A fantasy? A nightmare?
Perhaps a warning.
He
He remembered the first time, all those years ago. He must have been about thirteen. The Vogue magazine, lying open on the garden table with the breeze rustling the pages and occasionally turning them over. He was alone, finishing his homework, when he noticed the open page. An advertisement. Photos of women in their underwear. He averted his eyes back to the history text. But he was fascinated by what he had seen and stole another glance. Eight photos, black and white, brassieres and corsets. But not like those he had once seen his mother wear. Lighter, more form-hugging. Girdles, not corsets. And some with legs. He stared in fascination. Something stirred inside; he felt the pressure on his jeans. Blushing, he turned away again, but it was useless. His eyes were drawn back to the page, he felt powerless to stop them. His mother, very much of the old school, had called them unmentionables, and surely that meant unlookables also. The innermost layers of protection of womanhood lay revealed, for the first time.
He adjusted his posture so that he could keep looking at the magazine while appearing to concentrate on his textbook. He even pretended to mark passages in the text - just in case anyone was watching. But all the time his thoughts were on the images in the magazine. The garments looked so firm- they clung, they hugged. Most had panels of slightly different material or texture across the tummy. One or two had little bows at the waist or a flower motif stitched into the material. The ones with legs had laced cuffs, and clear outlines of suspender tabs underneath. And they had no lump at the crotch as they would have if they were worn by men - the smooth outline described the essential difference. A sight only imagined before by him, an only, lonely, child.
He closed his eyes and conjured up an imaginary woman, dressed only in one of those legged-girdles, standing in front of him. He put out his hand to touch her and felt the smoothness, the firmness, the varied textures, the slight lump of the suspender tab, and the softness of the crotch with its essential gender difference. He was lost in the sensation until he suddenly realised that his cheeks were aflame, his whole body was tingling, and the pressure in his jeans was intolerable. Uncontrollably he put his hand to his crotch and instinctively rubbed the jeans to ease the pressure. Almost instantly his heart raced, his blood seemed to boil, his face burst, he writhed in a thrilling ecstasy, and he felt his whole body slump into jelly-like lethargy. He became aware that he was tingling as if a hundred volts had just been pumped through his body. He suddenly realised with horror that a stain was spreading across his jeans. Had he lost control and wet himself? He felt too weak and helpless to move. What had happened? He had never experienced that sensation before. What if someone had been watching?
Terrified at the thought of discovery he hastily packed his books and stood up awkwardly, acutely conscious of the warm stickiness in his jeans. As he moved to leave, a reflex action of his hand grabbed the magazine and tucked it into his school folder. Quickly, he fled the scene of the crime.
"Has anyone seen my magazine? I thought I left it on the table outside."
"No Mum, it wasn't there when I was doing my homework."
He was obsessed with the unmentionable. The maddening thing was, there was so little he could do about it. Perhaps that was part of the obsession - that there seemed no way he could come to terms with it. If only he had a sister to confide in. If only his mother wasn't so old-fashioned and conservative. If only he had a girlfriend to unlock the secrets.
His mates at the boys' high school he attended were no help. Sex was the main topic of conversation. Everyone but him seemed to be an expert and he couldn't expose his ignorance. Lurid tales were told involving beautiful girls of extreme willingness in back rows of theatres or cars in lovers' lanes. Condoms in squashed and illegible foil packages were furtively revealed from wallets as proof of conquest (after all, if there was one in the wallet, it implied others now discarded in the shrubbery, didn't it). The removal of clothing was described in delicious detail, with the more intimate articles given more ribald narration. The widely reported cutting of a bra with a pair of scissors at a school social earned a boy in the year above everlasting fame - for at least six weeks.
It was clear to him that he was expected to scorn, even deny, the objects of his obsession. So many outdated terms - foundation garment, corset, knickers, brassiere - and yet 'girdle' had a different appeal. To him it conjured up visions of knights and their damsels with colourful tasselled cords and sashes girding the waist. Or the Greek Goddess Amphitrite heroically girdling the earth with a telephone cable, as depicted in his stamp collection commemorating a landmark technological advance. And was there ever such a sensuous word as 'panty-girdle'? He would whisper the word to himself as he fantasised the object of his shameful desire.
