Stuff You Should Know - How Corsets Work

Episode Date: April 18, 2017

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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Charles Chuck Bryant, and Jerry Jerome Rowland.

So it's Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, Jerry wore her swan bill corset today. Yes, she looks like a freak of nature. I'm nervous about this one. Gonna go ahead and say that. Don't be. Really? Yeah.

I'm nervous. Well, here I am to relax you, Chuck. Let me pat your beard, give you a little nap. That didn't help. Is it making things worse? Yeah, this one, I don't know. I mean, the history and stuff is interesting, which I assume we'll talk to first

since we don't plan this stuff out. Sure. You know, we're all with the 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 Guinness book lady, and I went to her website and watched the YouTube,

it just kind of freaked me out a little bit. Kathy 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. Sure. But then I think about like, I'm not gonna condemn anyone for getting

all kinds of weird plastic surgery either, if that's your thing. I think that... I just want people to be happy, you know? Right, but I think that extreme lacing is one thing it's called also, well, extreme lacing, I think is the general preferred term, right? Tight lacing.

Yeah, yeah. It's a perfect example of you're harming nobody. This is strictly your body. It's yours to do what you want with it. Have at it. Yeah, but what if it's in the, like, oh, because men say that's the only way a woman will be attractive, and like,

what's different? Is this different than foot binding? That to me is sad 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 wanna catch a man's attention or something like that, who knows, we're not pop psychologists. I know, it just, all this makes me nervous.

I did actually, I had a conversation with Holly from Missed in History, stuff you miss in history class. She's probably worn a corset in her time. Yes, she has, and she actually defends corsets too, because I thought, well, it's like the Western equivalent of foot binding, she said, no, no, no, my friend. Okay. It lacks in reality and actuality a lot of the,

a lot of the sexism. Okay. Associated with foot binding. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. And that corsets in reality, in truth, in the 19th century and before were very much chosen to be worn by women for their own tastes, sometimes at the, out of spite, or not out of spite,

but contrary to what 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. Sure. So did Vivian Westwooden.

But it's not as bad as you're thinking, I 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 corset 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 even Kathy Young, who again, we will talk about,

but she is again, a record holder, because she formed her waist into the size of a jar of mayonnaise, literally. Yeah, gallon-sized mayonnaise. I said, the thing I read said an average jar, but I don't think that's correct, unless you... Those photos on her site, though, looked photoshopped. Yeah, they did.

Don't think. But she said that all the advice she gave was, you go slow, don't like, you know, if you want to train your waist to be smaller, which you can do, don't, you know, dive in and just start, you know, doing the extreme lacing right away. No, there's... Work into it.

There's something called waist training. Yeah. And that's kind of a... It's not necessarily the ultimate goal of corseting, which can be a verb, but it is a kind of a parallel, a subculture of the corseting culture. And waist training is simply where you are basically,

through the use of corsets and pretty tight corsets, over a period of time, usually about a decade, you are reshaping your body mechanically, right? 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 into your stomach as normal.

Sure. But the waist training itself is just, it's a reshaping. It's not actually making you lose weight. So what it's doing is taking inches out of the middle and sliding them down to the hips. And all of this, the whole point for corsets, from the beginning of corsets to the world record holding corset wastes,

is to amplify existing female body features. Yes. That's the point. That's right. It comes from an old French word, C-O-R-S, meaning body. And here's the history. Ta-da. Which oddly came three quarters of the way

through this article. If you go back in time in the wayback machine to the days of ancient Crete, there were women who, well, I think even before Crete, there were women who tied ropes around their waist. To make their waistline look slimmer. To accentuate maybe the bust and the rear end.

So they were doing that a long time ago. And then in ancient Crete, people think that they are, historians think they're the first women that actually wore something that you could call a corset. It was a garment that shaped the body more than 3,000 years ago. Right, it covered the,

I think the waist and the hips. And Crete and women went around bare-breasted. So they would have their breasts like saying, hey everybody, how's it going? And then below that was the corset. And I would imagine that it probably enhanced the breasts as well. Yeah, sure.

If you're cinching everything up like that, it probably acted sort of like a pre-Brazier support and lift. See, I'm so uncomfortable. Yeah, hey man, we did one on female puberty. That was easier than this to me. We can do this, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, well, that was science.

This is, I don't know. I see, I see, you make a valid point, Chuck. So if you go forward a bit to the middle ages, they, 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. But it was very decorative and pretty.

