How Corsets Work

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Charles Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Jerome Roland.
So it's stuff you should know. Yeah, Jerry wore her

(00:23):
Swan Bill corset today. Yes, she looks like a freak
of nature. I'm nervous about this one. It's gonna go
ahead and say that, don't be really, Yeah, I'm nervous. Well,
here I am to relax. You chuck me, pat your beard,
give you a little nap. That didn't help making things worse. Yeah,

(00:44):
this one, I don't know. I mean the history and
stuff is interesting, which I assume we'll talk to you first,
since we don't plan this stuff out. But um, you know,
we're all with a live and let live thing. And
I certainly have no problem with a lady or a
dude that wants to wear a corset or anybody. Okay,
what's wrong? But when I started reading about the the

(01:05):
uh the Guinness Book lady and I went to her
website and watch the YouTube, it just kind of freaked
me out a little bit. Cathy Young, Yeah, yeah, and
we'll talk about her later, but it kind of crossed
the line to me to like weird obsessions with physical appearance.
But then I think about, like, I'm not going to
condemn anyone forgetting all the kinds of weird plastic surgery either,

(01:27):
if that's your thing. I think that I just want
people to be happy, you know, right, But I think
the um extreme lacing is one thing. It's called also
um well extreme lacing, I think is the general preferred term,
right um tight lacing. Yeah, it's a perfect example of
you're harming nobody. This is strictly your body. It's yours

(01:51):
to do what you want with it, have at it. Yeah,
but what if it's in the like because men say
that's the only way a woman will be attractive, and like,
what's different it's just been in footbinding. That to me
is sad and and it's a that's part of a
larger issue, you know what I mean, Like if you're
doing it because you know you want to catch a
man's attention or something like that, who knows, we're not

(02:13):
pop psychologists, and it just all this makes me nervous.
I did. Actually I had a conversation with um Holly
from miss in History stuff. You miss in history class.
She's probably one of course it in her time. Yes, yes,
and she actually defends course it's too because I thought, well,
it's like the the Western equivalent of footbody. She said, no, no, no,
my friend. Uh, it lacks in reality and actuality, a

(02:35):
lot of the um, a lot of the sexism associated
with footbindinging. That makes me feel a little bit better.
And that course it's in in reality and truth. In
the nineteenth century and before, we're um very much chosen
to be worn by women for their own tastes, sometimes

(02:57):
at the out of spy or not out of spite,
but um, contrary to what the with the men in
their life might want or desire. Okay, okay, so it's
actually it's not necessarily a feminist article of clothing, although
Madonna certainly made a case for that, so did Vivian Westwood. Um,
but it's it's not as bad as you're thinking. I

(03:18):
think I do feel better now, do you? Yeah? Good.
I just don't want to, you know, I don't want
to make people feel bad. I want people to feel
good always. I want everyone to feel good. That's my problem. Yeah,
and we should say, if you're wearing a courser right now,
and it feels bad. Everything I've seen in my research
says you need to loosen that thing because it's not
supposed to hurt. Well yeah, and um even Cathy Young,

(03:42):
who um again we will talk about. But she's againness
record holder because she formed her waists into the size
of a jar mayonnaise. Um. Literally, oh yeah, gallant size mayonnaise.
It said the thing I had said, an average jar,
But I don't think that's correct unless those photos on
her site though look photo shopped. Okay, but she said that.

(04:02):
All the advice she gave was you go slow. Don't like,
you know, if you want to train your waists to
be smaller, which you can do, um, don't you know,
dive in and just start, you know, doing the extreme
lacing right away. No, there's into it. There's something called
um waste training, and that's kind of a uh it's

(04:23):
not necessarily the ultimate goal of corseting, which can be
a verb, but it is um a kind of a
parallels subculture of the corseting culture, and waist training is
simply where you are basically through the use of corsets
and pretty tight course. It's over a period of time,
usually about a decade. You are reshaping your body mechanically, right,

(04:48):
you're not actually losing weight. Although a tight fitting corset
acts something like a gastric bypass surgery without the surgery
because you just can't put as much stuff in your
stomach is normal UM. But the waste training itself, it's
just it's a reshaping. It's not actually making you lose weight.
So what it's doing is taking uh inches out of