His collection of magazines grew slowly and steadily. Guiltily he listened for his mother's step outside his room. It was always with a thrill of trepidation that he uncovered them from their hiding-place - it meant she had not searched that shelf under the bottom drawer of his desk. He would stare at the cover of the chosen edition, imagining the sights within until he could bear it no longer. Then he would find the page, close his eyes and open the magazine so that the full force of the image would strike him like a tidal wave. Sometimes the effect was so strong as to cause him to take a sharp intake of breath. He would stare and imagine, touch the photo, kiss it, change it for another, creep back to the first, close his eyes and mentally run his hands over it to feel the sensations. He would continue until that glorious, frightful moment when the volcano inside him exploded, and he lay spent and exhausted. Then came the guilt, and he hurried to return the objects of much more than paper and ink to their secret lair. And he was left with an emptiness, a hollow longing for something more substantial.
That didn't come for several years. Early encounters with the opposite sex were well supervised, in crowded locations, and chaste. Occasionally while dancing his hand might slip - unconsciously, of course - and send signals to the brain of a firmness around the waist. A slight irregularity of the fall of a skirt against the thigh might likewise hint at stockings attached to something more intimate.
Slowly though, personal experience began to replace the two-dimensional, tantalisingly remote images of the magazines, so that he was able to piece together some useful - albeit limited - knowledge which both reinforced and confounded his assumptions and, incidentally, contradicted the undisputed wisdom of the schoolyard.
And then, at university, he met her.
She
She enjoyed wearing a panty-girdle. It seemed to hold her together securely in an insecure world. When she wore a girdle she felt a togetherness as if it bound all the separate parts of her into a unified whole.
But it was a rather solitary pleasure. While most of her friends wore girdles, it was with reluctance. They realised the necessity of such practicalities as holding up their stockings, but opted for a flimsier suspender-belt whenever possible. They accepted that the girdle would 'hold them in', giving them a shape more approved by the social arbiters among their relations and teachers. Some even acknowledged that a girdle could, to some extent, compensate for what nature had failed to provide or provided in too much abundance. And others recognised, with wholehearted parental approval, that a firm panty-girdle could blunt the edge of an amorous young man's sword, and provide the protection necessary if a white wedding was to be unhypocritically embraced in the future. And of course the combination of thick school-regulation stockings and long-legged panty-girdle was able to keep the worst of winter breezes at bay.
But to girls on the brink of womanhood such advantages are of limited appeal. Everyone knows that parents and teachers know nothing about teenage fashion, nothing about the needs of the younger generation, nothing about what it takes to keep ahead in the social scene (i.e., look, dress and do the same as everyone else!) So, whenever possible, girdles were conveniently 'forgotten' or removed in privacy and banished to hiding places such as schoolbags. Besides, everyone knows boys hate them - they are an unnecessary obstacle in the game of love and sex, of tease and torment, of look but don't quite touch. And wasn't parental approval of panty-girdle as prophylactic, in those pre-pill days, final proof of their undesirability for a thoroughly modern Miss.
But she enjoyed wearing a girdle. She liked the firmness of it. She would run her hands over the elasticised material around her buttocks and marvel that the rough texture could feel so smooth on her body. She would finger the outline of the tummy panel where softer material joined. Sometimes when she did her homework dressed only in her underwear with a housecoat loosely tied around it, she would fiddle with the little bow at the waist - it helped her concentration. When she felt she was unobserved she might pull her skirt up just high enough to expose the lacy cuffs of the girdle legs. She daydreamed over the "Maidenform" advertisements, seeing herself addressing the adoring crowd, playing Rachmaninoff to a rapturous audience, winning at Wimbledon, in nothing but her girdle. She would even gently caress herself through the thinner material of the crutch, and enjoy the pleasurable thrills this gave her. Over time, she was able to stock her lingerie drawer with several delicately pastelled samples, mostly panty-girdles, but also an open-bottom girdle, and (for a treat on really special occasions) an all-in-one with a zipper from breast to below her navel.
In a house full of unruly males, she needed reminders of her femininity. As the only girl, and the youngest in the family, she often felt excluded from the masculine world of work, pub, and football. She felt belittled by her brothers' tales of their Saturday night sexploits, and would take refuge in her room with her books and her music when they brought their latest conquests home. These women were always eager to impress the men, over-painted and under-dressed, with shrill voices and a limited tolerance to the popular 'women's' alcoholic beverages of the time, Pimms and Moselle, sneeringly described as "leg-openers" by the cruder males.