But I don't think that lasted too long. They went back under the garment in the 18th century. Right, and then up until the 18th century, most things that were part of the corset family tree or predecessors of corsets were conical. No, they were tubular, totally tubular. And then once we hit, I think about the 18th century, what we start to see today as a corset began to emerge

where that's conical. So it's cone-shaped, right? And from, I guess, yeah, the 18th century on, corsets were pretty much a mainstay of fashion. If not the basic ingredient of women's fashion from about the end of the 1700s until World War I, basically. Yeah, it wasn't like some weird thing.

Like today, I mean, they're still in fashion today, and in certain cosplay and costumes in the fetish world and burlesque and stuff like that. We're just playing sexy time, regular old sexy time. But the stuff I read said it was no more of a strange thing than a woman to wear a bra today. Right, exactly. It's just a regular fashion accessory.

Yeah, and as we'll see, it was kind of essential depending on the clothes you're wearing, depending on the period. Yeah, that's true. There was 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 came out of,

I guess the 19th century, the late 19th century, that was spearheaded by two brothers, Ira and Lucian Warner. And they came up with an alternative to, they actually were anti-corset crusaders. They were both doctors. And they basically said, you can't beat them, join them. But let's try to create a corset that's less problematic for women.

And the idea that corsets were problematic for women can actually be traced back to a 1793 medical article by a guy named Dr. Samuel Thomas von Sommering. And von Sommering basically made up a lot of the myths about corsets that we 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 organs. It all kind of came from this. And a hundred years after von Sommering wrote his article, the Warner Brothers got in and said, we're gonna come up with a health corset. Yeah, but they definitely can change. There's something called Visoroptosis or Glenard's disease,

which if you do the tight lacing long-term, your organs can actually sink and shift away from where they should be. So I mean, that's something that can happen. That raises a really good point, man. We should delineate here. Wearing a corset normally, even when you're doing waist 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. But just about every corseting site out there on the internet will warn you about going past that line. And in fact, there's a good site by orchard corsets. They sell corsets.

They have a really extensive site. They know their 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, your ribs can develop improperly because you're wearing a corset. They say girls under 18 shouldn't wear corsets.

Yeah. So then along came this guy. And we should mention too that when these two, the two Warner Brothers, were they in the United States? Yeah, they were out of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Okay, I was gonna say Warner, but... Maybe a generation or two before. Probably so.

They also changed around the same time at least. I think we have not mentioned yet that one of the corset 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. And it was actually, it was a teeth, right? Even they're called that whale bone.

Yeah. And they would use this to make the corset stiff in place, keep everything where it should be, but around that time in the late 1800s, as they were over-hunted, became really expensive. So they said, all right, forget the whale teeth. Let's put in steel in 1894. Yeah.

Which I'm sure that was quite comfortable. Right, well yeah. But 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 corsets, one of the points is to make it as comfortable as possible, this very uncomfortable contraption.

Yeah. Yeah, they started to use steel. And even today you'll find steel in corsets. Sure. That are meant to, for like waist training or something like that. And then like I'd 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 1890s for creating what was known as the Gibson girl. So what he did was he drew all these pictures of these ladies who were, I mean, some say it was like the first ideal

of American attractiveness for women. And it was, they wore these swan bill corsets, which made, I mean, these were even more extreme. They would make you kind of stick the bust out and stick your rear end back. And if you just look up Gibson girl, I mean, you've seen these drawings before. Right.

America's first cheesecake drawings. I don't know what a cheesecake drawing is. It's like a Gibson girl or a Vargas girl is another, a little more modern one. Well, supposedly his, You're an American boy. You've seen them before. Cheesecake girls.

Apparently his wife and her sisters were his inspiration. And, Oh, that's weird. Is it? The sister part's weird. Yeah. Well, 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. Gotcha. And supposedly the Gibson cocktail is named after him, but I'm not sure if that's true. Well, that's great. Good for him. Got any pickle onions?

Yeah. Yeah. Put it in martini. Right. Call it after me. So he, That's probably how it happened. He was actually working from a corset

that was invented by a doctor, Inez Gosh Serot. Terrible. Who created this corset, this straight front, also called the swan bill corset. And the whole problem with it was in Charles Dana Gibson is criticized for popularizing this because it's so bad for you.

Yeah. 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 lasted for about a decade during the Edwardian period, the first century of the, just 10 years.

