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of vaginal massage (generally referred to as 'pelvic massage'): The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve "hysterical paroxysm." Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.

"A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity. Already at the turn of the century, hydrotherapy devices were available at Bath, and by the mid-19th century, they were popular at many high-profile bathing resorts across Europe and in America.

"By 1870, a clockwork-driven vibrator was available for physicians. In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria.

"While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it. In fact, the introduction of the speculum was far more controversial than that of the vibrator.

"By the turn of the century, the spread of home electricity brought the vibrator to the consumer market. The appeal of cheaper treatment in the privacy of one’s own home understandably made the vibrator a popular early home appliance. In fact, the electric home vibrator was on the market before many other home appliance ’essentials’: nine years before the electric vacuum cleaner and 10 years before the electric iron.

"A page from a Sears catalog of home electrical appliances from 1918 includes a portable vibrator with attachments, billed as ”Very useful and satisfactory for home service.” Other cures for female hysteria included bed rest, bland food, seclusion, refraining from mentally taxing tasks (for example, reading) and sensory deprivation."

Too bad they couldn't just lie there on their fainting couch and watch reality TV while stuffing their fat faces with Cheetohs. They could have satisfied all their appetites at once, and squeezed the extra pounds away with one of dem-dar corsets they wore.

I wonder if attitudes toward female sexuality have improved that much: women are either pole dancers in thongs and net stockings, or dutiful but frumpy Moms trundling the kids off to soccer games. Oversexy, or not sexy at all. And what is "sexy" anyway? It all looks pretty stereotyped to me.

On a previous post, I wrote about princesses. So what's the deal there? In all the fairy tales, they were universally virginal and untouched until that amazing First Kiss. First sex is always awkward, in fact it can be downright painful, but somehow, in its fumblingly determined way, the human race has managed it (and managed and managed and managed it).

Has the deck been stacked against female plesure from the very beginning? I'm a slavish fan of Mad Men, the best series I have ever watched. The sharks of l960s Madison Avenue circle one another every week, waiting to lunge for the kill.

But there are domestic dramas unfolding behind the piranha-tank of the office.

Don Draper is the alpha male of the series and the biggest prick the ad world has ever seen. But he does have a redeeming fondness for his 10-year-old daughter Sally, traumatized by her parents' recent divorce and her mother's remarriage to a wealthy man she doesn't

love.

In this past episode, Sally hacks her hair off, causing her mother to slap her hard across the face. In my experience, cutting off one's own hair is pretty close to slashing or burning: it's self-mutilation, and to be slapped for that by your mother is pretty harsh stuff. But then Sally really gets into trouble.

While at a sleepover at a friend's house, Sally watches TV raptly while Ilya Kuryakin of The Man from UNCLE, tied up back-to-back with someone, murmurs in his usual seductive way. We see Sally slowly begin to hike up her flannel nightgown.

And then -

Then her friend's mother bursts in, shrieks at Sally, strongarms her out of there away from her daughter (who slept through the whole thing), and drags her home, telling her mother she was masturbating in public.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the adults' reactions to this news. It was blank disbelief mixed with a kind of repulsion A sort of "whaaaaaat?" thing. Betty Draper even tells her ex-husband, "Girls who do that are, you know. Fast." Sally is promptly packed off to a child psychiatrist to be straightened out.

Oh, you can say this was a long time ago, but I really don't think the reaction now would be that much different. The impression was that, perhaps being a bit young for full-blown sexual feelings, Sally was experimenting a little, curious about her own body and what it was capable of.

This is supposed to be "normal" and "healthy", but do we really see it that way? If you went to a psychologist and said, "My daughter masturbates in public," what do you think they'd say?

I once tried to post something on the Oprah web site that contained the word "masturbation". It appeared for a second, then was deleted. I tried once more, and it was deleted again. Too dirty and offensive to mention,

I guess.

Time to break out the mail order vibrators again?