The world has changed immensely in the last thirty years- some ways for the better, some ways for the worse. Don's round-the-globe memoir of other times and customs set off quite a furor when it was posted in alt.clothing.lingerie a while back, but no one dared call it boring.
Here's your chance to read the piece and judge for yourself.
I'm gonna get out the old flak jacket and step into the fray here a bit. Your paragraph added to some other remarks in this forum flushed up a warm memory that seems illustrative.
Notable among recent readings here have been items like (Suzanne's) stating (she'd) been a New York suburbanite who maintained full under-dress including a girdle even when clubbing down in Greenwich Village. I can understand that, for even though having grown up during the Fabulously Girdled Fifties I had noticed the women back home in Florida were becoming more and more prone to fully dressing only for heavy social affairs by the late 1960's. "Resort Styles" of course, centered in places like Arizona, California and Florida, so daywear was available that didn't demand so much formality in dress.
However, on arriving in New York in late 1968, and going to work right down at the corner of Broad and Beaver Streets in Lower Manhattan, it was obvious New York women still dressed "to the nines" (now there's a term for research by the wordsmiths) -- at least to go to work every day. (There was, of course, a much wider variety of feminine costume to be seen over in The Battery on tourist women.) Whatever, it just must have been "proper" for a New Yorker to be fully dressed.
I later found out that sort of New York approach held true in London, Rome, Paris, Munich, and even such "liberal" places as Copenhagen and Amsterdam, for my work took me to all of them within a year. And, of course, being there showed me the vast differences in social opinion between all those places and the U.S. of A.
I've also recently noted in here that U.S. mid-westerners have their own set of mind limitations on the matter of "unmentionables," telling us they remain rather unmentionable even to this day.
But along the way, I was also privileged to have some social dealings with Hispanics in Miami... even to the point of almost becoming the novio of a lovely Cubana. (I'm here to tell you that lady was a classic Iberian beauty with the olive complexion and flashing dark eyes you can imagine from any picture of such a beauty... but I wasn't ready to settle down into suburbia and row houses just then.) This lady was every bit as much a proper peninsulare as any woman could be in Miami, Florida, U.S.A.
However, she'd given me a large foretaste of some important differences between puritanical Yankee women and other societies. Her first overt invitation to foreplay was on the sofa in my apartment, when, with the lights down low, an evening of tropical Miami behind us, and several soothing beverages in both of us, she said, very matter-of-factly, "I just bought a new girdle today. You seemed to like feeling it. Would you like to see it?" The rest of that anecdote is obvious. The point is, what she was wearing ostensibly for good grooming (it was her 'working clothes" from her job in a bank) was not regarded as a matter of embarrassment nor was it "unmentionable" to a male she'd admitted into her comfort zone. Thus, she wouldn't be seen on the street without one. (I even recall being made to wait one day to take her to the corner drug store for some sort of incidental while she ran back to put on a girdle under her shorts. I couldn't talk her out of doing so, even for a five-minute trip, even though I tried.)
Nevertheless, without having taken the whole formal course, she certainly understood the Freudian aspect of her clothing, too... in its varied roles in the proper places. For example, later in our relationship, during that time of constant companionship, when I'd become her chauffeur to work and back, she'd often come running out the door in the morning with her stockings in her handbag, and proceed to don them in the car on our mutual way downtown. However, there was no time for "hanky-panky" then, and any motion I'd make toward same got a rebuff. She knew, I'm certain, it was going to make things more interesting later in the day, and keep her in my mind until then. Wily female!
Feminine trickery and costume has other geographic aspects, too. I had reason for a time to travel to New Orleans, where I came into the acquaintance of several of the city's "nice girls." Now, one of the more common complaints voiced by women about dressing up with foundation garments and hose is, "They're so HOT in the summer." I was puzzled to find New Orleans women down in the city center were always fully dressed, even in the heat and humidity of a summer afternoon. New Orleans of a summer afternoon can make even Flagler Street in Miami seem balmy, even though it's so hot the tar of the street sticks to your shoes. Why on earth were these New Orleans women enduring what must have been liquid discomfort inside their clothes?
The situation arose one sultry New Orleans evening in which it came to mind, so I asked. My companion told me rather matter-of-factly that in central New Orleans, being stockingless was the mark of a Bourbon Street prostitute. Proper women there wore hose day and night, so as to not be mistaken for the "wrong kind of woman." That was one more item to log into my Great Fact Book About Women. Hot or not, New Orleans women weren't going to be misidentified!
