Of Corset Hurts

aka: Of Corsets Painful

Of Corsets Sexy... but there's a price.

Pirate: I'm gonna teach you the meaning of pain!
Elizabeth: You like pain? [thwack] Try wearing a corset.

— Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Corsets can be painful. Squeezing four or more inches from your waist in order to get that perfect figure? Dear god, that must be torture—however will you be able to breathe? This perception has been carried into fiction: if corsetry is mentioned in a period drama, it is often in the form of a woman's complaint about the pain caused by being squeezed—usually against her will—into the garment.

The trope is older than radio, as a lot of literature—some medically sound, most not, and much of it seemingly intended to titillate—was produced in the nineteenth century regarding the dangers of corset-wearing and tightlacing, and the perceptions of garments as dangerous inevitably made their way to fiction. Later, after corsets stopped being ubiquitous, works featuring the garments, while not necessarily portraying them as deadly or even dangerous, would often present them as something to be endured for vanity; it is during this period that some of the most enduring images of corsets, such as that of Scarlett O'Hara doing anything for an 18.5-inch waist, were created. More recently, creators have taken to using the physical constriction provided by corsets as an allegory for the societal constriction women faced in the past; when a woman complains about her stays, she's actually complaining about how she's oppressed by society's norms. It's a common complaint of the Spirited Young Lady.

As for how much of the discomfort attributed to corsets is Truth in Television, the answer to that depends on a lot of different factors, including the corset itself, the person wearing it, and the circumstances under which they do so. While it is quite possible to comfortably wear tight corsets for extended periods, and there are plenty of people who regularly do so, there are also plenty of other people who do not speak of the experience positively, helping keep this trope alive.

Can often overlap with Of Corsets Funny. See also Of Corsets Sexy, for a more general overview on the garment's use, and Fashion Hurts, for other kinds of clothing-related pain. Compare to Hates Wearing Dresses.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Black Butler:
  • The infamous corset scene gives us a rare male example of this, although Ciel was preparing to go to a ball undercover. As a girl.
    • It's interesting to note that, since men don't give birth, their organs don't shift around as easily so it's more difficult for them to wear corsets properly.
  • The manga and OVA depict the general scene of Lizzy getting her corset tightened by her maid, Mary, even telling her to pull it tighter, as it was the norm for most girls (even young teens like Lizzy) to begin getting a thin waist.
• Despite providing the page image, female characters in Emma: A Victorian Romance only wore extremely tight corsets for special occasions, in this case taking a couple of inches off before a date.
  • However, they are described as painful, or at least really uncomfortable. In one scene of the manga, Emma's employer Dorothea Meredith is being dressed for the day, when her husband Wilhelm enters the room and proceeds to lace his wife's corset. Despite the whole scene is described as a jocular, almost sexual moment of intimacy, Wilhelm has to place his foot on Dorothea's back and pull the laces with all of his might to squeeze his wife into the desired shape. The author's commentary for this scene claims that, according to her researches, such a painful scenario was common and not surprising at all.
• Lampshaded in Haruhi Suzumiya when in chapter 7 of the original light novel (adapted into the sixth episode of the anime and first story arc), Haruhi complains about her Playboy Bunny corset complicating the effects that the summer heat is having on her, but she admits that at least her arms and shoulders are feeling better.
• The eccentric and rough-and-tumble co-protagonist of The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess, Princess Anisphia "Anis" Wynn Palettia, quite dislikes corsets, according to her maid, Illia Coral; the final episode of the anime confirms the claim in a scene showing Anis reacting poorly to being laced into one. Illia also asserts that the other co-protagonist, Euphyllia "Euphie" Magenta, will no longer have to wear corsets now that she is no longer engaged to Anis' brother and is free to pursue her interests, further reinforcing the garment's symbolism.
• In Murder Princess, Falisa is not happy about having to wear a corset once she is in Princess Alisa's body. She's a mercenary, after all, and accustomed to unfettered movement.
• In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, the Big Bad wears a very tight corset and is, in fact, named Corset. He has a BDSM fetish, so he wears it specifically because it hurts.
• Invoked in Ranma ½ once with a steel corset Ranma is forced to wear as a girl. It's tight enough when worn as a girl — when Madame St. Paul first forced Ranma into it, the latter is screaming in pain — and as such, constrains his bones to a point of almost crushing when he turns back into a man, forcing him to keep his female form. Thus, the symbolism of Ranma being trapped in the guise of an obedient girl both physically and metaphorically is complete.
• Gundula Rall from Strike Witches universe inverts this. She has a special magic-imbued corset what is made to prevent the old injuries she received long ago from affecting her again.
• Male example from ∀ Gundam: in Episode 7, Loran gets a corset strapped on him for his feminine disguise — he is visibly straining from the attempt.

