The tightening of the waist girth was little known to the Greeks of the
best period, but it was practiced by the Greeks of the decadence and by
them transmitted to the Romans; there are many references in Latin
literature to this practice, and the ancient physician wrote against it in
the same sense as modern doctors. So far as Christian Europe is concerned
it would appear that the corset arose to gratify an ideal of asceticism
rather than of sexual allurement. The bodice in early mediaeval days bound
and compressed the breasts and thus tended to efface the specifically
feminine character of a woman's body. Gradually, however, the bodice was
displaced downward, and its effect, ultimately, was to render the breasts
more prominent instead of effacing them. Not only does the corset render
the breasts more prominent; it has the further effect of displacing the
breathing activity of the lungs in an upward direction, the advantage from
the point of sexual allurement thus gained being that additional attention
is drawn to the bosom from the respiratory movement thus imparted to it.
So marked and so constant is this artificial respiratory effect, under the
influence of the waist compression habitual among civilized women, that
until recent years it was commonly supposed that there is a real and
fundamental difference in breathing between men and women, that women's
breathing is thoracic and men's abdominal.
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