Drawer One
Contents
Toro, Toro!
A story from Mae:
There was a wonderful girdle called Sleex in the sixties. It was a molded rubber girdle like Playtex. But it was much firmer yet just as flexible and never rolled over. For some reason it only sold for a few years and was never as popular as the Playtex. Does anyone remember it?
I remember how I discovered it. My neighborhood friend, Shirley, has an unusual figure. She even now has a trim waist, nice bosom and great legs, but has a few "problems" in between. She's always had a big tummy and butt with lots of jiggle. Yet Shirley was not one for dressing up and certainly not one for girdles.
This one year we went to a New Year Party at a local party house. Shirley was devastating. She wore a skin-tight black sheath with spaghetti straps and open high heels. She looked so good I could have killed her. Everyone noticed and complimented her - specially the guys.
When we went to the powder room, I told her how fabulous she looked. She laughed and said it was the dress and her new girdle. Still giggling she lifted her dress displaying her taut white rubber girdle.
After midnight and after she had had a few drinks, Shirley went to the crowded dance floor and took it over. There she was playing the part of the matador enraging a charging bull (another guy with us) using her girdle as the cape - the bull charging the girdle and Shirley bouncing in all directions under her tight but now ungirdled dress. What a sight! She stole the show even if her husband was ready to die of embarrassment.
The next day she explained that the girdle was killing her so she took it off and wrapped it in her scarf because her handbag was too small for anything but her stockings. The guy, the husband of another neighbor, had been after her all night and she wanted to have some fun with him at his expense. The girdle was a much better cape for such a dangerous bull than a scarf! Good ole Shirley just laughed with not a sign of remorse or embarrassment even though her husband was still livid.
Shirley explained in quite a serious tone that the girdle made her do it. It was so tight the drinks hit her quicker. Laughingly she made me take the girdle so it wouldn't do even worse things to her next time. So although her girdle never made me go crazy, it certainly did "control" me in another way. No kidding, the Sleex was the best latex girdle I ever wore. Anyone remember?
-Mae
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Suzanne's Ancient Girdle Joke
Here's the one girdle joke I ever heard. I heard it when I was about 15, told by my father to another man, in my presence. (Though I was not officially listening.)
A man was changing into his clothes in a golf-course locker room when he suddenly heard some loud grunting noises. Walking around to the other side of the row of lockers, he encountered one of his golf buddies squeezing himself into a woman's girdle. When the man had finished getting himself into the girdle, the first man asked, "How long have you been wearing that girdle?"
The man in the girdle sighed and answered, "Ever since my wife found it in the glove compartment."
-Suzanne
A former colleague of mine, who has working on a doctorate in anthropology, specializing in folk tales and humor, did some informal research on this and a few other famous old jokes. He traced variants of this joke through the routines of vaudeville performers going back nearly a century before he lost the trail.
-Roy
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I Read It In Reader's Digest
The June, 1996 Reader's Digest contained the following anecdote, submitted by one Ginger Lee-Anderson of Huntsville, Alabama:
Shortly after giving birth to my first child, I was asked to serve as a bridesmaid in my brother's wedding. Because the dress was form-fitting, I wore it with a pair of snug underpants designed to keep my tummy tight. The outfit was so uncomfortable that I removed it after the ceremony, hanging the bridesmaid's gown on a coat rack at the reception and tucking the panties into my mother's coat pocket.
After the reception I ran into my mother. "What did you do with your dress?" she asked. I told her where it was and added that I'd put my underwear in her coat pocket.
Mom looked at me blankly and said, "I didn't bring a coat."
Interesting, if a bit discouraging, to deconstruct this anecdote. Ms Lee-Anderson invokes not one, but two, of the acceptable modern justifications for wearing a control garment:
- "I just had a baby."
- "I was going to a wedding."