Comic Books

• Played with in the "Dead End Kids" arc of Runaways, in which the team goes back in time to 1907 and Nico and Karolina are expected to wear corsets. Nico has no complaints about hers, but Karolina has her corset tied by Xavin... who decides to use their super-strength to make it tighter than it needs to be.

Fan Works

• Near the beginning of Their Bond, Zelda nearly suffocates because her corset is too restrictive. In this case, her corset was tied unusually tight.
• In the Peter Pan fic Entrancing Wendy, Wendy wears corsets that hurt to move much in.
• Peach is put into an uncomfortable corset for her coronation in Married to the Koopa King. She finds it difficult to breathe in. Bowser ends up loosening it for her.
• In Not Old, Alone or Done For, Wendy finds Edwardian-era corsets to be uncomfortable. This accentuates her nonconformity compared to other women.
• This bit of fanart involving Yukari (with Ran's help) putting on one. If the tearful jolly roger with a broken bone Pictorial Speech-Bubble is an indication, we can assume that something was broken, adding to this is that Yukari looks like she's trying not to wince.

Films — Animated

• Pixar followed Disney's example with Brave. At one point, Queen Elinor dresses her Rebellious Princess daughter Merida up in a corset, who complains that she can't breathe. What's really odd about all this is that the movie takes place in Medieval Scotland, and corsets shouldn't actually exist yet. ^note Or, at least, not the kind that we see in the film.
• From the opening scene of Corpse Bride:
  "Get those corsets laced properly! I can hear you speak without gasping."
• Minions: Scarlet insists on her dress being as tight as possible. She comments on how it wasn't quite tight enough when she started losing the feeling in her legs.
• Mulan, during the "Honor to Us All" montage, and she doesn't enjoy it. It wasn't exactly a corset, but a large sash pulled very tight to make her waist smaller. The animators were probably trying to invoke the trope without actually using a corset (corsets were never a fashion in China). Ironically, the matchmaker berates her for being too skinny to bear children. Perhaps she was destined to fail and ultimately become China's savior?
• In Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, it's clear that Pocahontas doesn't like it, and it shows she is being forced into accepted norms for women in the society.

