And then, one day, I decided that I was tired of hiding.
Besides, I reasoned, these people pride themselves on being “liberal” and talk a lot about “diversity.” Why not let them see for themselves how truly liberal their opinions are when confronted with real diversity—with something that’s truly different from what they see every day?
On the last day of our module on Swedish massage, we were scheduled to have a paper-based test. We would begin our classes on deep tissue manipulation soon enough, but the day of the written test wouldn’t require undressing. In a way, it was oddly appropriate that I chose the last day of Swedish techniques as my first day to wear my corset to school, because although Pehr Ling (the so-called Father of Swedish Massage) died slightly before Queen Victoria was crowned in England, his techniques were popularized in America during the time she reigned on the other side of the Atlantic. Similarly, the corset had existed before the nineteenth century, but it really came into its own in America during this period. Whether students of one Victorian concept would tolerate another was yet to be seen.
I have never had a driver’s license, and it was my custom to ride my bicycle to school. I was a little nervous about cycling corseted, but after going a few blocks, I realized I needn’t have worried. My posture was a bit more upright than the classic cycling position, but nothing quintessential had changed. The corset didn’t interfere with my legs’ range of motion, and of course, my arms were completely free. The added stiffness on my torso required a bit of acclimation as my body practiced the little hindbrain tricks of balancing that a cyclist does so quickly that conscious thought doesn’t get a chance to enter into them, but overall the changeover from uncorseted to corseted riding was really no harder than a shift from off-road tires to slicks: something to get used to, nothing to worry about.
In class, the man sitting next to me that day kept staring, but it was a woman who actually said something. She looked me up and down, slump-shouldered and disapproving. “Wow, you’ve got the posture from hell today!” she boomed out.
Previously, my automatic reaction to such a comment would have been to slink down apologetically in my chair. I actually noticed other students within earshot doing exactly that, crouching down their already hunched shoulders in compliant submission. Some of them tittered nervously.
I couldn’t slink down, though. The corset kept me upright, so I did the only thing I could do. I sat up straighter.
I nodded slowly, keeping my voice low and level. “I’m wearing a corset.”
She stared throughout the length of several of my slow blinks. “Does that, like, hurt?”
“No, not at all,” I asserted. “It’s actually really comfortable.”
My classmate stood down, took her seat, and the test commenced shortly thereafter. Further discussion would wait until several hours later, when the exam had long been completed and everyone was munching snacks that had been brought to celebrate the end of a class module. One of the youngest members of the class—a woman who had come in late and thus missed the earlier confrontation—pointed to my midsection.
“Are you wearing a . . . a . . . thing?” she asked.
“A corset?” I smirked. “Yeah.”
She giggled, poking the metal busk through my dress. “My grandma had one of those.” She giggled again. “Can I see it?”
I paused for half a beat. “Sure . . . ” The request caught me off guard, but I didn’t see any reason to deny it. “Why not?”
We went into the women’s bathroom and I undid my dress far enough to show her the corset. “Damn!” she said, approvingly. “Can I, like, feel it?” She held out her hands in a circle, parallel around but not touching my waist.
“Sure, go ahead.”
She put her hands around my waist and squeezed the corset slightly. “Damn!” she repeated. “I gotta get me one of those.”
She asked me where I’d gotten it, and I related what I’d heard from Gabriel about the website13 where he’d made the purchase. While I was giving her the information and still had my dress down, another of the younger class members entered the lady’s room. She also wanted to feel the corset and find out where I’d gotten it, so I patiently repeated myself as she squeezed my waist. The first girl was still giggling when we returned to class together.
Well, I assessed in the privacy of my thoughts. Two for, one against. Not a bad score, really.
Illustration from nineteenth-century massage manual.
5
Stayed Slumber and Sizing Down
From A Widow and Her Friends (1901). Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.