I later found out in Paris that was indeed a "Gallic Thing," too, so New Orleans came by it honestly. (Just so there be no misunderstanding, just as soon as one hits the outskirts of Centre Ville in both cities, the rules change, and so does the costume.)
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La Bella Sophia in a movie that the editor will never forget: Boy On A Dolphin, 1957. |
But to get back to Rome, which is what this reminiscence is all about: Sure, there are some women I lusted for in my dreams (and day-dreams)... a variety of them. People like (young) Elizabeth Taylor, (young) Joan Collins. but also Mitzi Gaynor (even today!), Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Susan Hayward, Catherine Deneuve, a number of others... but most notably, Sophia Loren, who even today manages despite the ravages of seven decades to carry off a head of Big Hair and slinky sequined gowns. Loren typified for me the classic beauty of Mediterranean Europe.
And, when I finally got to Rome myself, what did I find? A whole city full of Sophia Loren wannabes, and... the famous Roman "pinching!"
(Now's the time to watch out for incoming mortar rounds!)
The Italian "pinch," I soon learned, was not really a pinch at all. Only stupid Yankee tourists tried that. No, a true Tiberian "pinch" was really much more a gentle caress, done in the most surreptitious manner. Those American women who cannot step aside from their puritanical brainwashing will immediately understand it best as the sort of "touching games" played by schoolboys - "games" they have been taught to deprecate. In Roman society, males continued to hone their skills at reaching out in a crowd, slipping a little "check-out pat" on an attractive derriere, and appearing totally nonchalant, even uninvolved, when the target of the caress wheeled around looking for its source.
Now, that's not to say it wasn't a risky maneuver, because it could wind up with a head fracture from a flying basketweave handbag. (Why do those things always weigh a ton?) BUT, the upside potential in the right circumstances was phenomenal. If one learned to play the "game" properly, the reward far exceeded the risk.
That happened one day when, quite without expecting it, I spotted the comely receptionist from our firm's office out on the street, dressed to the Italian afternoon hilt in one of those Loren-like cotton dresses, swaying her way through the crowd on a set of Loren-like stiletto heels, just as one might imagine such a scene in an old romantic Italian movie. Ah, what a picture, even today!
The opportunity boiled from the Wolf Sector of my Limbic Brain when suddenly there we were, she standing just two ranks in front of me at a corner waiting for the traffic to change. Without any really conscious thought, my hand darted out and got a good feel right through the cotton dress. Although it lasted only milliseconds, there was a curious sensation. It was not a monobuttock, as one would expect on an American. It was a firm globe - firmer than au naturelle. It was definitely being restrained by something. Oh, what a mystery it was!
I retained as much composure as possible, looking off into the distance, but it didn't do me any good. Most amazing however, was that she broke into a smile just as wide and toothy as Sophia could ever have managed, and said, "Good afternoon to you, too, Signore," whereupon she even cloyed herself into a hair-tossing laugh.
The light changed at that instant, and she held back for me to get along side her in the pedestrian crowd. I could see middle-aged women smiling to themselves as they bustled off, while we dropped into our own little two-person world. Clearly, The Game was working and we were fully cooperative players.
What was the next thing she said? It was, in my best recall of her broken English, "Did you like how my girdle feels? Let's have a small drink and then find a place where I can show it to you. This is a fine afternoon to show you how Italian mothers take care of their little boys." In consideration of some rather ample other assets the lady sported, I could tell The Game of Pinching was all going to end very well! (I know the males reading this are drooling at the thought of having a Sophia Loren in her prime for an Italian Momma!)
By now, in case The Point has become lost, it's to say that indeed, there are times and places when "unmentionables" are mentionable in other than the connubial relation, and as well, even some touching that would make certain acl readers go ballistic is most appropriate.
So that's what all this brought to my mind. Let the fusillades begin. I'm going to uncork some Campari and ignore them in the clouds of great memories in which talking openly and even pinching came to a glorious happy ending!
Well, what do you think, folks? There's plenty of room for debate here at The Girdle Zone. Send your comments to Virginian. Reasonable responses will be posted; flames will be forwarded to the bit-bucket. Meanwhile, the old Virginian is heading off to the video store to check out that dusty copy of La Dolce Vita.
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Originally Posted April 20, 1997