Films — Live-Action

• Alice in Wonderland (2010): Alice refuses to wear a corset as an act of rebellion.
• All About Eve:
  Margo: You bought the new girdles a size smaller, I can feel it.
  Birdie: Something maybe grew a size larger.
  Margo: When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours.
  Birdie: I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours.
• Anne of the Indies: On trying on the tightly corseted gown Pierre had chosen as his prize, Pirate Girl Anne remarks on how it is impossible for a woman to move or breathe in the thing.
• Attack of the Clones: One of Natalie Portman's costumes (specifically the one she's wearing in the "aggressive negotiations" scene) included a corset. Portman mentioned on one of the DVD featurettes that she wanted to finish filming the scenes involving it quickly because she had trouble breathing.
• Black Panther (2018): During T'Challa's coronation, Shuri raises her hand as if to challenge her brother for the throne...only to ask to speed up the ceremony, as her corset is very uncomfortable (eliciting a Collective Groan and even facepalms from the other Wakandans).
• Bridget Jones has trouble with a constricting panty girdle in the second film. If one only heard the audio, they would be forgiven for thinking someone was dying in agony.
• Cinderella (2015): A pre-ball scene has Ella's stepsisters enlisting her assistance in lacing their corsets. We get a closeup of Drizella's face as she instructs Ella to tighten it that indicates she's not exactly trained with these things. In a bit of Shown Their Work, Charles Perrault mentions the sisters using laces (and even starving themselves) to get nice figures for the ball.
  • A behind-the-scenes Real Life example was Lily James, who played Cinderella, talking about how difficult it was to get into her steel-boned corset for the ballgown, and how she could not eat solid food while wearing it.
• Colette: For their first public outing in Paris as a couple, Willy tries to make Colette wear a tightly corseted new gown. Colette, a country girl, has never worn anything like this before and refuses, as she finds it too uncomfortable.
• Corsage:
  • Elisabeth is frequently seen getting tight-laced into corsets. Though painful, she does it to maintain her figure. Throughout the film the corset is a metaphor of the restrictions placed upon Elisabeth in her unhappy personal life.
  • Late in the film Elisabeth asks her lady-in-waiting Marie to stand in for her at a social event. The corset emulating Elisabeth's figure is drawn so tight she has to leave in the middle and throw up.
• The Duchess: During the wedding-night scene when Georgiana is being undressed by her new husband, we see that she's wearing her corset over bare skin (which reveals a set of painful-looking welts when the corset is removed). This is incorrect, as corsets were (and are) properly worn over a protective garment of some sort (usually a chemise) to protect the wearer from just such injuries.
• Enola Holmes: Enola was raised by a feminist mother who didn't make her wear corsets. While she is able to wear a normal corset without any problems and is even able to fight off an attacker in one, the finishing school she's sent to insists on lacing her much too tightly for waist training, which is shown to be quite painful. The former is a case of Shown Their Work, as regular corsets weren't that restrictive, as well as the fact that she purchased the corset in a women's boutique, where it was likely laced by a professional dresser (as opposed to the the school, where Enola has no idea how to put it on and just winds up yanking it as tight as possible).
• Scarlet O'Hara powers through the pain as Mammy draws her corset ever tighter before the barbeque at Twelve Oaks in Gone with the Wind.
• The Handmaiden: Hideko starts dressing up Sook-hee in her clothes on a whim, and Sook-Hee isn't used to the tight undergarments.
  Sook-Hee: [The brassiere]'s suffocating. How do ladies wear such things?
  Hideko: ...you think this is suffocating?
  (Gilligan Cut to Sook-Hee shrieking as Hideko laces her into the full corset, steadying herself with a foot on Sook-Hee's back and yanking the lace)
  Sook-Hee: Miss, you're killing me!
• In Little Women (1994), Marmee is prone to rants about how corsets are responsible for womankind's reputation as weak and ill, and when Meg gives in to pressure from her stylish friends, there is the obligatory scene where she is painfully laced into a corset by a strong-armed maid.
• Esther and Rose Smith experience this in Meet Me in St. Louis.
  Rose: You look grand, simply elegant.
  Esther: I feel elegant but I can't breathe.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, when Elizabeth is being dressed in a corset, Governor Swann tells her it's the fashion in London. She replies, "Well, women in London must have learned not to breathe...!"
  Gov. Swan: "What do you think?"(of the dress, corset included)
  Elizabeth: "It's *GASP* difficult to say."
  • Despite Elizabeth's corsets being based in an era where they were designed to be more comfortable and supportive than nearly any other era, there actually is some logic to this particular example. Elizabeth has lived her entire life in Port Royal, where fashion trends of the time probably take several months to arrive from places like London and Paris, if not years, and has probably been wearing softer stays where the emphasis was less on shrinking her waist and more on lifting her bust (like a modern camisole with a built-in bra). The corset her father buys her was likely intended to be worn by a woman whose body had been somewhat corset-trained since age twelve or so, and who would not feel too squeezed by it at all. Elizabeth, on the other hand, hasn't experienced that, so the amount of constriction probably would feel shockingly painful to her and alter her breathing to the point of her later collapse.
    Pirate: I'm gonna teach you the meaning of pain!
    Elizabeth: You like pain? *whacks him over the head with a pole* Try wearing a corset!
  • It's also likely that the woman lacing the corset didn't know how to do it properly, and just laced it as tight as she could. Which is not how to properly lace a corset, and can indeed lead to shortness of breath and fainting.
  • Even more likely is simply that Elizabeth's dress is new. When you make garments from natural materials you have to make them smaller than you want them to be. Elizabeth's father gives her the dress while she is having her corset put on. He seems not to have realized that the waist will expand by at least an inch about ten minutes after she puts it on as the linen fibers relax. If she had worn it for a little bit before putting her corset on, she likely wouldn't have had this problem.
• The Prince & Me: When Paige is being laced tightly into an elegant dress she asks Eddie's mother if she's supposed to be able to breathe in the dress who replies "No."
• The Princess: Linh makes a joke about how painful a corset is after the princess sheds hers.
• In Remember the Night poor Lee has to wear a corset to fit into Aunt Emma's wedding dress. Aunt Emma tells her that having a 25-inch waist in her time was big and that all the girls tried to get to 19. Ouch!
• The expression on Rose's face in Titanic (1997) as her corset is being laced by her mother shows the pain informative of this trope. It's symbolic as her mother is explaining that Rose has no choice but to marry Cal as she laces her up.
• A similar situation arises in the movie of Tuck Everlasting, in which Winnie is forced to wear a corset. Her mother tells her "You must suffer to be beautiful, so say the French", to which Winnie replies "Well the French are crazy!". When Winnie is staying with the Tucks, Ma helps her remove the corset, commenting on how she can't understand why women torture themselves with them.