Her mother had tired of the battle long ago and had resigned herself an existence of housework and bridge with 'the girls'. Once elegant and well-groomed, she had become transformed by poverty, violence and neglect to a slovenly derelict state, in which she treated her daughter with contempt.
"Just you wait till you're married to a beast, worn out with kids and a slave to the home. You won't have time for a career then, my girl. You just mark my words."
She despised her mother and was determined not to tread the same path. She would be different. She had beauty, brains and ambition - an unassailable combination.
So her girdles became a symbol. They were the secret badge of her pride in her femininity. In her girdle she was superior woman. She was invincible. No one could surpass her because she was strong and confident. She could do anything, be anyone.
She knew she had power over boys in her girdle. She did not quite understand it, but she sensed their confusion at the glimpse of a fraction of girdle leg, at the hiss of her thighs as she walked. She knew she was taunting and teasing, and she knew she was safe. Girdle-flirting became a weapon with which to show her contempt for her brothers, but which actually taunted the eager boys at school.
She had had little sexual exploitation with boys herself. She wouldn't allow it, not because of any prudishness or frigidity - far from it - but because she was prepared to wait for the right opportunity. Someone so different from her boorish brothers and their mates, so different again from the awkward, callow youths of her school class and church group. So she dreamed of the ideal - the confident, handsome, articulate, thoughtful courteous gallant who would unlock her secret and uncover the real woman within.
Her one intimate experience as a schoolgirl had only served to reinforce her aversion of the available males and determination to wait for her true knight. A school legend, two years her senior, member of the football team, prominent in the dramatic society, took a fancy to her at a friend's birthday party, and invited her into the extensive garden, probably not to admire the dahlias. Flattered that such a notable would notice her, she agreed with only the socially accepted minimum of hesitation and protest. A quiet hand in hand stroll and some moderately intelligent conversation helped her to relax and enjoy his seemingly sincere remarks about her beauty and her character. His kisses, following soon after, were welcomed as a further compliment and she responded with a passion she was hitherto unaware of. His embrace was firm and reassuring, and she felt increasing thrills of pleasure as he slid his hands over her face, neck, shoulders, back, breasts, stomach, abdomen, hips, thighs ... Suddenly he pulled away.
"Oh hell, you're wearing cast-iron knickers!"
"What do you mean?" she murmured, eyes still closed, still feeling the tingling in her body.
"You know, that girdle thing with legs. It's a real turn-off. I just won't be able to feel anything."
By now she had snapped to full alert.
"How does my underwear change anything? Just what did you imagine would happen tonight?"
"Well, you know, I thought we might, sort of, do it. But wearing that thing, it really turns me off, I can't get near you."
Her emotions were torn. The tingling sensation was replaced by a feeling of being slapped hard in the face. Part of her wanted to offer to remove the offending article, but cold reality was seeping in.
"So your whole object of this little stroll in the moonlight was not so much to get to know me as a person, but to get me to come over, is that right?" she said in a steely voice.
"Well, maybe not go all the way." The confidence was gone, he was beginning to stumble over the words, she could feel his embarrassment. "But, you know, maybe sort of fool around a bit, and sort of see what happened. I wouldn't have forced you too if you didn't want to," he added lamely.
"But my panty-girdle, to call it by it's proper name, makes me less desirable, is that it?" She was still not sure how much of her emotional response was anger at his deceit, and how much was sexual disappointment.
"Yeah, like I said, it's a real turn-off. A bloke can't feel anything through it. You just gotta realise, no one's going to try anything if they know you're wearing that barbed-wire thing. Come on, let's go back in, it's getting a bit cold."
So there she was. Still a virgin by the time she arrived at university. Even more cynical about men and their motives. And still wearing girdles far more often than her friends. Because she liked them, no matter what others thought. Even if boys hated them.
Romance
They met almost by chance at university. He had been invited to an engagement party of an old school friend, and the girl he had asked had come down with the flu. Who to ask at this short notice?
"What about The Body?" One of his friends gazed admiringly as she walked passed, coffee cup in her hand, her generous breasts taut beneath her jumper. She was one of the freshers in the Psychology class that he and these mates were repeating, due to an excess of alcohol and pool the previous year.
She had already come to his notice on two memorable occasions. During a lecture early in the year, a sudden yelp from the back of the lecture theatre had caused all heads to turn. As he turned his glance had been arrested by the sight, across the aisle, one row back and up, of the inside of a girdled thigh, exposed by an instinctive body twist to identify the source of the cry. Stocking top successfully straining to free itself for the clasp of the legband, revealing an uneven thin strip of flesh, and several inches of white elasticised material above an unadorned band. While she and the rest of the class sought the cause of the disturbance, he feasted for what seemed an eternity on the fabulous sight, his eyes drinking it in, face burning, and his voyeuristic mind numb with fascination and guilt.
