JVL
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if i look back, i am lost
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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
styofa doing anything
i don't do bad sauce passes
Mike Driver
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@cantlosethefantasy
(Part 1? lol)This got more ridiculous than I intended but here we are, a little rujinu aquarium date shenanigan inspired by @galaxyspeaking ‘s great aquarium date concept! I have a part 2 sketched out that’s more romantic and sappy but we’ll see if and when I get to it 🐠
the concept art is so fucking gorgeous I can’t
Putting the Great Corset Debate in context
TW: Body image, diet culture, calorie counts, fatphobia, coercive beauty standards
Gold star to @ryuutchi for guessing the gist of this post!
Historical costumers today are very big on defending corsets. Like a lot of other re-enactors, I know firsthand that corsets can be comfortable, practical garments that can be worn all day, every day, for years, through all kinds of strenuous activity.
Karolina Zebrowska has documented how much anti-corset sentiment was a product of misogyny; Bernadette Banner has talked about growing up in a medical brace more restrictive than a corset; I’ve used corsetry techniques to make garments to deal with my own chronic pain, and make chest binding less uncomfortable.
And yet. There’s an undeniable wealth of evidence that many women in days of old hated corsets. So how the heck do we reconcile these things?
Let’s talk about diets.
A diet is, in its simplest form, what you eat during your day. Or it’s a plan for what you’ll eat during your day. Diets can be hugely varied. The ideal diet for a performance athlete is often around 5000-7000 calories a day, which is the same amount of food that two to five ordinary people will eat in the same period of time. Some diets are very gentle and flexible, encouraging intuitive eating and listening to your own hunger cues much more than any chart. Victorian diets actually promised to fatten women, relieving their consumers from the hideous fate of skinniness.
And yet. And yet. For many people, especially women, “diet” is an enormously loaded word. It’s practically synonymous with restricting your food intake until you’re a little bit crazy, constantly criticizing the way you look, and tying your weight with your worthiness as a person.
That’s not how I generally experience diets, since I was never forced to diet, and never seriously dieted myself. But if I said, “Diets for women aren’t restrictive or oppressive!” I’d be quite frankly wrong, given how often they are–how much women face incredible pressure to be thin, how often girls are forced to diet during their childhoods and adolescences, how much fat women are penalized in completely unrelated areas, like salary and career progression, for their weight.
Diets don’t have to be restrictive or oppressive. But in our day, it is hard to untangle the concept from how coercive diets can be. For many people, “dieting” feels inextricable from being controlled.
Corsets fundamentally served the same function as dieting does now. It alters the body’s shape to appear more socially pleasing. It does so by different methods, but in the era when it was widespread, it carried a similar psychological weight.
This is how Laura Ingalls Wilder describes her experiences with corsets: Of being forced to wear them by her mother, being nagged by her mother to tighten her laces, having to listen to stories of how her mother, as a young bride, had a waist her husband could span with his hands–an ideal painful and impractical to reach under most circumstances, and a positive hindrance for a girl like Laura, who had to do heavy farm labour in that corset. In the Victorian era, uncorseted women were seen as everything from lazy and sloppy to sexually loose and morally inferior.
Modern movie actresses face the same pressure to look absolutely perfect. A lot of actresses complain about the corsets in their costumes for good reasons: Those corsets are made with only the sketchiest reference to the actress’s real measurements, engineered hugely for aesthetic effect, and worn for a very abrupt span of time without the lead-up of getting used to the corset (and letting the corset get used to you). I have no doubt that being shoved into a corset that changes your shape dramatically and being told, “Go on, get out there and act,” is an uncomfortable experience!
These days, historical re-enactors don’t face as much social pressure or censure for failing to corset tightly enough. A lot of us are wearing costumes in an increasing atmosphere of fat acceptance and health at every size. Those of us who make our own costumes can experience historical costume as the one area in our lives where our clothes are made purely to our own measure–we have all the control that’s denied us by mass-produced modern clothing sizes.
Here’s my contention: It’s not the corset, or the lack of corset, the diet, or lack of diet, that makes corsets or diets awful, painful, harmful, or oppressive. It is the social pressure to push your body past the point of discomfort or pain to achieve certain a social idea. Corsets are so liberating for historical re-enactors specifically because we get the profound freedom of deciding everything about what we wear and how we want to look.