Yeah. Of bad backs. And then pretty much right after that, not right after, pretty close. Corsets suddenly just went away because World War I had such a sweeping change on the world. It just, it was, it created social upheaval.

And one of the things that came out of this was women said, you know what? We're done with corsets. I'm a flapper now. Yeah. Can't do the Charleston, can't do the Charleston in a corset. 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, which is, you know, 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 I.

That basically killed the corset. But the modern bra and slip and all of that stuff came out of that, the death of the corsets. They were like, we still need something. We still want a corset anymore, okay? I think one of the reasons all this made me uncomfortable is just all the categorizations over the years. Yeah.

Like this is ideal women and she's called a Diana. And this is what they should look like. Yeah, that's gross to me. That to me is like a whole other podcast. Oh, sure. You know? I mean like, because plenty of women buy into that and they don't feel bad about themselves for buying into it.

They say, oh yeah, this is what I find attractive too. So anyway, during this time in the roaring 20s, there were the corseteers that were just like, oh no, well how about this kind that you can still wear? That's not like the other corsets. You can actually dance in them and you know. It sunk. It did.

And it basically stayed that way for the rest of the 20th century. There was a brief resurgence. Christian Dior brought it back in the 40s. And it was kind of akin to that swan bill corset. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then it went out pretty quickly.

And then in 1982, Vivian Westwood had a show called Buffalo Girls, her collection for 82, 83. And it brought corsets out. Who was she? Vivian Westwood, she's a famous designer. Kind of punk fashion. And she brought corsets out from underneath the clothing and made it like basically into a shirt.

It was outerwear now. Was that when Madonna got on the train? That was about six years later. And that was Jean-Paul Gaultier 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 the Vogue video, right? I think so, okay. Oh, we'll find out if it's not. But that was Jean-Paul Gaultier.

And from that point on, the corset has basically stuck around 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, and then occasionally, I guess, if you're in a swing and nightclub, you might see a lady in a corset. Sure. Or maybe a man. Yeah, we'll talk about that after this. How about that? All right.

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.

All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, you teased men wearing corsets. You teased it. Not literally. I never teased a man for wearing anything, except those dolphin running shorts.

Those were great. So, get back in your time machine. I saw the boy in the bubble for the first time. Have you ever seen that movie? Yeah, Travolta? Yeah, I never saw it. And I watched the Riftrex version of it. Oh, well, that's the only way to do it.

For me, it a lot better. Yeah. Where'd that come from? Oh, I think he's wearing dolphin shorts in one of the scenes, and I was like, those are dolphin shorts. So, yeah, we're talking about men wearing them. Yeah, so apparently, this article makes it seem

like it was fairly normal. But from what I saw in the 19th century, and from what I saw in the 19th 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 corsets does definitely hold fast. Okay.

If you were like a straight establishment-type male, you probably did not cotton to men wearing corsets and didn't want to associate with any guy wearing corsets, because you didn't trust him, he's probably gay. But if you were in favor of your wife wearing a corset, she better be wearing a corset, or else she wouldn't be viewed as a proper woman

in normal polite society. Gotcha. So, it's not fair to say that myth about the corset being a part of the patriarchy is not true. It is true in some ways, but it's not like women were forced to wear corsets throughout history. Right. So, it was kind of dawned in particular on purpose.

And one of the reasons why women wore corsets was because it also served as a, basically the thing that held up all of their really heavy clothes. Yeah. Like you couldn't just slip into one of those dresses in Victorian times. No.

It had a certain shape that required a certain form to put it on. And you know, that corset would help your body like morph into that form. Basically. You know? Yeah. It was a low, there was a low bearing structure

that you wore under your 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. Yeah. There's some people out there that are like, what is a corset?

Well. Jeez. Did we not even say that? In so many words. All right. And it's usually pretty short. And it's like a, it's like a belt, like a, not a wide belt, but 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 corsets, I think that did that. All right. They lace up in the back. We mentioned the whale bone,

which was actually the teeth of the baleen as these reeds. And they were put in what were called boning channels, which were just little sheets basically, where they would slip these things down in. And it's like, you know, if you've ever had to wear a back brace or something. Yes. It's very much like that.

And like Andy Warhol had to wear one of these after he got shot. By Valerie Solange. 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. No. Did she? We should do one on that whole scene. Yeah, we should. All right. We'll do that. And then they were made out of this cotton fabric

called Coutil. C-O-U-T-I-L. And it's still used today in corsets because it doesn't stretch, has very high thread count. Right. It keeps all those boning channels and rib, or I guess bones in place. Right.