On another occasion, he had spied her walking from the library through the cloister to the cafeteria. It was a brisk autumn day, the wind causing leaves to scurry around like schoolchildren in a playground. Suddenly a playful gust caught the back of her full skirt and blew it Monroe-like to the level of her waist. She had been wearing an open girdle that day, and he had a momentary view of the full length of her stockings and underwear, sufficient to note that she wore her panties outside her girdle. He thought this unusual, but the imagined sight of her panties stretched over the girdle, and the small gap caused as a result, kept him fantasising for the rest of the day.
"She looks too classy for me," he said, "besides, I don't even know her name."
"Well, what have you got to lose? Right now you're on your own tonight - you might as well give it a go!"
He sighed. His mate was right of course. But fear of rejection made him hesitate.
"For Christ's sake, do it! Look she's just sitting there, alone, drinking coffee. Do it before someone else sits there, or she gets up and walks off."
"Okay, okay, don't push me. I'm going. Wish me luck, guys!"
He walked over to where she was sitting, and stood there, wondering what to say - and wondering which girdle she was wearing.
She looked up, and smiled a pale smile.
"Ah, g'day, ah, look, can you do me a favour. I've been asked to this party tonight, and I've been stood up, and I've got no one to take. Ah, would you like to come with me?"
He realised it hardly sounded romantic, hardly the classic offer too good to refuse. He braced himself for rejection.
"Sure, I'd like to. Tell me more about it."
He stared at her. He wasn't prepared for her acceptance. This beautiful girl, popular with the first year blokes, had just said yes to him, the most average of the second years'. His description began in an equally jumbled manner, but gradually he relaxed, and they were soon chatting and chuckling like old acquaintances, as they finalised the when and where of their meeting.
"Well I'd better go," she said, rising from the battered wooden chair, and hoisting her bag over her shoulder. "I'll see you at my place at 8.30 tonight just watch out for my Dad - he bites! Especially young men who take out his daughters."
"Thanks for the tip. I'll see you tonight. And, thanks, I really appreciate it." He watched her leave, skirt swinging as she navigated round the tables, long legs delectably curved. Wow, he thought, me and The Body! And then, he realised ...
"Oh, excuse me," he called, "Who do I ask for when I get to your place?"
The first date had been successful, and others followed. They found they had much in common - similar views on political issues, similar tastes in music, common interests, common classes. She seemed quiet, reserved - not the outgoing person he had taken her for - but that only increased his attraction to her. While they both had their own circle of friends, both at uni and outside, they still seemed to find time for each other occasionally, and gradually they became accepted in each other's group.
It was perhaps their third or fourth date, a rather dull party from which they were quite happy to make an early exit into a balmy early summer's night. Not tired, but too poor to seek out a nightclub or even a bistro, they drove to the beach and sat in the car, watching the moon shimmering on the water, and lulled by the lapping of the water on the sand.
"This is heaven," she murmured as she snuggled against him, and rubbed his cheek with her sweet smelling hair. "Let's just sit here all night, until the moon sets."
He slipped his arm under her blouse and began to gently caress her breasts through the thin cotton of her bra. "That's nice," she whispered, and her lips turned to meet his.
It was a wonderful experience, lying there with this beautiful girl, kissing and caressing. His hand moved down her stomach, over her waist, and across her belly. Its firmness told him what he wanted to know - she was wearing a girdle. He moved his hand around her buttocks delighting in the movement of her skirt against the taut undergarment. From the contours he realised it was a long-leg panty-girdle. As his hand moved down her thigh, over the rise of her suspenders, he felt his excitement rising. At the same time, he felt the hot flush of guilt. Here, under his hands was the forbidden object of his secret desires, the garment that encircled and enclosed, that forbade entry, that protected the mystic centre of womanhood. He was caught between his secret longing, and the shame of longing for it.
"Encased in concrete, I see." A sneer was his only defence.
She squirmed under his touch. "Let me take it off, so you can appreciate the real me."
