6. Reynardine: On Display
Dear Lucinda,
I was very moved by the painful, but ultimately, I think, triumphant encounter you seem to have had with your mother in your chronicle of the charm school experience. I think your struggle to define your sexuality in relation to your mother and in relation to the forms of femininity your mother was trying to pass on to you is representative of what a lot of women have gone through. None of us grew up in an age that encouraged the healthy expression of female sexuality. I'm not sure we do now.
What was interesting to me about the period in which I grew up was how intensely sexual it was, all in indirect ways. Dressing the way we had to dress focused us, and our male counterparts no doubt, on our sexuality, but everything was supposed to be carefully channeled and controlled. I suspect at some level that the powerful sexual charge of wearing girdles, stockings, heels, skirts, etc. was intended to give us a kind of satisfaction, by intensely feeling ourselves as feminine, that was supposed to satisfy us, and discourage us from seeking anything more direct in the way of satisfaction.
Obviously, it didn't work, but it is fascinating the degree to which mothers tried to give us this compensatory, and quite exciting, gratification. My mother, and my aunts as well, would talk to me about my bras and girdles and stockings, all of my clothes, in ways that I found exciting and titillating, but in this more open era, you hesitate to discuss such issues with your niece. That's because these things weren't perceived as directly sexual, even though, obviously, they were. We live in a more self-conscious age. It's a good thing, overall. But the intensity of the perpetual charge of femininity has been lessened.
It's interesting that your mother was so insistent on you wearing panties under your girdle. It's as if she knew the kind of stimulation a girdle without panties could give. Interestingly, my mother did not expect her daughters to wear panties under their girdles. I never did.
One really interesting element of your charm school account was your frank discussion of the pleasure of being exposed, of being in public wearing nothing but your bra and girdle. This fascinates me too. I'm turned on by the idea of that kind of exposure, that kind of laying open of one's femininity in public. I'm sure I would have enjoyed what you went through in the same way, as a way of feeling one's sexual power. I'm sure you can see that from the letters I sent you where I describe the pleasure I get in being the only female in situations. Or in my account of my husband lacing me tighter in public, in that nightclub. There is a flaunting sense, hard to define. There is a kick I get from showing my girdle briefly during swing dancing (it's part of what you're supposed to do with swing dancing).
I remember the first time I wore a corset, in a play in college, and how the costume mistress insisted that I be more tightly laced than the other female characters in the play, because of the nature of my character. And I remember this being very visually evident, and being intensely turned on by the way in which men seemed to be responding to this. Related to this too is the retrospective pleasure I have had in thinking of my experience of conspicuous public bondage, when I was nineteen years old and got arrested at that demonstration, and appeared on the front of three newspapers with my hands tied with plastic handcuffs behind my back, and my feet bound together, being carried off by two burly policemen. Though there was a degree to which I hated this, my nipples were pretty hard, my awareness of my sexual power was pretty strong, and I get very excited when I think about it in retrospect.
Reynardine
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