And you have to understand like this whole thing, this whole mechanism that is the corset, is basically defying physics at any given point in time. So you have to have some really strong stuff involved in the manufacture of it. Yeah. So what else you got? You got on the front part where it meets,

you have a busk. Yeah. And that's actually needs to be pretty strong as well. Right. So usually that's wood or metal, maybe bone originally. And it was two flat pieces that basically went up and down alongside a seam. Yeah.

And most people are, I don't wanna 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? Yeah. You put it around yourself like that. It's actually not the case. You, when you-

So you were doing it all wrong? I had it all wrong. When you put on the corset, 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 busks. Yeah, but then you tighten the laces, like you don't lace it tight and try to put it on.

Exactly. You just have it kinda pre-laced like your shoes. Yeah. And the lacing kinda confused me too, 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 a 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 press it all in. So what else?

Are there any other components to the corset that we haven't mentioned? I don't think so. Just the lacing. Okay, so we'll talk lacing now then. You ready? Yeah. So traditionally in the West, in Europe,

the method of lacing was basically like you would lace a shoe. Okay. It's called bi-directional lacing where you just alternate from one hole to the other diagonally, right? Okay. That's typically what you think of when you see a corset.

That's probably what you're seeing is bi-directional lacing. If you look at Italian paintings from the medieval era, you're probably 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 and then over and then down and then over and it forms a ladder.

The name's pretty appropriate for that one. And I wonder was this just to make it look different? I would guess that had something to do with it, but I would also imagine that it had to do with, 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 or at the top, but sort of in the middle of where it laces, these bunny ears. Right. And that was for women because a lot of times in the movies, you've seen like the Downton Abbey, like the lady holding the bed post

and then her valet, or I guess, were the females called valets? Valet. Valley girls. The lady who helps them dress would be like, cinching this thing down so tight and they'd be like, breathe in, suck in 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 for women wearing corsets. They usually put them on themselves more often than not. And those bunny ears were just two loops of lacing at about the thinnest part,

the narrowest part where you had some slack. And then when you put your corset on, you wrap it around you, you fasten the busk, the buttons on the busk, the front, and then you just pull back, tighten it, done. Right, and this is, again, ideally after you have visited your corsetier

because apparently, like buying a bra, guys don't know this stuff, it's apparently tough to get one that like fits just right. What? And so you need to get like professionally fitted and like the off the shelf thing doesn't work for a lot of ladies. Right, and that was the case with corsets

for a very long time. You had to go to a corsetier to be fitted for one and it was expensive from what I understand, right? Probably. Today, there are, I guess because of mass manufacturing, it's a lot easier to make corsets 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 Corset says, women tend to miss or to underestimate the length that they need. So that leads to a lot of discomfort. Their corset's too short for their body. Oh, gotcha.

So, I mean, I don't mean to buzz market or anything, but just based on my research, Orchard Corsets, if you're getting into corseting, they might be a pretty decent place to start. Wow, you might get a little treat in the mail. All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll talk a little bit more about

the Cathy Young and some of the myths about corseting. You On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So I think we didn't mention, after course, it went out of fashion, girdles came along. Like everything has kind of been replaced by something else that does something similar. Sure. You know? Yeah. And like men these days have those,

those like, I guess, Spanx for men almost. Like these tummy, tummy shirts that dudes can wear. The damn merino. That suck everything in. Yeah. And, you know, it's all fool's 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. But Kathy Young, we mentioned a few times, she is the Guinness record holder. And she started waist training at the age of 48. Yeah, seems a little late to get into it. Yeah, I thought so too. But she got into it 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 waist training, it can usually take, it seems to me, about a decade before you get the results you're looking for. Which is a waist that the average five-year-old could put two fingers around.

Well, she said that her goal was never to earn an award. And the Guinness called her. And she holds that record now at 15 inches, 38.1 centimeters. 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? 13 inches.

Who was she? Her name, my friend, was, as follows. Ethel Granger, 33 centimeters, 13 inches in 1939 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 Kathy Young's website? Did you see the YouTubes?