(05:12):
the middle and sliding them down to the hips and
all of this the whole point for course, it's from
the beginning of course, it's to um. The world record
holding course at waste is to um amplify existing female
UM body features. Yes, that's the point, that's right. The

(05:33):
word uh comes from an old French word c o
r s, meaning body and UM. Here's the history, which
oddly came three quarters the way through this article. UH.
If you go back in time and the way Back
machine to the days of ancient crete, there were women

(05:58):
who well I think he and before crete, there were
women who tied ropes around their waist to make their
waistline look slimmer acentuate maybe the bust and the rear end. Uh.
So they were doing that a long time ago and
then an ancient create. Um people think that they are historians,
think through the first women that actually wore something that
you could call a corset. It was a garment that

(06:21):
shaped the body more than three thousand years ago, right
it um It covered the I think the waist and
the hips and um crete and women went around um
bare breasted, so they would have their breasts like saying, hey, everybody,
how's it going? And then below that was the corset okay,

(06:41):
And I would imagine um that it probably enhanced the
breasts as well. Uh yeah, sure, if you're sent and
everything up like that probably probably acted sort of like
a pre brazier support and lift. See them so uncomfortable
a man. We did one on female puberty that was easier.

(07:03):
Oh really yeah, well that was science. This is I see,
I see, you make a valid point. Uh So if
you go forward a bit to the Middle Ages, they
um for the first time, these undergarments came out in
something called the heavy stay, and it was very much
an outerwear, but it kind of accomplished the same goal.

(07:24):
But it was you know, very decorative and and pretty um.
But that I don't think that lasted too long. They
went back under the garment in the eighteenth century, right,
and then um, up until the eighteenth century, most things
that were part of the Corset family tree or predecessors
of course it's were conical. Um no, they were tubular,

(07:44):
totally tubular. And then once we hit I think about
the eighteenth century, what we start to see today as
of course it began to emerge where that's conical, it's
cone shaped, right, um. And from from I guess, yeah,
the eighteen century on, of course, it's were like a
pretty pretty much a mainstay of fashion, if not the

(08:07):
basic ingredient of women's fashion from about the end of
the sevres until World War One. Basically, yeah, it wasn't
like some weird thing like today. Um. I mean they're
still in fashion today, and if you know in certain
um like cosplay and costumes in the fetish world and

(08:27):
burlesque and stuff like that, or just you know, just
playing sexy time. Sure, regular old sexy time. But um,
the stuff I read said it was it was no
like more of a strange thing than like a woman
to wear a bra today, right exactly, it's just a
regular fashion accessory. Yeah. And as we'll see, it was
like kind of essential depending on the clos you're wearing,

(08:48):
depending on the period. Yeah, that's true. Um, there was
a a real movement. And when I was saying like
some men were saying like, you shouldn't be wearing corsets,
and women said, t s for you, Pal, I'm still
wearing a corset. There was actually a big movement that
was UM that came out of uh I guess the

(09:09):
nineteenth century, late nineteenth century, that was spearheaded by two brothers,
Ira and Lucian Warner Um. And they came up with
an alternative too. They actually were anti corset crusaders. They
were both doctors, and they Um basically said you can't
beat them, join them, but let's try to create a

(09:29):
corset that's less problematic for women. And the idea that
corsets were problematic for women can actually be traced back
to a sevente medical article by a guy named Dr
Samuel Thomas von Sommering, and Um von Sommering basically made
up a lot of the myths about corsets that we

(09:50):
know today, that they can cause scoliosis, that they can
mess up your liver, that they can lead to permanent
deformation of your body and your internal or inns. Uh.
It all kind of came from this and a hundred
years after Von Summering wrote his article, UM, the Warner
Brothers got in and said, we're gonna come up with

(10:11):
a health health courset. Yeah, but they definitely can change. Um.
There's something called uh viscer optosis or Glennard's disease, which
if you do the tight lacing long term, you're your
organs can actually sink and shift away from where they
should be. Right. So, I mean that's that's something that
can happen that there is a really good point, man,

(10:32):
we should delineate here. Wearing a corset normally, even when
you're doing waste training, should not result in that. There
is a definite line where if you are getting into
extreme corseting, then yes, all sorts of medical problems can happen. Um.
But just about every corseting site out there on the

(10:54):
Internet will warn you about going past that line. And
in fact, there was a really there's a good um
site by Orchard Corsets. They sell corsets. They have a
really extensive site. You know, there's stuff about corsets. They
actually say one of the ways that the body can
be deformed. Is if you're an adolescent girl wearing a corset, Um,

