The feminist critic Beatrice Faust made this surprising admission in her 1981 book, Women, Sex, and Pornography: wearing a girdle kind of gave her a charge.
The bitter controversies over corsets and the milder ones over footwear are not conflicts between men and women; the battle transcends sex, with some men supporting rational dress and women's emancipation and many women either opposing them or following current fashions without even considering the arguments. Are women such sheep that we must follow fashion leaders? Are we so gutless or stupid that we cannot make independent choices? If we stop seeing ourselves as mindless, helpless victims and ask whether women may have consented to fashionable outrages for reasons of their own, we may gain understanding of our sisters and ourselves
Fetishism is described as an almost exclusively masculine adaptation. Most analyses of corsets and high heels-including analyses by feminists- concentrate on the visual impact on the male of slender ankles, rolling hips, and jutting breasts. They neglect the experience of the female wearer or assume that it is uncomfortable. But there may be method in the madness of women who resist rational dress and defend bizarre fashions. High heels and corsets provide intense kinesthetic stimulation for women, appealing to the sense of touch but extending more than skin deep. These frivolous accessories are not just visual stimuli for men: they are also tactile stimuli for women.
They may even have been fetishes for some women, since the rare feminine fetishes noticed by clinicians are mostly tactile: fur, textiles, foot ticklers, and vibrators. The Victorian era was uniquely repressive of sex, producing an epidemic of fetishism. It was more repressive of female sexuality than male, especially in England and Australia: America appears to have been more nearly egalitarian in repression. The coincidence of unique sexual repression among women and unique devotion to the corset was probably not accidental. No nineteenth-century dress reformer had as much success against the corset as Rousseau had had a century earlier. The decline of the corset does seem to go with increased permissiveness. The Victorian corset was probably as much a tactile fetish among women as it was a visual fetish among men.
Contemporaries did realize that corsets might kindle impure desires. Havelock Ellis pointed out that sadomasochism, bondage, flagellation, and dominance/submission relationships were rarely transactions between a tormentor and a victim.
He saw that they were often reciprocal exchanges that could be pleasurable to both the passive and active partners. Once the ordeal of foot-binding was over, Chinese women enjoyed their lotus feet as erogenous zones to receive as well as to give pleasure: lovers of either sex caressed them and women used them in masturbation or lesbian play. They were not merely for arousing and servicing men.
Those women who were young in the fifties and sixties may remember modest but sustained arousal from comfortably tight girdles and well-fitted high heels. They were at least as pleasing as geisha balls clenched in the vagina. I had no trouble deciding not to ask for maintenance when I divorced my first husband: financial autonomy was a matter of principle that did not conflict with self-nterest. Yet I took years to decide that freedom of movement was more important to me than the erotic tensions of high heels and girdles. The former tighten the abdomen and push out the buttocks. Walking in high heels makes the buttocks undulate about twice as much as walking in flat heels, with correspondingly greater sensation transmitted to the vulva. Girdles can encourage pelvic tumescence and, if they are long enough, cause labial friction during movement.
From Beatrice Faust, Women, Sex, and Pornography, New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1981.
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