No. I think that's where I got a little freaked out, because on her website, she has an FAQ section. And people were writing in, and a lot of people were just like, I think you look great. And 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. Also make her eat out of a dog bowl. Yeah, it made it seem like something that he was making her do, which may not have been the case. It may have been the wording. But it just freaked me out. And he says, right now, I've got her up to 18 hours a day,

but I'm really looking forward to go 24-7. And can you give me some tips on how we can accomplish this? Because she does 24-7, except for when she showers. Kathy Young does. Oh, OK. She's always in a corset. And she gave tips and everything, and like I said, the way this guy was talking, it just seemed a little creepy.

Yeah, no, that is creepy. He sounds like a huge jerk who needs to be set straight and probably get his butt kicked by a larger dude, right? But also, Chuck, you may also be witnessing a BDSM couple coming up for tips or whatever. No, you're right. That's just their reality. And if they're both equally into it and into that dynamic.

Yeah, yeah. And neither one is psychologically suffering or physically suffering from it than, hey. True. 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 Kathy Young parts one through six. And they are five minute videos of 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 orthopedic surgeon, so there's a chilliness to it. And it's just creepy, man. As you will observe 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, chikis, chikis. And that's the only other thing you hear.

It's got like a houseplant. This is all just weird. But then again, 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 he was an orthopedic surgeon that he had removed some of her ribs, which is one of the big myths of supposed myths of back in the day.

And I believe it was a myth because they said back then, like surgery was very dangerous. You would have to be one of the least risk averse people on the planet to undergo elective surgery to have ribs removed in the 19th century. 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. But she said that, no, my husband didn't remove any of my ribs. And it's all natural. And she's into it. She's very proud of it, so I don't want to yuck her yum. It's the same thing with corseting in general. I think just to assume that men made women do that

really takes a tremendous amount of agency away from women. Like they're just completely vapid shells that are bossed around by their husbands, regardless. I know. It's a fine line. Sure. So you want to bust a couple more myths? Sure.

It's what we do. We're known as myth busters. So one of the things that I saw, it's hilarious in this article, it says that there's the myth of the Victorian wave who feigned it at the drop of a hat because of a lack of oxygen from wearing a corset. Yeah. 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. Right. Because of corsets. Because they weren't eating. Yeah. Is that it? Are there any other myths?

Yep, that's it. Those are all the myths. Now, there's plenty of other ones. There's actually a pretty cool article on Collectors Weekly written by Lisa Hicks about corset myths. And again, you should probably, if you're getting into this kind of thing, go check out a little bunch of sites, but also check out Orchard Corsets.

Again, I have no financial stake in them whatsoever, but check it out. And as I said, go to orchardcorsets.com slash Josh. Since I said orchard corsets, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, thank God that episode is over. Hey, guys, I just finished the episode on pain scales, and I find it fascinating when humans try to put an objective score on something very subjective.

Not sure if you came across this info in your research, but I thought you'd be interested to know that we use pain scales in veterinary medicine as well. It's even more challenging, because obviously our dogs and cats can't tell us verbally, and certainly can't draw happy or sad faces. Man. And that's the saddest thing of all.

Yeah. Our assessment is based completely on behavioral cues and body language. For instance, I'm sure everyone would know a happy, pain-free puppy. If you saw one sitting square, looking you in the eye, ears parked up, wagging his tail, because dogs are very stoic, higher pain tolerance

than even Chuck. It can be very hard to tell when they're feeling pain. Both of my dogs got sick recently, so I got to see this in action. They didn't act sick for a long time, and then I was like, you guys are sick. That's why they recommend if your dog's vomiting, take him to the vet, because it's really tough to tell

if your dog's bad off norm just by looking at their behavior. Totally. Or if they don't eat all of a sudden, because that's most dogs, or at least all the dogs I've had, eat voraciously. Or if their head comes off. That too. As recently as the 1980s, it was why they 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 in giving pain meds for surgery and other injuries in animals. Do you remember what kind of talked about that in the animal rights episodes? Oh, yeah.

You know? That's nuts. It is nuts. This line of thinking is obviously known to be wrong now, and we have come a very long way in the last 20 to 30 years in 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 up the great work. We are eagerly awaiting a live show in St. Louis. And that is from Michael Richards. Thanks a lot, Michael Richards. We appreciate you writing it. We coming to St. Louis? Maybe.

All right. It's on the table. Yeah, I think we're going to do some shows this year, folks. So look out in the future. Look out. Maybe we'll see you there. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us on S.Y.S.K. podcast.

And at Josh M. Clark, you can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and facebook.com. Slash W. You should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.