Femininity (4 page)

A different approach to the feminine esthetic prevailed in the West, where the entire
torso from breast to hips was believed to require artistic improvement, and the ingenious
device that
hampered a woman’s motions as it molded her figure to a romantic ideal was the imprisoning
corset with its inflexible stays of whalebone or steel. We know from the art and documents
of the sixteenth century that two powerful queens, Catherine de Medici of France and
Elizabeth of England, were among the first to wear the compressing cage, taking on,
as it were, the armor of their noble knights to push the soft flesh and rib cage inward.
How fascinating that history’s first tight-lacers should have been the Medici and
the Virgin Queen, two bold, ambitious women who were called “unnatural” in their thirst
for power. Why did they do it? What made them want to subject their chest and stomach
to such discomfort, they who negotiated treaties and plotted murder with such competent
skill? Could it be that the singular quality their enemies whispered they did not
have—a womanly weakness, a soft, yielding nature—might best be proved and ceremoniously
displayed by that excessively small and breathlessly feminine bodice? The slender
waist was not exclusively a feminine vanity. Elizabeth’s father, Henry the Eighth,
compressed his middle in order to give his chest that extra-burly look—but King Henry
and other men stopped short of physical pain.

Two points must be stressed right here. The first is that no discussion of the feminine
body in the Western world can make much sense without getting a grip on the corset,
no matter how familiar the material may seem, for the corset has played not a supporting
but a starring role in the body’s history. The second is that whatever sartorial devices
men have put on to bolster their body image—codpieces, elevated shoes, padded shoulders,
a boxy jacket—these did not constrict or cause pain. The truth is, men have barely
tampered with their bodies at all, historically, to make themselves more appealing
to women. The development of biceps and pectorals is an honorable byproduct of hard
physical labor and an aid to competitive feats of sport and strength. Musclebound
body builders, the man in the elevated shoe or the baldy who wears a toupee have been
grist for the jokester’s mill, under the masculine theory that real men do not trick
themselves out to be pleasing. (They have better ways to prove their worth.) A woman,
on the other hand, is expected to depend on tricks and
suffering to prove her feminine nature, for beauty, as men have defined it for women,
is an end in itself.

Not only did the corset induce a regal posture and smaller, feminized motions—a lady
could barely bend at the waist or take a deep breath, but her bosom heaved and her
fan fluttered in her agitated efforts to get enough air—it became a necessary under-structure
for anyone who cared about fashion. The quest for the perfect body in the perfect
dress was contained in the quest for the perfect corset, which could uplift, augment
or flatten the breasts, widen or narrow the hips, pinch or elongate the waist, sway
the back, slope the shoulders and push in the stomach, in accordance with the fashion
ideal of the times. An estimated twenty to eighty pounds of pressure might be exerted
by the corset’s squeeze, depending on the season’s style and the determination of
the wearer. Corseting up was a challenge that taxed her stamina and the strength of
her maidservant, or a convenient bedpost, the laces pulled tighter as evening drew
near. But oh, the admiring glances that fell upon the fragile waist which could be
spanned and lifted by a pair of strong hands. And oh, the delightful charms of the
fainting, swooning lady who so exquisitely needed masculine protection. Or so she
has been romantically presented. Realistically, the typical corseted woman was no
wasp-waisted Scarlett O’Hara flirting at a glittering ball. She was a solidly built
matron who loosened her stays in private as often as she could, and who was annoyed
to find her maidservant “putting on airs” by corseting up on the sly.

Among its persuasions, the corset encouraged the idea that the female body was structurally
unsound and needed to be supported by artificial contraptions at strategic points.
A woman of the nineteenth century believed she was born with a clumsy waist, and that
a stiff foundation would compensate for the inability of her spine and musculature
to support the weight of her breasts and stomach. Since her muscles were miserably
atrophied from disuse and binding, she had authentic reason to be grateful to her
supporting stays, and without them she feared she might collapse into a degenerative
heap, both physically and spiritually. Her erect, formal posture was identified with
moral rectitude and social propriety (the term “straitlaced” owes its origin to the
corset), and loosening the stays or leaving the house without them was interpreted
as a sign of loose, licentious behavior. Training the body to accept the corset was
a discipline that began in childhood, for it was never too early for an anxious mother
to correct the slovenly posture with which her daughter was born. Initiation into
the mysteries of the hooks and laces was a rite of passage into the mysteries and
responsibilities of becoming a young lady; the confines of the corset signified the
submissive, self-conscious values of the feminine sphere.