"No, it's alright, you can leave it on for a while." His hand moved under her skirt, and touched the sliver of smooth skin freed from between the constraints of the girdle leg and her stockings. The longing became unbearable. He moved his hand over the inside of her thighs, exhilarating at the firm band with its frill of lace, the thick stretchy material of the girdle, to the circle of moist softness at the apex. He had to will himself to contain the pressure in his own groin. He longed to shout, "You're so sexy in your panty-girdle... let me caress you through it!"
But the repressions of his childhood led him to protest clumsily, "End of the line- solid armour-plating!"
"Sorry," she muttered angrily. "You bloody men, always in such a hurry! Let me take it off, and you can get down to business." She fought back tears of humiliation - why did boys resent her girdle so much? Couldn't they accept it as part of her nature, couldn't they include it in their repertoire of foreplay as she so much desired? She longed to shout, "Please caress me through my panty-girdle, it's so sensual!" but her previous experience led her quickly to acquiesce to the perceived demand.
She was prepared to forgive him this small inconsideration for all the other qualities of affection, humour and intelligence which he had shared with her. So she hastily removed her stockings and squirmed her way out of the offending item, folded it neatly and placed it on the rear seat. He watched with fascination and disappointment, and treated himself to a final sensation as she hid it under a rug - "In case someone sees it" as she explained.
Thus unencumbered, they continued their lovemaking, in what was to be the first exhilarating experience of many in their long romance, as it matured and turned into marriage. But he could never bring himself to broach with her the subject of his fascination, preferring to keep it hidden in a dark guilt-ridden corner of his psyche. And, until the time came when she no longer wore a girdle, she was always careful to remove it prior to or early in their foreplay, so as not to offend him and cause him to offer a sarcastic and unromantic remark.
So they withheld their little secrets for the remainder of their relationship.
Divorce
And now, ten years later, they were splitting up. Two nice people but moving in different directions and basically weary of each other. Probably could have been avoided if they had tried harder, but neither had taken the initiative, perhaps neither no longer cared enough. Time to sell up and move on - he to another job in another town, she to another relationship. No one's fault - perhaps that was the saddest thing.
On her knees, surrounded now by an assorted jumble of clothes too old, too faded, too unfashionable, she slid open the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Not much there, a couple of nursing bras from her maternity days, a suspender belt with a broken suspender, and a black long-leg panty-girdle. She paused, looked at it, and recalled the days when she had worn it - and its colleagues and predecessors - as a regular feature of her grooming and deportment. She remembered how girdles had helped her to feel confident, secure, independent - and feminine.
With the girdle in hand, she crossed to the door and closed it, lest she be observed. She unzipped her jeans and pulled them off. Sitting on the bed she carefully pulled the girdle on, standing and wriggling it over her hips. "Not as easy as in the old days before motherhood," she thought as she turned to face the mirror. She stood there, preening slightly, rubbing her hands over her body, eyes closed, and felt a small tingle of excitement. Oh, if only he had been more sensitive and accepting of this small indulgence of hers. If only he had shown a willingness to include the girdle in his caressing during foreplay. But, men will be men!
She stood still, lingering over her image in the mirror. Then quickly, urgently, a strong tug at the fabric, she pulled it roughly down to her ankles and kicked it off, onto the pile on the floor. Mind a blank, she picked up the pile, opened the door, walked into the lounge room and threw the clothes into the middle of the floor.
"What do you want done with those?" he asked.
"Just get rid of them! I've sorted out the ones good enough for charity." She walked quickly away so he wouldn't see how close to tears she was.
He found a plastic garbage bag and began cramming the clothes in carelessly, his mind a blank. Amid the softness of the varied fabrics, something hard caught his fingernail and bent it enough to make him wince. He sought the culprit and pulled out the black long-leg panty-girdle by its metal suspender. He looked at it sadly. It must have been two years since she had worn it in his presence, and he had secretively, silently, admired her in it. It was a pity she was so insistent on removing it prior to their foreplay. If only she had enjoyed wearing it more, he was sure it would have greatly enhanced their physical relationship. With a furtive look around to make sure he was not observed, he raised the garment, closed his eyes and gently rubbed it against his face while tenderly kissing its crotch. Slowly, ruefully, with a heavy sigh he placed it in the garbage bag and resumed his packing.
He remembered the first time, all those years ago.
Are you wondering how to tell the one you love about your own interests? Read how others have dealt with the challenge in the Roundtable Discussion Honey, Would You Put On A Girdle For Me?
Return to Relationships: Men, Women, and Girdles
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Originally Posted May 11, 1998