Such is the respect accorded motherhood, and so universal the awareness of the physical demands it places on a woman, that recent childbirth is deemed legitimate grounds for extraordinary measures. Similarly, weddings are about the only occasions left in modern American society that warrant formal attire, so leeway is granted for what latter-day Puritanism might otherwise condemn as unseemly attention to appearance.
Nonetheless, the author still cannot bring herself to utter the G-word: though the actual nature of the garment is obvious, she will only admit to wearing "snug underpants designed to keep my tummy tight." Heaven forfend she let on that she went and got herself a girdle!
More pleasant to recall another anecdote I read in the same magazine many years ago. I no longer have the text, but as I remember it, a woman wrote about a rainy-day shopping trip, when she waited in a store doorway for her husband to pick her up. Spotting the approach of a familiar car, she made a dash for it, but as she ran through the downpour, her arms laden with bundles, she felt a garter give way.
Reaching the car, she opened the door, tossed her packages in the back, then jumped inside. Without further ado, she pulled her skirt to her waist, refastened the garter, then smoothed her hem back down.
Only then did she look at the driver and realize he was not her husband: in her haste, she'd jumped into a stranger's car! Horribly embarrassed, she blurted out an apology, but the driver smiled and shook his head.
"Not at all, ma'am," he said. "I assure you, I enjoyed it thoroughly."
For years afterward, I made a point of driving slowly past department stores on rainy days with my passenger door unlocked, but nothing of the sort ever happened to me.
-Virginian
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More Than One Kind of Protection
One of the common themes of on-line discussions of the practice of wearing girdles has been the way they served, to some degree, as protective devices. Various ladies have agreed that in their dating days, their girdles set up an artificial barrier, allowing them to to enjoy a limited degree of sexual exploration without the fear that intercourse might result. Conversely, any number of guys have complained that, "Those things messed up my plans on more than one occasion."
The theme of "girdle as protective armor" even came up in the news in recent years. I'm sure many Girdle Zone readers perked up their ears upon hearing the account by an Oregon woman of how, when she was a young aide to Senator Packwood, the creep jumped her in his office, stepped on her feet, jerked her head back by the ponytail, French-kissed her, and with his free hand reached up her skirt and tried to pull off her panty girdle. You have to wonder if her choice of underwear was what saved her from a true fate-worse-than-death: sex with a Senator.
(Don't mean to be flippant here; I'd be quite happy to assist her in cutting off his appropriation, if you catch my drift.)
But I've also heard other accounts where the girdle served as protection from dangers other than unwanted sexual advances:
- Four of five years ago, there was some nutcase wandering around Manhattan blowing small metal darts into the backsides of women of a certain description. (Can't recall exactly, but I think he had a thing for long brown hair.) According to the New York Times, some women of that description took to wearing girdles until the man was apprehended.
- Similarly, I used to hear it asserted that Italian men loved to pinch the fannies of female tourists, and on at least one occasion I heard American women advised to pack a strong girdle to wear on strolls through Rome.
- A friend once told me how an aunt, back in the fifties, fell out of a small foreign car whose doors opened opposite to the customary way-- ie. they had the latch toward the front and the hinge at the rear. It seemed that the car hit a bump, the door flew open, and without a seat belt, the woman fell out. The way the door was arranged, she was dragged along the highway in a sitting position until her husband brought the car to a stop. According to family tradition, she escaped with only minor bruises because her heavy-duty girdle literally saved her butt.
- In the mid-seventies, I read an account of a woman who fell off a boat in New York's Great South Bay. She was nearly swept away by the current, but her husband managed to maneuver close to her, then got her back in the boat by reaching down and grabbing her by the girdle. He was quoted as saying, "Thank God she was wearing one."
Can any readers add to these accounts?
