4. Girdles And The Decline And Revival Of Romance
I have a story too, of an ensnarement. But to set the stage let me mention that when pantyhose first appeared, around 1967, I remember discussing them with other girls. As I recall, no one at that time really thought they they were going to replace girdles. They were going to replace the inconvenience of gartered stockings, and they were going to be worn under girdles. I certainly didn't imagine that anyone would trust them to stay up by themselves. And I couldn't imagine that after years of being taught that a girdle was as essential to being a well-dressed female as a bra, that suddenly, in Orwellian fashion, everyone would suddenly think differently. When they first appeared they were expensive. And if they ran, well, you had to throw away the whole thing. They seemed economically wasteful and I stayed with girdles and stockings.
Then when I went off to college in the fall of 1968, I was aware that an increasing number of girls in my dorm were wearing them under their girdles. Then, and this happened with some rapidity, girls with good figures started wearing pantyhose without girdles. By 1970, to continue to wear a girdle was a sort of an admission that you didn't think your figure was good enough to do without one. I didn't think mine was, and I continued to wear one. Then I took a year off, and when I returned to college in the fall of 1971, there were hardly any women wearing skirts, let alone girdles. Except for special occasions.
Well, I wouldn't go along. I had been brought up to be elegant. It meant something to me. I didn't want to go around in jeans and t-shirts. And so I was virtually the only girl I knew who wore skirts almost all the time, and girdles with either stockings or pantyhose most of the time. Although I was politically sympathetic to what I understood to be the reasons behind the changes, although I was glad that college girls were considered less ornamental than they had been in the "elegant" period I was so ambivalent about, nevertheless, I had this feeling that I had gotten all dressed up for the elegant and romantic adulthood I had always dreamed about, and it wasn't going to happen.
Although my friends respected my individuality in dress, they didn't really understand it. To the friends who asked me about it, I found myself justifying my way of dressing, not by defending it, but by saying, essentially, that I was an old-fashioned bookish girl who was used to dressing in a certain way, was comfortable with it, and was not going to take the time to develop a new style. For the last two years of college, I threw myself into my work and didn't have a boyfriend, so no one was in the position to discover that I wore a girdle, except my suitemates, who teased me about it.
Anyway, when I began graduate school in 1975, I made a conscious decision to stop wearing girdles. I was going to have a new style, was going to recognize finally that that elegant world my mother had prepared me for was dead, and that I needed to embrace a new world that was less aesthetically appealing but more politically acceptable, a world in which women didn't dress up for men, and men accepted them for what they "were" and not for how they "looked." So when I left for graduate school, I packed up a non-descript 1970s intellectual girls' wardrobe of jeans and wrap-around skirts, and one, only one, clingy dress-up dress in case I had to dress up for some special occasion. For purely practical reasons, I packed a girdle, in case I ever had to get into that dress.
Well, I met an earnest, bookish guy when I got to school, we began to go out, and we fell in love. We dressed identically and forgettably. We had long discussions and discovered we were soulmates. Then, to celebrate the end of the semester, he sheepishly and somewhat humorously suggested that he take me out dining and dancing at a fancy restaurant. What a joke! An old-fashioned date, something people like us never did.
I agreed that it would be a real gas and I got out my black dress, my girl costume, as it were. I put it on without the girdle. No way.
So when the time came for him to pick me up, there I was, all dressed up, confusedly but profoundly enjoying being in a girdle again, and terrified that he would find out and think I was either strange or fat. I was really worried about this. Then he arrived, laughing delightedly when he saw me all dressed up. He embraced me, and I noticed an sudden, surprised and incredible reaction when his hand touched my waist. He held on to me, very obviously feeling how uncharacteristically firm and smooth I was. I thought, "Oh god, he's noticed! He's turned off." I was mortified.
But it was very clear, and very puzzling, that he seemed anything but turned off. He seemed intensely focused on me, bubbling over with compliments on how I looked in the black dress, and he was having unusual trouble finding the right words to say what he wanted to say.
We had a marvellous, romantic dinner. We had a couple of drinks and I was having an extraordinarily good time. It was not long before we seemed to mutually and silently understand that this was anything but a joke. This was what things should be like between a man and a woman. And we could have the rest of it too. We could still be equals, but dressed like this, expressing and enjoying our difference from each other in every article of our clothing. He seemed intoxicated by me. His compliments just didn't stop, and as he drank a little more, he kept talking more and more about how terrific and sleek and sexy and beautiful I looked in my dress. As he was using the word "sleek" a lot, I began to have a hunch.
Then we began to dance, and as I felt his timid hands on me, both on the dance floor, and sitting on banquettes along the side, putting his hand on my thigh, "accidentally" brushing against my hip, I began to have more than a hunch. It was more like a dawning and extremely excited revelation. Well, as he was launching for the thousandth time into praise for how good I looked, this was while we were slow dancing, I put my finger on his lips to shush him and said, in a purposely seductive, somewhat drunken whisper, that the only reason I looked so great in my dress is that this was the first time he had ever seen me in a girdle.
Well, I immediately knew that I had hit the jackpot. For the rest of the evening, we flirted and I teased with all sorts of references to my girdle. In the cab back to my apartment, I allowed my skirt to ride up. I knew perfectly well that he was able to see just a little lace-trimmed white panty girdle leg. He was silent but I could hear his heart beating. What an experience of power! To feel as if one has completely fired someone's sexual imagination, has made someone's dream come true.
I'll end the story right here. It is twenty years later, and we have been blissfully married for seventeen years. It is a great pleasure to have had the opportunity to tell this story.
Continue to Girdles And Masochism
Copyright 1995 by Suzanne. Used with permission of the author.
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Originally Posted April 20, 1997