9. Reynardine: Damsel In Distress
Dear Lucinda,
Now I have to tell you a story. About thirteen or fourteen years ago, my husband and I were involved in a community theater program which was putting on a festival of old silent movies. The festival committee wanted to make up a publicity poster that would feature a photo of a pretty lady being tied to a railroad track by a villain and being rescued by a hero.
Well, guess who volunteered to be the lady and the hero? I was dressed up, thanks to a local costume store, in a long, frilly gown, and my hair was tied back with a pink ribbon. I wasn't authentically dressed in that I wasn't corseted, but I had the costuming sense to wear a long-line bra, and of course I had a girdle on, as always.
Well anyway, we arrived for the photo shoot and I looked with some trepidation at a big coil of rope, obviously intended for me. I felt no attraction to the idea of being tied up, and at that point, I hadn't really thought I was going to be tied up. I thought there would be some kind of faking of it. Well, everyone was standing around waiting for things to happen and then I heard the head of the festival committee say, "Okay, who's going to get to tie up Reynardine?"
I didn't appreciate this, and when the "villain" picked up the coil of rope and started walking towards me I was on the point of dropping out of the whole enterprise. But then the "villain" just handed the rope to my "hero" husband and gestured towards me. So, he and I went over to the railroad track where the director of the shoot was setting up the picture and we awkwardly began the process.
After some false starts, numerous mistakes, and a lot of giggly awkwardness, he had me very securely and actually bound in about a half an hour (he felt that he had to use up all of the rope). Then he put a kerchief over my mouth (the gagging was at least fake, thank goodness) and the photo shoot proceeded and they were able to get a great picture of me, bound as tightly as any heroine of a romance, the villain, my hero, and his white horse.
Well, Lucinda, when my man untied me after that hour-and-a-half of constriction, the sexual energy I had in me was enough to blow away three counties, and it was a feeling exactly like what we both seem to feel when we take our girdles off and get into bed with our men.
Now, though we did rush home to have hours of hot and wild passion, we did not become bondage aficionados, and in fact we never directly talked about the sexual aspect of this experience until many years later. The only role that this has in our life is that we occasionally enact fantasies borrowed from literature, myth, and film.
In any case, to bring this excessively long letter to an end, what I'm trying to say is that there is, I think, a certain degree to which we must acknowledge that part of the appeal of girdles and corsets is related to the romantic feminine attraction to signifying restriction that is undoubtedly responsible for the fact that images of bondage play such a large role in the archetypal narratives of heterosexuality. Females seem to build up a great deal of sexual energy when they are restricted, that can then be liberated for the pleasure of the male. This may be natural. This may be the result of centuries of putrid conditioning.
Whatever it is, it is the way that it is, and it is better to acknowledge and analyze it than to pretend it doesn't exist.
Reynardine
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