(11:17):
your ribs can develop improperly because you're wearing the course.
As they say, girls under eighteen shouldn't wear corsets. Uh.
So then along came this guy, um. And we should
mention too that when these two the two uh Warner
brothers within the United States. Yeah, they were out of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
I was gonna say Wigner, but maybe a generation or

(11:40):
two before probably so. Um they also changed around the
same time at least Um. I think we have not
mentioned yet that Uh, one of the you know, the
the course it has to and we'll get into all
the parts of the corset, but one of the things
that keeps it rigid and stiff and the old days
was baleen whale um. And it was actually it was
a teeth, right even though called a whalebone. And they

(12:03):
would use this to, you know, to make the corsets
stiff in in place, keep everything where it should be.
But around that time, in the late eighteen hundreds, is
they were overhunted, became really expensive, so they said, all right,
forget the whale teeth, let's put in steel in which
I'm sure that was quite comfortable, right. Well, yeah, but

(12:23):
and I mean women were wearing these like every day. Yeah.
But I mean one of the as we'll see when
we talk about manufacturing, course it's the UM. One of
the points is to make it as comfortable as possible,
this very uncomfortable contraption. Yea, but yeah, they started to
use steel, and even today you'll find steel in corsets
that are meant to for like waste training or something

(12:46):
like that. Uh. And then, like I teased a moment ago,
along came this guy named Charles Dana Gibson. He's a
he was a graphic artist in the Victorian times, and
he became very famous, and a lot of artists that
came after him emulated his style. But he became very
famous in the eighteen nineties for creating what was known

(13:06):
as the Gibson Girl. So what he did was he
he drew all these pictures of this, uh, these ladies
who were I mean some say it was like the
first ideal of of UM American attractiveness for for women,
and it was they wore these swan bill corsets, which
made I mean these were even more extreme. They would

(13:27):
make you kind of stick the bust out and stick
your your rear end back. And if you just look
up Gibson girl. I mean, you've seen these drawings before.
It's like America's first cheesecake drawings. I don't know what
a cheesecake drawing is. It's like a Gibson girl, okay?
Or a Vargus girl is another a little more modern one. Well,
supposedly his American boy. You see them cheesecake girls, apparently

(13:53):
as his wife and her sisters were his inspiration. And
um m is it the sister it's weird. Yeah, they
said they were all pretty okay, and he was celebrating.
He said that this was not a woman, but it
was a thousand women, is his quote. Got um. And
supposedly the Gibson cocktail is named after him, but I'm
not sure if that's true. Oh that's great, good for him.

(14:16):
M gut him. Pickle onions? Yeah, put in Martini, call
it after me. So what happened? He was actually um
working from a corset that was invented by a doctor
ines ghosh, so terrible Um who created this course at
the straight front, also called the swan Bill corset and

(14:40):
the whole problem with it was, and Charles Dana Gibson
is criticized for popularizing this because it's so bad for you, Like,
there's no question that the swan bill corset is really
bad for your posture because the thing that it forces
your spine into is just totally unnatural. And apparently that
trend only last for about a decade during the Awardian

(15:02):
period of first century of the just ten years, and
then pretty much right after that, not right after pretty
close of course, it's suddenly just went away because World
War One had such a sweeping change on the world.
It just it just it was. It created social upheaval.

(15:24):
And one of the things that um came out of
this was women said, you know what we're done. Of
course it's I'm a flapper now I need to do
the Charleston, can't do the Charleston and of courset um
and the whole fashion was just different looking, you know
it was, and the idealized body was different too. So
prior to that and throughout basically history, the Venus body type,

(15:45):
which is you know them, the fertile women curves type,
was replaced by the Diana type, which is the more
athletic type that's now has been in fashion basically ever
since World War One. That basically kill the corset. But
the modern bra and slip and all of that stuff
came out of that the death of the corset, because

(16:08):
they were like, we still need something, we still want
to course it anymore. Okay. I think one of the
reasons all this made me uncomfortable is just all the
categorizations over the years, like this is the ideal women
and she's called a Diana, and this is what they
should look like. Yeah, that's mean that to me is
like a whole other podcast, you know. I mean, like

