What a profound experience it is not to be wearing a corset
Think about corsets for instance. Yes, corsets.
We all know they were hella uncomfortable, and bad for the internal organs – but I’m not sure I had realized they were also bad for mental functioning.
Elizabeth McGovern, one of the Downton Abbey crew, spent a lot of time wearing them, and she says they are. It makes sense, of course – obviously you can’t breathe properly in them, and obviously breathing properly is important for mental functioning – but I don’t think I’d made the connection until I saw her say it on some dopy PBS special about How Fabulous is Downton Abbey the other day.
Elizabeth McGovern is talking about restrictive underwear. Or more precisely – since we are talking about the new season of Downton Abbey, in which the action has moved into the free-and-easy Twenties – she is talking about the absence of it. ‘There is no way,’ she says, speaking heavily and with the conviction that can be born only of bitter experience, ‘that I can convey to you what a profound experience it is not to be wearing a corset. In the series, we’ve been through the years leading up to the First World War, the years during it, and now we’re in the years after it, and I have actually physically inhabited the clothes of each era in that I have not only tried them on but spent the major part of my days wearing them.
‘Corsets are so uncomfortable that they drive me mad, and it is incredible how much it changes your world view to be out of them. You can move around so much more freely, and the passage of air is not constricted – you have more oxygen making its way to your brain so you have much more ambition, much more desire to achieve things and connect with the outside world…’
I didn’t fully realize that, specifically, but I resisted the confining nature of girls’ clothing from earliest childhood. I detested skirts, and wore jeans or corduroys whenever I possibly could; I whined and resisted whenever I was told I had to put on a dress. Trousers were freedom and skirts were constraint; it was that simple.
It’s a funny thing the way female clothing is designed to hobble and restrain women, and women put up with it.
My problem with pants is that some, jeans especially, have rigid waistbands and if you change size easily (there are health problems that lead to swelling) can cause problems.
With pants that have self-adjusting waists, it’s different. One is always comfortable. However, the messages are as follows:
Elastic waist slacks or casual wear are dowdy, unfashionable, and suitable only for working class grannies.
Yoga pants are fashionable, yes, but not *really* pants. Like leggings, if you show up in them, you will be labeled “slutty-looking”.
Sweatpants… are you a ghetto teen? Are you going to Wal-Mart? Have you completely given up on looking attractive or at least presentable?
I mean, as much at things have changed, there’s still pressure for women to sacrifice comfort and practicality for acceptability.
So much of women’s fashion is designed to restrict, constrain, inhibit. In some cultures and times this could (and can) be very in-your-face, from Chinese foot binding to Afghani burkas to Western corsets and modern high heals. It’s a kind of low-burning torture, which the hip kids today might term a ‘microaggression’–if not the act itself, then the expectation of the act, and the censure of nonconformity to that expectation.
It’s that expectation that’s so frustrating and confounding…the lack of choice. It’s still very much present in our society as well, in perhaps subtler forms for non-black women. Black women are pressured from a very young age to regularly undergo painful and damaging chemical treatments to make their hair seem ‘more natural’, i.e., more like white women’s. See Chris Rock’s ‘Good Hair’ if you want to get a whole new perspective on white privilege and a study in what real intersectional feminism can look like.
All women, for example, are heavily encouraged to wear several layers of makeup, to the point that wearing a single foundation and a mild concealer is called a ‘natural’ look. (It turns out that ‘natural’ is just as disgusting when employed in fashion as it is when employed in nutrition.) And all women of a certain class and professional level are expected to wear obvious makeup, plus high heals, plus restrictive skirts, plus professional-yet-revealing tops, plus have hundred-dollar haircuts every couple of weeks, plus manicures, plus…I don’t need to go on, do I?
I don’t think I’d mind any of that if it were an honest choice. I’ve known women who loved wearing corsets, at least for a few hours at a time, for purposes that suited their own fancies. Ditto makeup and heels. But those women were and are allowed to take those costumes off whenever they like; they exercise that power for their own satisfaction, whatever that may be.
In that way, I imagine corsets of the style and period explored by Downton Abby to be more like the power suits or hijabs of today. Sure, women arguably chose to wear them, but only inasmuch as they chose to be a part of public life and thus had to expend a tremendous amount of emotional and physical energy on performing the necessary pantomimes to pass the bar of social expectation.
I have nothing against corsets, or heels, or even hijabs. But I think it’d be a damned sight better world we lived in if women weren’t forced to wear them under the aegis of participating in an ostensibly open society.
There was a Living as an Edwardian series (can’t remember the name) on Channel 4. An ordinary family goes off to live as Edwardian squires. The wife, who had been a consultant in a hospital wore a corset. She said (a) her husband liked her to wear one: (b) that she thought it affected her brain – the blood wasn’t flowing to her head. Dunno if that’s medically true but she definitely found it mentally as well as physically debilitating.
Cycling was liberating for women in many ways and one was to adopt less restrictive clothing.
Weren’t the more portly males of the epoch also wearing corsets? I thought such things were quite common for men as well back in those days.
People suffer for fashion all the time. For example, the current craze for high heels leaves me perplexed. It’s surprising these women can still walk.
Cf the last paragraph –
Obviously that includes high heels.
Mind you, there are people who call me “femmephobic” for saying that.
^
Should we bring back foot binding? I mean there were people found that feminine and sexy as well. Sheesh.
High heels are a branch of foot binding. They are, obviously, much less severe, but they are also exactly the same category: they mutilate women’s feet and impair their ability to walk or run, for the sake of the aesthetics and sexual appeal of a smaller, daintier foot.
Yup, that was exactly my point.
I remember the eighties when skin-tight jeans became the new corsets… ouch, but I don’t remember feeling like this, even before lycra!
I wonder whether this effect is something that would apply to women historically, who were used to corsets and wore them daily all their lives? There seem to have been a fair number of politically and physically active corset wearing women.
Now I have reached middle age I have happily settled into a uniform of loose tops, palazzo pants with elasticated waists and converse trainers, It’s like wearing pyjamas and slippers all day. Wonderful! Not sure it makes me mentally or physically more active though.