Whenever I see a picture of that vintage torture device known as a “girdle,” I remember something my grandma once told me that scarred my brain. She said that as a teenager, when she slept over at a girlfriend’s home, she would wear her girdle underneath her nightgown when she went to bed.

Now that says something about what the folks of her day thought of women’s bodies. Granny couldn’t bear the thought of her actual (as opposed to conformed) body being detected, even by a good girlfriend in the middle of the night in the privacy of a home while she was asleep.

You could argue that this may be my grandma’s personal issue, and it is true that she was probably shyer than some. But she didn’t learn her horror of her natural shape in a vacuum,

Anyhoo, I ran across this today and thought it would be good idea to require all men to wear this not-so-vintage contraption every day for a couple of years. Just so’s they can get a truly visceral experience of what daily life can be like for women. We could cut them a break and let them take it off at night.

Oh, and here’s my beautiful grandma at age 20 posing for a wedding portrait with my grandpa, circa 1945.