(16:28):
because plenty of women buy into that, and there they
don't feel bad about themselves for buying into it. They say, oh, yeah,
this is what I find attractive to uh So. Anyway,
during this time in the Roaring twenties, there were the
corsetiers that were just like, oh no, well, how about
this kind that you can still wear and it's not
like the other course that you can actually dance on them,

(16:48):
and you know, it's sunk and it. It basically stayed
that way for the rest of the twentieth century. There
was a brief resurgence. Christian Dior brought it back in
the forties, um, and it was kind of akin to that, uh,
that Swan Bill corset. Yeah. Uh. And then it went
out pretty quickly. And then in two Vivian Westwood had

(17:12):
a show called Buffalo Girls, her collection for two eighty three,
and it brought corsets out. Vivian west Wood, she's a
famous designer, kind of punk fashion, um, and she brought
courses out from underneath the clothing and made it like
basically into a shirt. It was Outerwhere now was that
when Madonna got on the train? That was about six

(17:33):
years later, And that was Jean Paul Gautier that designed
that very famous corset with the conical bra that would
take your eye clean out. Yeah. What was the what's
the video? I don't remember. I can sing the song
in my head, sing it. No, you know the one Vogue?
It was okay, that was a Vogue video, right, I think? So, okay,
Well we'll find out if it's not. Um, But that

(17:54):
was Jean Paul Gautier. And uh. From that point on
the course that has basically stuck a down, sometimes a
little a little more predominantly, sometimes a little more in
the background, but it's basically been a fashion accessory that
you could conceivably wear out in public in the West
ever since. Yeah, I mean it sticks around these days,
like you see costumes and stuff like that. But um,

(18:17):
and then occasionally, I guess if you're in a swinging nightclub,
you might see a lady in a corset or maybe
a man. Yeah, we'll talk about that after this. How
about that? So chuck your teased men wearing corsets? Literally, Uh,

(18:55):
I never tease a man for wearing anything except those
dolphin running shorts. Those are great to get back in
your time machine. I saw The Boy in the Bubble
for the first time. Have you ever seen that movie
here at Trivolta. Yeah, I never saw it, and I
watched the riff Trecks version of it. Well that's the
only way to pervde it a lot better. Yeah, where

(19:17):
did that come from? Oh? I think he's wearing dolphins
shorts on one of the scenes, and I was like,
dolphins shorts. So, um, yeah, what we're talking about men
wearing him? Yeah, So apparently this article makes it seem
like it was fairly normal. But from what I saw
in the nineteenth century and there, from what I saw

(19:39):
in the nineteenth century was that if you were wearing
a corset, and you were a man, you were probably
suspected as being gay. And so here's where this kind
of patriarchal view. Of course, it's does definitely hold fast. Um,
if you were if you were like a straight establishment

(20:01):
type male, Um, you probably did not cotton two men
wearing corsets and didn't want to associate with any guy
wearing corses because you didn't trust him he was probably gay.
But if you were in favor of your wife wearing
a corset, she'd better be wearing a corset or else
she wouldn't be viewed as a proper woman in normal,
polite society. So it's it's not fair to say like

(20:25):
that myth about the corset being a part of the
patriarchy is not true. It is true in some ways,
but not It's not like women were forced to wear
corsets throughout history. They donned it in particular on purpose.
And one of the reasons why women wore corsets was

(20:46):
because it also served as a basically the thing that
held up all of their really heavy clothes. Yeah, like
you couldn't you couldn't just slip into one of those
dresses in Victorian times. No, Um, it had a certain
shape that required a certain uh form to put it on,

(21:07):
and you know that course it would help your body
like morph into that form basically, you know, it was
a low there was a load bearing structure that you
wore under her clothes, a load bearing beam. So I
don't think we've really described the how these things were
kind of came you know, how they came together. There's
some people out there are like, what is a corset? Well, geez,

(21:31):
do we not even say that? And not in so
many words? All right, Well, it's a garment and it's
usually pretty short, uh, and it's like a it's like
a belt, like a a not a wide belt, but
a towel, a tall belt. It's like a vest that
doesn't go over your shoulders. Yeah, but some of them
could go over your shoulders. Well that was the health coursets.