Art historian Anne Hollander observes in
Seeing Through Clothes
that much of the world’s great painting celebrates the nude female body not in its
natural configurations but in conformance to the dress and corset styles of the period,
with pushed-up breasts or widely separated breasts, with a high waist or a low waist,
with a rounded or a flat abdomen, etcetera. Apparently the corset could shape not
only the woman but the artist’s erotic preference. Corset fetishism in the history
of pornography is astonishing and shows no sign of phasing out in today’s freer, more
natural age. A comical, dated interest in girdles, brassieres and crisscross of garters
(I have yet to see a pornographic picture of a woman in pantyhose) seems to say that
a network of feminine impediments is a more potent sexual tonic for many men than
the direct reality of an unencumbered body.

Of course, women’s underwear is imbued with erotic value at least partially because
it lies close to the forbidden female mysteries. In the step-by-step procedure of
the old-fashioned seduction the formidable girdle must be breached, the brassiere
unhooked, the soft flesh released and the moral inhibitions overcome by the determined
lover. Given this standard scenario based on the double standard, decorative lingerie
with its contradictory message of harness, display and frivolous trim takes on a sexual
life of its own. During the Gay Nineties a frilly lace garter thrown from the stage
by a music-hall performer was a titillating gesture of naughty, provocative promise.
In our own day there seems to be popular agreement that black lace is charged with
sexual current, since it bespeaks narcissism that is wickedly assertive although the
wearer herself may remain conventionally passive. Black lace has been certified as
sexy for so
many generations that for some women it represents the ultimate in feminine lingerie
while others believe it is vulgar and cheap. On the reverse side of the picture, white
cotton underpants have a feminine reputation for chastity and refinement in some quarters
and are too plain, dowdy and childish for the taste of others.

I campaigned hard for my first brassiere, for my mother was of the opinion that I
didn’t really need one. Need one? The need was in my head, not in my bosom. Half the
girls in my class were proudly showing off their bra lines under their Sloppy Joe
sweaters—how could I look sophisticated and get a boy with nothing to show but the
scoop of a kiddy undershirt? Despite my mother’s unsettling reassurance that all too
soon I would fill out and begin to resemble her side of the family, the only enlarging
I did was from 34-A to 34-A padded. This was rotten luck in an era where the boys
said they could always tell a C-cup from a D-cup, and Howard Hughes publicized
The Outlaw
by revealing how he applied his engineering technology to design a special uplift
for Jane Russell. Watching Jane Russell on television last year doing brassiere commercials
for the full-figured woman, I had to admit that Mother was right. I didn’t really
need one. By the late 1950s I had discarded the padding and by the mid-1960s I had
discarded the bra.

Brassieres had no reason to exist before the 1920s since the upper portion of the
corset was designed to keep the breasts supported and contained. In the tumultuous
years of female emancipation that began during World War I, the corset was cast aside
in a delirious rush toward freedom and modernity that included job opportunities,
bobbed hair, bright lipstick, short skirts, disposable sanitary pads and the right
to vote. Dress-reform movements that were partly feminist and partly hygienic in tone
had paved the way for the corset’s demise. For generations female doctors had spoken
at public meetings of crushed ribs and atrophied internal organs, and concern for
a sound, healthy body inspired women’s participation in the physical-culture movements
that sprouted in American soil—the fresh air advocates, the bicycle enthusiasts, the
back-to-nature cultists, and the artistic dancers in their Grecian tunics who were
followers of Isadora Duncan. Even the government got into the act
when the War Industries Board announced that if American women were released from
their armor, 28,000 tons of steel would be freed to build and furnish two battleships.