-Virginian
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Girdles On Stage
I was recently directing a play in a community theatre and suggested to the costumer that one of the actresses wear a girdle and hose as being appropriate to the period of the play and also to make her more credible in the sophisticated, worldy role she was playing. The play was Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, and the role was the second wife, Ruth. The actress, having never worn a girdle and being a so-called "liberated" woman raised an enormous fuss. She finally agreed to a "Promise" pantie girdle, complaining constantly about the zipper, the garters, the long-legs, etc. She forgave me when the reviews were in and she was praised for the "perfect style" of her performance. Even more amazing, however, was the report from the costumer that the actress asked to buy the girdle from the wardrobe at the end of the run. I am not sure she has become a total convert but one can hope.
-David
On several occasions, I have been involved in the costuming of college productions of plays set in the period 1930-1968. Like most costumers, and all authors of serious costuming handbooks and reference guides, I believe that it is absolutely essential for women appearing in plays of this period to wear authentic undergarments (always gartered stockings, usually girdles and slips, sometimes garter belts, Merry Widows, crinolines, etc.) to create the right period effect.
Whenever I have put women between the ages of 18-25 in such undergarments, and in such clothing, I have always observed two things:
1) They absolutely love it. While I'm not saying that they would all like to dress like this all the time, they all enjoy the experience of dressing in this way for the play. Several always say that they wish they could dress like this all the time and most always seem to feel that they wish they could have the opportunity to dress like this more frequently. I never hear serious complaints about the discomfort of a girdle or the inconvenience of stockings, etc. I usually hear them say how much more comfortable and convenient these things are than they had ever heard. In sum, the vast majority of these women genuinely enjoy and certainly the exude the femininity (mysterious term) of this clothing.
2) The men can barely control themselves. It is quite evident in these play productions that the men, aged 18-25 at the most, are powerfully attracted to the women when they dress and underdress in this way, even though they may have never encountered women dressed in this way before. For some reason, this clothing, and this underclothing still has this power. The sexual magnetism on the set is evident to everyone and sometimes it helps the production and sometimes it gets in the way. I'd be curious to know if other costumers have observed the same thing.
What I have seen convinces me that if young people had more of an opportunity to dress in this way, many if not most of them would indeed enjoy it.
-Suzanne
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Let's Take A Trip To Brazil!
After visiting Carnival in Brazil several years ago my wife and I thought that surely some of the people, both male and female, must be wearing a girdle, merry widow, or corset under the costumes. As we became more acquainted with new friends we found that indeed our suspicions were correct. Through conversation in Brazil, my wife purchased an open-bottom black girdle with six garters. The first night she wore it, the effect on me was traumatic. Doom on pantyhose! That says it all
-Tonsi
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Let's Take A Trip To Japan...
Interestingly enough, one of the few places on Earth where you can still get a really nicely fashioned girdle, with pretty stitching (as opposed to the strictly plain white ones you find in the US now) is Japan, where wearing a girdle is apparently still quite popular. I saw a statistic that said 40% of women in Tokyo own "4 or more" girdles. A recent trip to a Japanese book store turned up a feature on girdles in a high-fashion magazine, as well as (score of scores!) a huge, 150 page lingerie catalog featuring TONS of girdle shots, many of girdles I doubt many in the US have seen. Let me know if you want some scans of them, I'll see what I can do. (Please do! Ed.) Last time I was in Tokyo, it was heavenly seeing all the obviously girdled women.
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-Chris
...But Bring Along An Interpreter
Japanese lingerie is known throughout the world for its high quality. An early 1997 visit to the "San Lady" page-- no longer accessible-- showed a lovely long-leg panty girdle that illustrated Japanese artistry. Visitors also got the opportunity to read this ad copy, apparently written by a guy about halfway through his English class. (Not that my Japanese goes beyond Sayonara and Arigato!)
The longed-for style. Master the function for make the body.
Use the satin for bottom of the belly and hold to expand it so it keep your belly tightly.
Use the power-nets for bottom of the belly, hips, and the thigh. Specially, use the threefold power-nets for the legs and under the arm, and it keep off the flesh stick out to sides.
- The part of the thigh use a kind of cotton, so it doesn't go stinking.
That last bit is good to know.
-Virginian
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