Painful, Humiliating Garments Were De Rigueur

I can't believe that I wore a garter belt, that not so subtle implement of torture, but I did. The garter belt's button fasteners dug into my tender thighs, was pain the appeal of it for some?  Men seemed enthralled by them, advertisements were full of them, I despaired of them.  And garter belts have persisted into the twenty-first century, even being graphically touted in online children's games like Avakin Life.

"Nylon" stockings smoothed up past the knees were required when I started working so I had to wear a wretched garter belt to hold them up every single work day for years.  I was working in ordinary office environments, answering phones, filing, typing, taking dictation...that's where I noticed that the men whose letters I transcribed seemed strangely interested in the state of my stockings.  Even though someone invented pantyhose in 1959, I never heard about pantyhose until late in the seventies.  But pantyhose was its own form of horrible because it squeezed my body from my waist over my toes into a sheath of hot, stinky, bad* plastic.  Ugh.  In retrospect I wonder if nylon fabric was designed to urge skirts to slide up? Because they did slide up, constantly. When undergarment slips changed from cotton to nylon, slips no longer held skirts in place. You slipped on a slip and it promptly slipped up.  So humiliating trying to work with your nylon slip rumpled up to the top of your thighs between your nylon pantyhose and your nylon skirt.  Nylon slips, nylon skirts, and nylon pantyhose all generated static electricity, they must have been designed to do that, and then the greedy guts sold women cans of Anti Static Electricity Spray.  Women were constantly in the bathroom spraying themselves with it.  Instead, I used to lightly wet my hands with water, then smooth them over my body trying to keep my slip and skirt in place over my knees.  Then mini-skirts came into vogue and no one was wearing slips anymore.  I tried to keep up.

I resolved to never wear a cinching, breath-grabbing corset or even a girdle, and I didn't.  Never even tried one on.  My paternal grandmother wore a girdle because she knew it was sexy and it compressed her belly as she aged out.  When she took off her girdle at night it was with a huge, windy fart.  Ugh.  Try a search for corsets in S&M/BDSM and prepare to be horrified.  There ought to be a law, oh wait there are plenty of laws, they just are not enforced. Criminals.

For this post I have illustrated Pain And Humiliation.  It seemed appropriate.

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*  AI Overview.  "Nylon is considered "bad" primarily due to its high environmental impact as a non-biodegradable, petroleum-based plastic that releases microplastics. It is also less comfortable, trapping sweat, heat, and odor, which can cause skin irritation. Production involves hazardous chemicals and emits significant greenhouse gases."

Pain And Humiliation

image and animation by Annmarie Throckmorton, copyright 2026

antiquarian corset in the twenty-first century-Screenshot_Avakin Life 2026

(non-commercial use)