Literature

• Adrian Mole: Adrian sees his grandmother's corset, thinks it looks like a parachute harness, and asks his grandma how she gets in and out of it. She replies that it's all down to self-discipline, and believes that since corsets went out of fashion, England has lost its backbone.
• After Alice takes place in the 1860s. Ada wears an uncomfortable iron corset because of her scoliosis.
• Discussed in the Caroline B. Cooney's time travel romance novel Both Sides Of Time where the main character and other girls despise the tightness of corsets and woman asking for a fainting couch due to corsets is expected.
• Discussed at length in Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes series. The prospect of wearing corsets, as part of boarding school and normal society, is one of the major factors that influence Enola to run away from her brothers' custody.
  • The horrors of corsets are an important factor to the mystery in The Case of the Gypsy Good-bye. A missing duchess is known to have an extremely slim waist from spending all her time since childhood, even while sleeping, in a full-length spoon busk corset. The duchess's kidnappers merely stole her expensive clothes and abandoned her—but she stayed missing because her waist had atrophied to such a degree that she could not walk without the corset.
• In The Fairy Godmother, lacing Daphne into her corset is painful. Understandably, as Daphne is overweight and the corset is meant to force her into too-small (but the "appropriate" size) dresses.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 4 (Wolf in the Fold), in her disguise as a member of the MacNeil family, Fisher has to wear a corset and hates every minute of it.
• The Gates of Sleep: After Madame Arachne carries off Marina, her maid forces Marina into tightlacing with the comment "You've never been properly corseted". (Marina eventually figures out how to tense her abdominal muscles to keep her corset from being laced too tightly.)
• In Elizabeth Enright's Gone Away Lake, two mid-20th C. girls — the story is a little vague, could be set any time between the late '40s and early '60s — are playing dress up in Victorian or Edwardian ball gowns that had belonged to an old lady's elder sisters. When they find they can't make the plackets meet, the old lady offers to lace them into corsets, however, when she pulls the laces it hurts so much that the girls content themselves by covering the gap with silk sashes.
• In The Goddess Test, Kate's maids force her to wear corsets. Kate is not pleased and tries to force her gut out to give herself more breathing room and to spite them.
• Gone with the Wind references this several times, Scarlett can take the pain of a tight corset, but other female characters are mentioned to have fainted when it becomes too tight.
• During Journey to Chaos, there is a scene where Zettai is undergoing a Painful Transformation. The surges of magical energy are said to more painful than the corset she was forced to wear.
• Laura looks forward to haying time in Little Town on the Prairie because it's an opportunity to remove her corset. While Ma says she ought to sleep in her corset, and Mary does, Laura can't.
  • Carrie also doesn't seem too keen on them. At one point, Mary is trying on a new dress, but it's absolutely skintight and she can hardly breathe, let alone finish the buttons. Laura realizes Mary's corset must have stretched back out, and while she pulls it tight again, all the while warning her sister not to breathe, Carrie's comment is a relieved "I'm glad I'm not old enough to wear corsets." Laura tells her to be glad while she can be.
  • In Little House in the Big Woods, when two of Laura's aunts are getting dressed for a dance, one of them hangs onto the bed so the other can drag on her corset strings with all her weight, bracing her feet like she's in a tug-o-war. Unsatisfied, she measures her waist with her hands and says that when Laura's ma married Pa, he could span her waist with his hands.
• Horribly used in the short story “A Mother of Monsters” by French author Guy de Maupassant: a young peasant girl hides her pregnancy with a rudimentary corset (planks of wood strapped together with rope). When the baby is born, it is hideously deformed, and who should drop by but a circus man, who offers to buy the baby for his freakshow. She promptly sells it, and when she gets pregnant again, the whole deal is renewed, and she makes a pretty good living out of it.
• In the Nightfall (Series), Myra is forced into a corset by Lucy prior to wearing the dress Prince Vladimir "gifted" to her. She not only experiences physical discomfort from tightlacing but also conveys reservations about wearing one beforehand when she sees Lucy pull it out of her bag.
• In Ann Turnbull's novel No Shame No Fear, Susanna's mistress asks her to help her unlace her stays of her corset to help her relax after she's been hurt.
• Simona Ahrnstedt goes back and forth between this and Of Corsets Sexy in her debut novel Överenskommelser. We get several allusions to how uncomfortable it can be to wear a corset, but a lady is expected to do it anyway. And if she shapes her body as much as possible, men will, of course, find her more attractive.
  • Magdalena Swärd in "De skandalösa" is happy to not have to wear a corset during a costume party.
• In E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, Evelyn Nesbit flees a crowd and is taken in by Emma Goldman. Once Evelyn's corset is removed (along with the rest of her garments), Emma treats the marks it left on Evelyn's flesh. Given that Emma Goldman was in real life an advocate of socialism and women's rights, the garment is clearly symbolic of the sufferings caused by the society of the time.
• In Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner, Meg starts secretly wearing a tight-laced corset in pursuit of fashionable slimness, suffers untold agonies, and eventually faints in the middle of a dinner party.
• In the original Grimm's fairy tale of Snow White, the wicked queen's first attempt to kill Snow White consists of trying to suffocate her by lacing her corset too tightly. The dwarfs save her by cutting the stay-lace, which leads to the queen opting for poison instead, first with a comb and finally with the famous apple.

