Sunday April 28, 2002 Loving Your Curves: Painful Beauty? by Tony Leather/Staff Writer According to UK author and staff writer Tony Leather, "In the battle of the sexes, the hourglass figure is still a powerful weapon, though the emphasis has shifted significantly from the public gallery of society to the privacy of the bedroom." Read all about female torture readily accepted in times of yore. You shudder a little when you see a sword-swallowing act, imagining the feeling of feeding the blade into your own throat, and you wince when marveling at the unbelievable feats of a contortionist. These look like painful and pointless things to do but you still get vicarious pleasure from observing. Are these acts any less mysterious than some of the things that women will do to themselves in the name of being seen as beautiful? It’s difficult to imagine that there can be anything pleasurable in squeezing the life out of yourself for the sake of looking good, but girls have been doing it for thousands of years. Nothing draws the male eye more than a female body where the natural curves are accentuated. No surprise then that women want to have as small a waist as they can, but you may be surprised to learn that this preference goes back at least 20,000 years. On a Neolithic site at Brandon, Norfolk, in England, drawings scratched on bone of this age were found. They showed women wearing bodices made of animal hide – probably molded to the body while still untreated, then laced down the front and fastened round the waist with skins. Stone dolls found nearby also wore these primitive corsets, tied with the sinews of animals. The classic hourglass figure seems to have been revered for thousands of years and features on much of the pottery from Assyrian, Cretan and Egyptian civilizations. One 5,000-year old Cretan piece shows a snake cult priestess in a bronze corset fastened at the waist by two serpents. It’s impossible to say which of the genders started this trend all those millennia ago, but there’s no doubt that many societies considered it a vital part of sexual attraction and even slavery. It is almost as if the wearing of the tight garments was a form of subjugation, yet women seemed happy to go along with it. In Rome, where the citizens preferred loose clothing, slaves were subjected to tight lacing, while middle-eastern women loved to show off the figures in elaborately decorated tight belts. It seems that in spite of the discomfort they must have endured, the admiring looks of the men made it somehow worthwhile. Whilst Europe didn’t really embrace this idea whole-heartedly at first, the trend toward tighter clothing could be seen as early as 1244, when Queen Leonor of Castile was buried in a tightly laced gown. Both sexes began to enjoy the feel of more closely fitting clothes, and doublets with hose became the fashionable wear for men. Ever-tighter bodices made of cloth or leather became essential wear for women, and men took to wearing codpieces to compliment ever tighter upper garments. There was a need to display one’s sexual attractiveness in a covert sort of way, and accentuating the lines of the figure became ever more important. By the 15th century it had become so fashionable that corsets stiffened with wood or whalebone were common, and even wrought iron ones were produced. The desire for a truly tiny waist was overwhelming. So much so that Catherine de Medici – mother of French king Henry III – would not tolerate waists larger than 13 inches among her female staff! The physical discomfort and probable damage to internal organs is impossible to guess at, but many women suffered silently in the name of beauty, and many died at fairly young ages. Whilst it seems natural for women to want to show off their best physical assets in a sexual sense – hips and buttocks below the waist and breasts above – it can hardly have been less healthy than to do it in this way. By the 18th and 19th centuries, it wasn’t just women who felt the need to suppress their natural shapes. In 1834, the Prince Regent of England was advised by doctors to stop wearing stays because the practice was threatening to kill him. All the same, people continued to do it and the Victorian age proved the most insane of them all. Victorian women were completely besotted with the notion that a tiny waist was essential to their marital prospects. The smaller it was, the better were their chances, and every girl desperately wanted to be married before the age of 21, preferably with a waist measurement lower than their age. It was far from unusual for corsets to be laced so tightly that the legs and lower bodies were permanently numb, and fainting was a commonplace occurrence. Men saw this, somehow, as simply demonstrating how weak and helpless women were, but nothing could have been further from the truth. The levels of endurance required to maintain an air of outward calm and dignity – while suffering tortures that would have been envied by the Spanish Inquisition – defy description. Especially when you consider that they didn’t even escape it at night, because a sleeping version would be worn, in order to maintain the waist size at all times. In Victorian times, open sexuality was seen in a very bad light. As ridiculous as this seems, in light of the female passion for appearing beautiful, it seems clear that there was masochistic gratification in their self-inflicted pain. One reader of the ‘Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’ wrote a letter in 1870, which proclaimed that ‘tight lacing produces delicious sensations, half pleasure, half pain.’ It is hard, in today’s society, to imagine the physical and mental anguish that young girls must have experienced when being ‘figure trained’ by their mothers. She’d be clinging tightly to an overhead bar, teeth gritted in determination, while her parent pulled mercilessly at the laces of the corset, in search of the smallest possible end resulting waist. Thankfully, the advent of the 20th century and the two world wars saw a marked decline in the popularity of the corset as everyday wear, but its appeal never died away completely. In the battle of the sexes, the hourglass figure is still a powerful weapon, though the emphasis has shifted significantly from the public gallery of society to the privacy of the bedroom. Fancy corsets are now more readily accepted as sex toys than normal wear – spurs to intensifying gratification which undoubtedly still have their place and rightly so. Natural good looks and a perfect figure are a blessing for the few, but beauty surely doesn’t need to be a painful experience, not when there’s so much to any person than simply the way they look?