Corsets Must Have Been Hell!

wait -- whalebone is unfashionable?

god, i hope i can pay back that small business loan without any fees...

Patiodog--

Costume museums have been raided and authentic corsets have been boned, the better to fashion weapons for those who despoil the environment.

The mutilation for beauty (especially of women) is age old and world wide and changes with the beauty ideal. In China small feet were the fashion (for the upper classes) so girls' feet were broken and folded and caused lifelong pain and discomfort. Nowadays, small feet are not in, but round eyes are, so girls line up for expensive operations to their eyelids.

And in the West female beauty ideals changed from curvy with narrow waist and huge buttocks (in the Victorian era) to emaciated with big boobs today and girls line up for expensive boob jobs. The suffering continues...

Who knows, one day long necks may become the thing, take a cue from the Asian (not African) giraffe women:

Corsets have been worn for centuries. That's how Elizabeth I and her ilk all got their shapes . . . or lack of them. Remember the movie, Shakespeare in Love, when the heroine told her nurse maid to bind her breasts? I leaned over and said to my date, "I thought that's what her normal clothes did."

Actually, corsets were responsible for miscarriages and spinal problems.

There's a term something like retromingent, which means peeing backwards. People who tie flies (not buzzing insects, but lures for fishing) value female fox fur from retromingent foxes for a certain fly.

African women from a certain tribe did wear neck rings. Another tribe pierced their lips and inserted wooden plates of increasing sizes. One of those tribes replaced that fashion with beaded veils that covered the face.

Chinese women with tiny feet -- known as Golden Lillies -- were considered the height of sexuality. There are even prints of totally curtained rooms, with a tiny foot emerging from a fold in the curtain, letting the viewer know what the couple were doing. Those bound feet stank and were always infected.

Today's corsets are supposed to be comfortable and the best are custom made for the wearer. They support the breasts -- which was one of the functions of the corset from its earliest days -- which makes the woman look seductive. Really tight lacing was an extreme but even women who were opposed to tight lacing still wore corsets, which, according to Ann (forgot last name) who wrote a marvelous book on clothing called, "Sex and Suits," gave a "neat line to the figure."

I recommend Sex and Suits in part because the writing is terrific.

The giraffe necks are unique to the Kayan/Padaung tribe in Myanmar/Birma, on the border with Thailand. There are many tribes in Africa whose women traditionally wore neck rings, especially some of the pastoral tribes in Kenya and Tanzania (e.g. Turkana, Samburu, or Maasai). Women wear heavy coils of (usually beaded) metal wire around their necks, but those are not used to make the neck look longer.

There are three African tribes, that I know of, that use lip discs (or lip plates): the Mursi and Surma from Ethiopia and the Sara from Chad. The size of the disc a woman can accomodate in her lower lip indicates the dowry she is worth. It is said that the lip discs were invented as a means to make the women of the tribes unattractive to Arab slave traders active in the area, but I do not know if there is any evidence for that.