(21:55):
I think that did that, all right. Um, they lace
up in the back. We mentioned the whale own, which
was actually the teeth of the baleen as these reads,
and they were put in what we're called boning channels,
which were just a little sheaths basically where they would
slip these things down in and um, it's like you know,
if you've ever had to wear a back brace or something,

(22:15):
it's very much like that. And like Andy Warhol had
to wear one of these after he got shot by
Valerie Salon. Yeah, for the rest of his life, who
went on to write the Scum Manifesto. You ever read that? Yeah?
I thought she wrote it before she shot him, Now
did she? We should do one on that whole scene, Yeah,
we should. All right, we'll get that, uh. And then
they were made out of this um cotton fabric, fabric

(22:35):
called kutial c o U t I l um and
it's still used today. In course it's because it um
doesn't stretch, has very high thread count, keeps all those
boning channels and rib or I guess bones in place.
And you you have to understand, like this whole thing,
this whole mechanism that is the corset, is basically defying

(22:58):
physics at any given point in time. So you have
to have some really strong stuff involved in the manufacture
of it. So what else you got? You got on
on the front part where it meets you have a
busk Yeah, and um that's actually needs to be pretty
strong as well, right, So usually that's um wood or

(23:19):
metal maybe bone originally, and it was two flat pieces
that um that basically went up and down alongside a scene.
And most people are I don't want to say most people.
I for a very long time thought that you put
the corset on and then laced it up, and that
you put it on and then laced up the back, right,
you put it around your stuff like that. It's actually

(23:41):
not the case. You, um, you were doing it all wrong.
I had it all wrong. When you put on the corset, um,
you've already got it laced and you're putting the front together.
You're putting it around yourself and then fastening the front
at the buss. Yeah, but then you tighten the lacens
like you don't lace it tight and try to put
it on exactly. You just have it kind of pre
lace like your shoes. And the lacing kind of confused

(24:03):
me to Actually we'll get into that. Well. First of all,
we need to finish the front. There was a flattened
part on the stomach. A lot of times it was
decorative called the stomacher. Yeah. It was very lovely designs
and embroidery and stuff, and that had the added benefit
if you were trying to adjust your shape of keeping
your stomach flat. That's right, just person all it. So, uh,

(24:26):
what else? Are there any other components to the corset
that we haven't mentioned? I don't think so. Um, just
the the the lacing. Okay, so we'll talk lacing now
then you're ready. Yeah. So, traditionally in the in the
Western Europe, the the method of lacing was we're basically

(24:49):
like you would lace the shoe. Okay, it's called bidirectional lacing,
where you just alternate from one hole of the other diagonally. Right. Um,
that's typically what you think of when you see of course,
it's probably what you're seeing is bidirectional lacing. If you
look at Italian paintings from the medieval era, you're probably

(25:10):
gonna see what's called ladder lacing. It's all right angles, right,
so you go from one hole down and then over
and then maybe up and then down again, then over,
then down and then over, and it forms a ladder.
The name is pretty appropriate for that one. And I wonder,
was this just to make it look different? I would

(25:32):
guess that had something to do with it, But I
would also imagine that it had to do with you know,
if somebody was like this actually, this doesn't loosen during
the day very much. Because I also saw with the
bi directional what you would create in the not at
the bottom at the top, it's sort of in the
middle of where it laces these bunny ears. And that

(25:53):
was for women because a lot of times in the
movies you've seen like the you know, the like down
and be like the the lady holding the bed post
and then her valet or I guess where the females
called valets was valley girl. The lady who helps them
dress would be like, you know, cinching this thing down

(26:15):
so tight, and they'd be like, breathe in, you know,
sucking your breath. But these bunny ears allowed women to
that didn't have a personal dresser to tighten it themselves. Yeah,
and apparently that was fairly normal. Um for women wearing courses.
They usually put them on themselves more often than not.
And those those bunny ears were just two loops of
lacing at about the thinnest part, the narrowest part where

(26:39):
you had some slack, and then when you put your
corset on, you wrap it around you. You um fasten
the busk the little the buttons on the bus the
front and then you just pull back tighten it done right.
And this is again ideally after you have visited your
uh course a tear because apparently, like buying a braw,

(27:01):
guys don't know this stuff. It's apparently tough to get
one that like fits just right, and so you need
to get like professionally fitted and um, like the off
the shelf thing doesn't work for a lot of ladies, right,
And that was the case for of course it's for
a very long time. You had to go to a
corsetier to to be fitted for one, um and it
was expensive from what I understand right, Um, today there