Women could do anything, or so it seemed, and a collective sigh of relief was heard
when the corset was taken off and the flesh was allowed to spread in the name of the
loose, unstructured Paris fashions. But what about the unfamiliar, loose shape of
the body? The dancing flapper who epitomized the postwar generation was ideally thin
and small-breasted in her waistless shift. Her unlucky sisters who also wanted to
be New Women resorted to binding in order to suppress the superfluity of their bosoms.
By the 1930s, however, breasts and the belted waistline had made a comeback, and corsetry
had become a two-part solution. A lighter, rubberized girdle was introduced to contain
the stomach and hips, and the bandeau that suppressed the breasts was redesigned to
pull them up by means of adjustable straps. For those who wanted more support, the
upper and lower contraptions could be hooked together.

Only at brief, vivid moments in the Western world have breasts been unencumbered by
a restraining device worn under the clothes: Madame Récamier reclining on her sofa
in a Grecian gown, Jean Harlow slithering to a dinner party in white satin, feminists
in T-shirts marching on Fifth Avenue—but the rare privilege of this freedom has been
seized happily and exemplified in fashion almost exclusively by small-breasted women.
Historically, breasts of every shape and size have been crammed tightly into a V-shaped
bodice, pushed upward and presented like two oranges on a platter, flattened downward
into obscurity, projected forward into a singular front-porch effect known as the
monobosom, underpinned and braced like a shelf to maximize rising cleavage, forcibly
separated by wire frames and pointed straight ahead like missiles, or persuaded by
a combination of straps, clasps, elastic and stretchy fabric to stay put at some designated
place mid-chest without jiggling.

The containerizing of breasts is a significant question, and not one that can be written
off strictly as a matter of decoration. Whatever configuration the corset took in
a given period, and however much attention was devoted in the fashion journals, and
later in the costume history books, to the dazzling waistline, the slope of the torso
or the flare of the hips, the unvarying function of any corset (and obviously, of
the brassiere) was always to secure the breasts in some manner that reduced their
independent motion. In fact, I suspect that the true reason women put up with the
tribulations of the corset for so many centuries, abandoning it finally when the bra
made its appearance, was that the majority of them felt more at ease physically—better
armored, so to speak—when their breasts were immobile and firmly contained. It is
no accident, I think, that the use of breasts for nursing as a routine public act,
as it still is today in Africa and other parts of the globe, fell into disfavor in
the Western world, especially among the upper classes, at approximately the same time
that the corset took hold as a necessary undergarment of fortitude and fashion. What
to do with breasts, if one is not actually using them, has preoccupied the feminine
mind for a very long time.

Breasts are the most pronounced and variable aspect of the female anatomy, and although
their function is fundamentally reproductive, to nourish the young with milk (placing
“Man” among the mammalian species), it is their emblematic prominence and intrinsic
vulnerability that makes them the chief badge of gender. Breasts command attention,
yet they are pliable and soft, offering warmth and succor close to the heart. Breasts
seem possessed by an independent momentum, an autonomous bob and sway that forever
reminds and surprises. Breasts may be large or small, droopy or firm, excitable or
impassive, and variably sensitive to hormonal change, swelling in pleasure or in discomfort
or pain. Breasts are an element of human beauty. Breasts are subject to cancerous
lumps. Breasts are a source of female pride and sexual identification but they are
also a source of competition, confusion, insecurity and shame.

Although they are housed on her person, from the moment they begin to show, a female
discovers that her breasts are claimed by others. Parents and relatives mark their
appearance as a landmark event, schoolmates take notice, girlfriends compare, boys
zero in; later a husband, a lover, a baby expect a proprietary share. No other part
of the human anatomy has such
semipublic, intensely private status, and no other part of the body has such vaguely
defined custodial rights. One learns to be selectively generous with breasts—this
is the girl child’s lesson—and through the breast iconography she sees all around
her, she comes to understand that breasts belong to everybody, but especially to men.
It is they who invent and refine the myths, who discuss breasts publicly, who criticize
their failings as they extoll their wonders, and who claim to have more need and intimate
knowledge of them than a woman herself.