If you have the complete freedom, if you want to wear a corset, to choose the corset that’s right for you, or even more, to have it made for you, corsets are amazing garments. Just like figuring out which foods are right for you, eating them, and feeling good because of it can be a great experience.
It’s achieving that freedom that’s the hard part.
I mean honestly I just assumed that the corsets were built and worn differently than modern ones and were more uncomfortable. There’s definitely this too tho.
Huh that’s interesting! But yeah, I’m seeing re-enactors who are like, “I have a literal physical 150-year-old corset that matches my measurements, so I’m going to perfectly replicate it” or “Here is the 1880 patent for this corset type that includes its manufacturing instructions, so I’ll make it based off this.”
It really just is… when they’re sewing a corset and it’s uncomfortable to wear, they assume it’s the corset’s fault and fix/change the uncomfortable part. Or only wear the corset for very short periods. As opposed to women in the period who would assume, or be told, that it was their job to fit the corset, and instead of changing it, they should wear it 24/7 and learn to adapt.
It’s kind of like when hip-hugger jeans were in fashion, and there was all this diet and exercise advice about how to get rid of your “muffin top”, when the really obvious solution was to buy a bigger size. Or wear a different style. Or anything else.
I always felt like corsets would feel nice because they would hold my back and provide support…. does anyone know where I could purchase one tho
Lucy’s Corsetry is the most comprehensive site I know of that reviews corsets and provides a directory of corset makers. They have a page of Corset Brands by Price Range that might be helpful, with reviews of many of them.
You can buy a corset for $20USD off eBay, but on the low end you don’t have any real promise of quality. However, there are a lot of really decent corsets in the $50-$100 range.
It’s more expensive than that to get a custom-made corset, but a lot of people recommend them as being more comfortable and better-fitting, especially if you can find a corset-maker in your area so you can have an in-person fitting. So maybe try a cheaper corset and see if you’re interested in investing more?
HUNTR/X 💥
Deadbeat fathers don’t deserve roadkill deer
I was so focused on the dual meaning of the word “possession”—posses the deer vs possess the deer—that I skimmed over the jewel that they must be up to date on child support.
. , : ' " — - ... / >
10/22
Everyone on Earth needs to see this. It's vital.
I hate googling shit like "why am I still sad and tired when I ate and slept and have been walked and watered" and it's always some shit like "your brain is fried because your parents sucked at handling kids when you were a kid". Like can it be literally anything else sometime, just for the sake of variety.
just a doodle dump for those who don't mind...!
Cutey cutey romantic moment because I need the serotonin. And a hands insert shot because I apparently hate myself.
English added by me :)
Trying to take care of yourself when you're sick is so annoying. Like you know you should probably eat something and you're trying to question yourself on what you'd want to eat, and the only answer is your inner voice of dying Jane Austen going "I desire nothing but death". well ok you dramatic sickly bitch do you want that with garlic or hot sauce.
5 minute fanart
Icecargo
Wait so is the mandate of heaven and the divine right of kings the same kind of concept, or have I massively misunderstood one or the other?
divine right of kings: you can do whatever you want forever because you're god's specialest little boy!
mandate of heaven: do a good job ruling or god's gonna start sending hitmen
Ah, yeah, I see it now. This is the exact level of detail I needed of the key details of how to distinguish the two. Thank you.
you know what? I'm a big fan of those old city structures where there's a bridge connecting two houses and that bridge is also made of house. And there's a walkable street underneath it. Like I get why they're not good for fire safety but fuck yeah you get more house for house and also do not obstruct pedestrians. The indoors person, old houses enthusiast, and unobstructed pedestrian in me delights in that.
finally finished this comic! i think i wrote the poem a full two years ago and, ironically, kept fiddling with different concepts until i ended up with one i liked :)
Literature nerds: “Cosmic horror isn’t seeing an octopus and going crazy – it’s learning something about the nature of the universe that you can’t allow yourself to live with.”
Victor Hugo, learning about the octopus:
Well sometimes the unreconcilable thing you learn about the nature of the universe is that there is an octopus
more vine favorites in no particular order (part 2)
warning for loud noises
