‘Valerie’s impromptu staircase striptease has lost a little of its erotic spontaneity due to the three quarters of an hour it’s taken her to remove her thirty-five layers of thermals.’
The Mills & Boon Modern Girls’s Guide To Growing Old Disgracefully – Ada Adverse
Things In My Head 
I’ve often wondered how they managed stripping in the Victorian era. You’d need a couple of hours and an engineering degree to get a properly attired gentlewoman out of her clothes back then (flowers too, of course) and there were no little blue pills to help with endurance. Given their life expectancies I don’t know how they survived long enough to reproduce.
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While on the subject of prudity and repression, remember when Victorians supposedly covered up the legs of their furniture because they were considered ‘too sexy’ to be left bare? https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-table-legs-covering-myth
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Do you reckon the clothes were about prudishness or repression? All the wires and whalebone and steel-reinforced bustles and enough cloth to build a tent city? I’d put it down to the industrial revolution and engineering fetishes. Like atomic age hairdos.
Were Victorians actually prudish? Or did all those pictures of the Queen staring down from walls and out from their purses just put them off?
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Wires, whalebone and steel-reinforced bustles may be about feminine restriction, physically, politically and socially. You’d think corsets would have been invented by a man (probably the first medieval fashion designer) but it was apparently a woman, Catherine De Medici. Now you’ve got me thinking about the chastity belt. Although, it appears to have been invented by men rather than women, apparently both men and women wore them. Now there’s a school of thought that says chastity belts weren’t real, that they are a myth, a joke but we’ve all seen them in museums haven’t we? And more recently on fetish websites (well, not me personally, I just looked that up for research purposes, honest) I know I wore/wear studded wristbands and belts to help provide a psychological and physical armour against the world. It never feels restrictive though, it seems to be on my terms. (It may have been restrictive at times, like being weighed down walking to the bus stop but it really helped somehow). I’ve discovered there’s a fine line between restriction and protection.
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Punk fashions never made me feel protected. On the contrary they sometimes got me beat up, especially by cops. It was the post-apocalyptic vulnerability that appealed to me. The rips not closed by safety pins. Leather and zippers, sure, but always undone. To me that was part of the message. We can’t defend ourselves from the world bequeathed us. Just scream our defiance as we crumple beneath its blows.
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I only got verbal abuse. You have earned your stripes.
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That would explain The Empire too. With royalty like that the only way you’re gonna keep it up is to close your eyes and think of Anywhere But Britain.
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Come to think of it, why did the British need to invent tanks to protect their WWI troops from German bullets?
They could have just worn their mothers’ underwear.
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