(27:27):
I guess because of mass manufacturing, UM, it's a lot
easier to make coursets that are fairly close to what
a large number of people would use. But the fit
is still extraordinarily important. And apparently from what I well,
I should say, from what orchard course, it says, um,
women tend to miss uh or to underestimate the length

(27:50):
that they need, so that leads to a lot of
discomfort there of course it's too short for their body.
So I mean, I don't mean to buzz market or anything,
but just based on my research orchery, of course, it's
if you're getting into corsetting, there might be a pretty
decent place to start. Wow, you might get a little
treat in the mail. Uh, let's take another break and

(28:10):
we'll talk a little bit more about Cathy Young and
some of the myths about corsetting. So I think we

(28:38):
didn't mention after corsetting went out of fashion. Uh, girdles
came along, like everything has kind of been replaced by
something else that does something similar, you know, and like
men these days have those. Uh. It was like, I
guess spanks for men almost like these tummy tummy shirts

(29:00):
the dudes can wear Marino that suck everything in and uh,
and it's all fools gold because what lies beneath is
still there, right, I guess if you're trying to impress
people who will never see you without your shirt on,
go nuts. Um. But Cathy Young, we mentioned a few

(29:20):
times she is a Guinness record holder and she started
waste training at the age of forty eight. Yeah, it
seems a little late to get into it. Yeah, I
thought so too, But she got into a big time.
And you were saying earlier. I think at the beginning
of the episode that you this is not something that
happens overnight. If you're doing waste training, it can usually

(29:41):
take it seems to me, about a decade before you
get the results you're looking for, which is a waste
that the average five year old could put two fingers around. Well.
She said that her goal was never to earn an
award and Aguinness called her uh And she holds that
record now at fifteen inches thirty eight point one centimeters,

(30:02):
So that's for living on a living person. There's actually
a woman who holds the record for the narrowest waist ever,
narrowest corpse thirteen inches. Who was she? Her name, my
friend was as follows Ethel Granger. Thirty three centimeters thirteen

(30:23):
inches in nineteen thirty nine was what her waist was
measured at. And she obviously trained her waist yeah over
again about the course of a decade. So did you
go to Cathy Young's website? Did you see the YouTube's? No?
I think that's where I got a little freaked out
because on her website she has like a she has
an f a Q section and people were writing in

(30:43):
and a lot of people were just like, you know,
I think you look great, and you know, give me
some tips here and there, and that was all well
and good, but then there was one where this husband
was like, I'm waist training my wife and just hearing
that made it sound like a dog bowl. Yeah, it
made it seem like something that he was making her
do right, which may not been the case. It may
have been the wording, but it just freaked me out.

(31:04):
And he says, right now, I've got her up to
eighteen hours a day, but I'm really looking looking forward
to seven, and can you give me some tips on
how we can accomplish this because she does seven except
for when she showers. Cathy Young does okay, always in
a courset right, and you know, she gave tips and everything,
and like I said, it, just the way this guy
was talking, it just seemed a little creepy. Yeah, no,

(31:24):
that is creepy. Sounds like a huge jerk who needs
to be set straight. Probably get his butt kicked by
a larger dude. Right, But it also chuck. You may
also be witnessing, um a B DSM couple coming up
for tips or whatever. That's just the reality. And if
the if they're both equally into it, and the into

(31:46):
that like dynamic, neither one is psychologically suffering or physically
suffering from it, then hey, but it could also probably
even more likely be just the guy's a jerk. That
was my instinct, but you never know. And the other thing,
if you go to YouTube, there's parts Cathy Young, parts
one through six, and they are five minute videos of

(32:07):
her in different lingeries standing in front of a white
backdrop while her picture was being taken and her husband.
She's silent the whole time and just kind of turning
around and stuff, and her husband is just sort of
very calmly talking about it and describing her waist and
what she did and the techniques used. And he's an

(32:28):
orthopedic surgeon, so there's a chilliness to it, and it's
just creepy man on the subject. Like go watch one
of those videos and yeah, that's exactly how it sounds.
And you just hear the photograph going to keep and
that's the only other thing you hear. It's got like
a houseplant. It was just all just weird. But then again,