As much as I loved wearing my corset during the day, it took me a few weeks to creep up on the idea of sleeping in it. It had been my custom for years to sleep wearing nothing at all; the idea of sleeping in the tightest garment I’d ever owned seemed crazy. Not to mention, uncomfortable. But mostly crazy.
Still, as I’d told Gabriel, before I’d started all this, the idea of myself wearing a corset at all would have sounded mad to me—and once I’d tried it, it wasn’t as uncomfortable as I’d expected. Quite the contrary, in fact, once I had gotten used to it. I’d grown to look on it like a case of a person who’d gone barefoot her whole life and had suddenly been given a pair of sturdy boots. At first the unfamiliar items would seem constrictive and uncomfortable, but after a while, the wearer would find it hard to go back—and, most likely, wouldn’t want to do so.
Of course, it would be distinctly odd to wear shoes to bed. That was where I hovered for a while with the corset: it was pleasant for the day, but it was a “day thing” in my mind, and it was sort of nice to take it off at night. In the mornings, I was finding myself reluctant to get out of bed, because I knew the first half hour or so after I had squished myself into the corset would be the worst part of the day.
As I had seen in models in anatomy class, and in actual bodies in the cadaver lab I had attended, the lower portion of the human torso is mostly filled with intestines. On their own, these are latex-thin (a very reasonable analogy is sausage casings, which are made from animal intestines). The only appreciable bulk involved is their contents, which are rather amorphous. (This is why a corset can do what it does on the abdomen and not, say, the leg.) Over the course of the day, these intestinal contents would settle into the shape of the corset, and as things evened out, wearing the corset would become comfortable.
My research had lead me to the conclusion that the more a person wears a corset, the faster the waist diminishes. Certain nineteenth-century texts referenced women loosening their corsets for bed (implying that at least some women did sleep in them) or wearing their older corsets at night to save the nicer ones for day wear. The bloggers on the websites I had read who slept in their corsets all agreed that it was the best (most said the only) way to achieve a small waist. I dithered, but at last decided to give it a try.
The first night I slept in my corset, I tossed uncomfortably for hours after lying down. When I finally did attain sleep, it was fitful at first. But after an incredibly vivid nightmare of violent strangulation, I awoke at midnight, clawing at my laces. Gasping for breath, I yanked at the ends of the laces, pulling them far out as soon as I managed to untie the bow. I didn’t retie them, but left them hanging loose down my back as I fell into a deep slumber.
In the morning, Gabriel curiously examined the loose, slightly tangled cords. “How did that happen?”
I was embarrassed and didn’t want to answer at first. “I . . . guess they must have gotten caught on something while I was sleeping,” I lied, lamely. He looked surprised, but didn’t ask any further questions.
The second night was easier. I woke up a few times, but resisted the urge to undo my laces, and managed to get back to sleep. In the morning when I got dressed, I was pleasantly surprised not to have to go through the initial morning squeeze to which I had grown accustomed. Since the form had stayed in place, my intestinal contents had never oozed out into an amorphous blob, and there
was no displacement to deal with. I was comfortable in a way that I had come to associate with evenings, after internal contents had settled. It was a pleasant comfort and it inspired me to continue sleeping in the corset.
The third night was easier still, and the progress continued until I was sleeping normally, more or less. I found the advice of the bloggers had been quite true, although I was in no way prepared for how quickly my waist started to shrink. After a week of sleeping in the corset (a mere month after I’d first worn it at all), I could wear it so tightly laced that the two halves were overlapping in the back, and still have enough spare room to thrust both arms down behind the busk and wave them around. I had started with a natural thirty-two-inch waist, and this corset measured twenty-eight inches. Taking the spare room (enough for both my fists) into account, that was a reduction of more than four inches in a month. There had been no surgery involved, nor any special diet. I was eating smaller portions because the constriction on my abdomen meant I had less room in my stomach, but I was eating until I felt full at every meal. (Actually, a lot of what I had been eating was cheesecake. There had been quite a large quantity of it left over from my birthday. So, no . . . No special diet here.)
