I feel most North Americans have an unfair double standard in that it is acceptable to see the outline or bulge of the woman’s body (breasts and sometimes even the vulva) in a one piece or a two piece swimming suit but most people in North America are not okay seeing the outline or bulge of a man’s body.

Do we have an aversion to the male form? Why can a woman wear a form fitting swimming suit right next to her skin but not a man?

I believe in practical modesty; I believe a form fitting (speedo type) swimming suit should be acceptable attire for swimming and getting in and out of the water. I encourage men and women to compare wearing a form fitting swimming suit to a trunk style swimming suit while swimming and getting in and out of the water.

I am a member of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), which is a medieval and renaissance re-enactment society, and started out with the corsets of my chosen period, Middle-Class English 1536. I also have breathing problems because of an accidental fire that happened when I was a small child. I’ve never had a problem breathing in corsets, however. I can almost breath better while in a corset, even one that’s fully drawn. I didn’t dive head first into corsets, though; I did a lot of research on them, and looked at them from both sides, both medical and practical. I was careful the first few times, and never wore them for longer than an hour. I’ve been wearing period corsets for nearly five years now, for several hours at a time, and I’ve never once had any sort of breathing problem. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I’m used to breathing shallowly from the upper-portion of my lungs, because my lungs sustained damage, which is the effect corsets can cause most often in people. Other people aren’t as used to this as I am, so it becomes more of a problem for them than it does for me.

I do tend to get annoyed, as both a corsetmaker and an avid wearer of corsets, at the women who go into department stores, pay $50 dollars for a cheaply made, plastic-boned “corset”, and get angry when I charge $200 (which is about as cheap as real, quality, long-lasting corsets get) for one of my fully-boned Victorian Sweethearts or Elizabethan Classics, or the more modern styles. Making corsets is not only vastly time consuming, but very expensive. You could easily pay over a hundred dollars for the equipment and materials to make the corset, and that’s not even including the fabrics, which have to be heavy and durable, not to mention pretty, and can often cost as much as $75 a yard. It’s a tedious and time-consuming task, and buyers should be grateful anyone would subject themselves to that amount of work so that they can look sexy. Let me put it this way, the class I took to learn how to make corsets started out with about twenty or so students. I was the only one who finished the class. Everyone else gave up halfway through. I’ll never complain about the cost of a corset ever again.