(32:49):
she feels great about herself and that's what she wanted
to do. I'm not saying he forced her, because there
were rumors because she was he was an orthopedic surgeon
that she he had removed some of her ribs, which
is one of the big myths of supposed myths um
of back in the day. Uh. And I believe it
was a myth because they said back then like surgery

(33:10):
was very dangerous. You would have to be one of
the um one of the least risk averse people on
the planet to undergo elective surgery to removed in the
nineteenth century, you know. So that's by all accounts, very
much a myth. Yes, same with Marilyn Manson, I think too.
Oh sure, I remember hearing that one. Uh. But she

(33:35):
said that you know, no, my husband didn't remove any
of my ribs and it's all natural, and um, you know,
she's into it, she's very proud of it. So I
don't want to It's the same thing with with corseting
in general. I think like just to assume that men
made women do that really takes a tremendous amount of
agency away from women, you know, like they're just completely

(33:57):
vapid shells that are bost around by their husbands regardless,
you know. Sure, so you want busts a couple more myths.
That's what we do. We're known as myth busters. So
one of the things that I saw. It's hilarious. In
this article, um, it says that there's the myth of

(34:19):
the Victorian waif who fainted at the drop of a
hat because of a lack of oxygen from wearing a corset.
And at the bottom of this paragraph the author says, no, no, no,
it wasn't that. It was malnutrition and not being able
to breathe very well because of the Yeah. Uh that

(34:43):
are there any other myths? Yep, that's it. Those are
all the myth Now, there's plenty of other ones. There's
actually a pretty cool article on Collectors Weekly written by
Lisa Hicks about um corset myths. Uh. And again you
should probably if you're getting into this kind of thing,
go check out UM well a bunch of sites, but

(35:03):
also check out Orchard Course. It's again I have no
financial stake in them whatsoever, but check it out. Uh.
And it's as I said, go to orchard Orchard of
course its dot com slash josh um. Since I said
Orchard course, it's it's time for a listener mail. I'm

(35:24):
gonna call this. Thank god that episode is over. Hey, guys,
it just finished episode on pain scales, and I find
it fascinating when humans try to put an objective score
on something very subjective. I'm not sure if he came
across this info and your research, but I thought you'd
be interested to know that we use pain scales and
veterinary medicine as well. It's even more challenging because obviously
our dogs and cats can't tell us verbally and certainly

(35:46):
can't draw happier sad faces. And that's the saddest thing
of all. Um our assessment is based completely on behavioral
behavioral cues and body language. For instance, I'm sure everyone
but know a happy, pain free puppy. Uh you saw
one sitting square looking you in the eye, ears perked up,
wagging his tail. Because dogs are very stoic, higher pain

(36:07):
tolerance than even chuck it can all, it can be
very hard to tell when they are feeling pain. Um My,
both my dogs got sick recently, so I got to
see this in action, like they didn't act sick for
a long time, and then I was like, you guys
are sick. That's why they recommend, like if your dog vomiting,
take them to the vet, because it's really tough to
tell if your dog's bad off norm just by looking

(36:29):
at their behavior totally um or if they like don't
eat all of a sudden, because that's you know, most dogs,
or at least all the dogs out had eat like,
you know, voraciously, or if their head comes off that too.
As recently the nineteen eighties, it was why we believed
the animals didn't feel pain at all, And isn't that crazy.
In fact, you would still encounter veterinarians who don't believe

(36:50):
in giving pain meds for surgery and other injuries and animals.
Do you remember what kind of talks about that in
the animal rights episodes? Oh yeah, that's nuts. It is.
This line of thinking is obviously known to be wrong now,
and we have come a very long way in the
last twenty or thirty years giving better pain control to
animals in our care. Google dog pain scale you'll find
a large variety of different pain charts for animals. Keep

(37:12):
up the great work. We are eagerly, eagerly awaiting a
live show in St. Louis and now it's from Michael Richards.
Thanks a lot, Michael Richards. We appreciate you writing it.
We come into St. Louis. Maybe all right, it's on
the table. Yeah, I think we've got some We're gonna
do some shows this year, folks, So look out in
the future. Look out. Maybe we'll see you there. If

(37:32):
you want to get in touch with us, you can
tweet to us on s YSK podcast and at josh
um Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook
at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and uh Facebook dot com
slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email the Stuff podcast to how Stuff Works dot com
and has always joined us at our home on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this

(37:57):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works
dot com? Mhm