It took a while to become accustomed to how quickly I now achieved a full feeling at mealtimes. I would top up my bowl with what seemed like an average portion, then run out of room halfway through. Even when my stomach felt full, my eyes would tell me I hadn’t eaten enough, and I would continue trying to make myself eat, a remembered echo of my mother’s voice scolding, “Finish your dinner/lunch/breakfast/snack! You haven’t eaten enough! If you don’t eat it all, you’ll be hungry later!” Trying to heed this advice and evade this dreaded bogeyman of getting hungry later, I would stuff myself as full as I could, then suffer from stomachache and heartburn afterward.
One day, I had a striking realization. It should have been obvious—ridiculously so, in retrospect. It just ran so blatantly contrary to the advice that had been drilled into me from childhood that it came as a bit of an epiphany. If I get hungry later, it finally dawned on me, I can eat more later! This is the first world, not the third; I’m never far from food, and I can get it when I need it.
It was a relief, really, to realize that something that had been hanging over my head since childhood had never really been a threat. So what if I get hungry later? I’ll eat later—when I’m hungry! What on earth have I been so worried about?
This thought found its way into the portions I placed on my plate at mealtimes. I would spoon out a given serving of food, and my eyes would tell me it was nowhere near enough. But this doesn’t have to be the end, I would remind myself. There’s more food if I need it. If I’m still hungry after I eat this, I can get more. As often as not, I wouldn’t want to get more.
I practiced chewing slowly, counting my bites and savoring the flavor of the food instead of forcing it down as though it would be taken away any minute. As I took more care with my meals, they became better-rounded, with more salubrious proportions of fiber and protein to starch.
The stomachaches went away, as did the heartburn. One night as I was relishing my cheesecake dessert, enjoying the sensation of being pleasantly full but not stuffed, I looked over at Gabriel.
“You know,” I told him, pondering. “My mom and my brother both have something called acid reflux, but that’s really just a fancy name for bad heartburn. Their doctors give them prescription drugs for it, and they’ve got all kinds of side effects. Then they take more drugs to deal with the side effects, and with the side effects of the side effects . . .”
I let the chocolate cheesecake melt slowly over my tongue, savoring its richness, then I continued.
“But since I’ve been eating smaller portions and eating slower, my heartburn’s gone away.” I swallowed the creamy chocolate and cocked an eyebrow, thinking of my mom’s overflowing medicine cabinets. “Do you think their heartburn would go away, without the drugs, if they just started eating less?”
Gabriel nodded. “Oh, I’m sure it would.” Then he shrugged. “But do you think they’re going to do that?”
“No,” I sighed. “You’re right.” I shook my head. “It’s too bad, really.”
When my mom moved into her own house after my grandmother died, I spent several seasons planting her yard with a myriad of fruit trees and bushes, thinking that the fresh fruit would be good for her diabetes. My reward had been hearing how her friends at work loved the cherries, apples, and Asian pears and how the neighborhood birds loved the mulberries—never any comments about her eating any of it. Her refrigerator remained full of highly processed, microwavable foods, and meanwhile her diabetes continued to get worse.
I had long since given up on trying to change my family.
But at least I now knew I could change myself for the better.
As my waist dramatically reduced, that first corset rapidly grew loose enough to be uncomfortable. It may seem counterintuitive, but a loose corset can actually be just as uncomfortable as an unreasonably tight one. The first time I had put on my corset, it seemed to have been suffocating me, but as we grew accustomed to each other, I found that I enjoyed the support it offered. I could stand up straight, with a lovely posture (which is rare in modern times), comfortably held in snug support. When I sat, I had a ready-made brace at my back fitted to my exact contours, regardless of how awful the chair behind me might be.
However, as my waist reduced and the corset became looser, it provided increasingly less support. I still had to remain upright, or else be slumped uncomfortably against bones of sprung steel, but the stays were too slack to provide their intended support. My back muscles grew tired, holding that agonizingly perfect posture on their own, and I became fidgety.
It was time for a smaller corset.
Gabriel showed me the website from which he had ordered my first set of stays. They had a number of lovely choices, all of them tempting. After some delightful dithering, I chose a twenty-four-inch model in green silk brocade, embroidered with gold thread. I watched the mailbox, eager for its arrival.
When the new corset came, it was the first day all over again. I had grown used to seeing my curvy image in the mirror, but the new figure brought those curves to new levels. The first corset had given me a form that could still (with imagination) be attributed to lucky genes or intense exercise, but this was starting to look unreal.
The first time Gabriel helped me on with the new corset, I flashed a coquettish grin at myself in the mirror. I slid a hand down the curve of my gold-touched emerald flank and gave my silken armor a playful slap, then insisted we go out for a stroll.
My head was very high indeed as we walked along the streets of Seattle’s University District and into the adjoining neighborhood of Wallingford. I had on my lovely kitten-heel boots and I was almost dancing. The cheerful smiles I saw at every glance may have been in response only to my own joyous countenance, but to me they all seemed to be admirers. I reveled in the pride in Gabriel’s eyes as he looked at me, and the feeling as he slid his arm around my waist was very much like when we first fell in love.
As we turned back toward home, he made me laugh at some little joke that has since been lost to time. I giggled at first and the involuntary shaking of my belly muscles shook against the sides of the corset and tickled me all the way through. That sense of core-deep tickling only made the laughter stronger, and soon I was cracking up with mirth, one hand over my corseted stomach as I shook with laughter that made me sway, since I couldn’t double over.
When I finally caught my breath enough to explain the delicious feeling coursing through and over me, Gabriel responded, “Maybe that’s where the phrase, ‘Tickle your fancy’ comes from. I bet that’s why nineteenth-century men were always trying to make women laugh.” He raised his eyebrows at me, teasing. “Trying to tickle their fancies!” He reached for the soft spot under my arm, as though to tickle me in earnest, and I was laughing all over again.
I enjoyed having
a supportive corset again, but because my new stays were so tight, I started to have real issues with my underwire bra. Since this corset was still a ready-made, off-the-rack model, its reduced size (compared to my first corset) meant that the upper portion of the corset was proportionally smaller to the waist. While I was fine with the reduced waist, my ribs were not compressible. They could—and did—move up a bit, but there was a limit to this mobility. The result was that the tender flesh under my breasts was caught between grudging bone and two layers of unyielding steel: the wire of the bra and the stays of the corset, which pressed that wire into my body. When I took off the bra and corset for showers, the mark of the underwires would be printed into my soft skin as angry red curves.
It was a bothersome problem. The obvious solution would have been to simply go out and buy a new bra that didn’t have an underwire, but they were nowhere to be found. Fashion had proclaimed the push-up bra to be “in” that season, and soft-cups had completely vanished from store shelves. Anything beyond a preteen’s training brassiere was padded like a bedlamite’s cell and wired for liftoff.
Ever the problem-solver, Gabriel responded to my complaints by taking the matter as a personal challenge. My husband is a resourceful man, with a decidedly historic view of the world. When I saw what he came up with as a solution to my underwire issue, I rubbed my chin, shifting an amused look between him and the garishly colored cardboard box he had handed to me.
“Angle-action bra.” I read the swoopy, 1950s script slanting above a grinning, flip-haired model. “Why are there bull’s-eyes centered over the nipples?”
“That’s the reinforced stitching!” Gabriel told me cheerfully.
“And the fact that the cups are pointing away from each other?”
“That was the style back then.”
“Uh huh . . .” I removed the new/old-stock cotton brassiere from its box, a reasonable opinion forming in my mind as to why it had gone unsold for half a century.
Victorian Secrets Page 6