Live-Action TV

• In one segment of an episode of 1000 Ways to Die, a vain tango dancer wears a corset to hide his weight gain but winds up breaking one of his ribs from cinching it too tight and bleeds to death.
• The inconvenience and discomfort of corsets are one of the major complaints of the mother and eldest daughter in The 1900 House. Similarly, some of the women in Frontier House refuse to wear them after a while (and, in the hot weather, wind up wandering around in their underwear).
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dick is having body-image issues, and puts on a corset with Harry's help (referencing 'Gone with the Wind) — he explains to a puzzled Tommy "It's called the 'Shatner'."
  • The preparer isn't safe either — Harry gets his fingers tangled up in the laces and ends up getting dragged around by an oblivious Dick.
• In the TV version of The Alienist, the camera gives several closeups of the marks left on Sara Howard's bare back by her corset. (Although it must be noted this is artistic license; a woman of Sara's time would have worn a chemise under her corset for exactly this reason. Poor Dakota Fanning.)
• Are You Being Served? regularly had gags of uncomfortably cramming a larger woman into a corset, what with it being set in a women's underwear department. Mrs. Slocombe was usually the Butt-Monkey.
• In an episode of Bones, the victim of the week was a 9-year-old girl with a deformed ribcage. It turns out she participated in beauty pageants and had worn a corset in her sleep, in addition to starving herself to the point of malnourishment.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow steals a corset from her Mirror Universe vampire counterpart to impersonate her. Then Willow realizes that she needs to breathe, while her vampire counterpart does not.
• Carnival Row: Imogen sighs in relief after removing her corset while undressing.
• In an episode of CSI, Grissom, Nick, and Sara come across a corpse with a horribly shrunken waist and horribly disfigured torso. Eventually, they discover that it was a man who, obsessed with American Civil War history and reenactments, habitually wore a male corset that had reduced his waist to only a few inches wide.
• In one episode of Call the Midwife, an unmarried woman hides her pregnancy via a girdle, fearing that she'll be fired from her job for it. Nurse Jenny is horrified to find this out since it poses many medical issues for the woman and her child. The woman is convinced to stop wearing it, and the baby is thankfully born fine.
• On Emergency!, Johnny and Roy got called to a woman's house. She put on a new girdle that was so tight she could barely breathe and spoke in little more than a whisper. When Johnny cut the girdle off her, it smacked him in the face.
• The women on Mad Men often wore girdles (especially in the earlier seasons).
  • Joan was seen taking off the strap of one of her full body girdles (looks like a full slip) and a nasty red mark in her shoulder is revealed. She looks very much in pain, especially after having been stiffed at work.
  • A few seasons later, a teenage girl talks with Betty about how her late mother once wore a rubber girdle that would leave the older woman's stomach in pain with the girl remarking on how "you'd rather die of a stomach ache so Daddy will like you."
• Two in Murdoch Mysteries:
  • In Season 3's "Victor, Victorian", a cross-dressing Dr. Ogden comments on how freeing it feels to not have to wear a corset.
  • Season 8's "The Devil Wears Whalebone" has a murder victim who is killed by a corset designed by the murderer to contract sharply and suffocate the victim. Dr. Ogden also mentions a nanny who made her and her sister sleep in their corsets, going so far as to tie their arms behind their backs so they couldn't remove them. Dr. Grace is encouraged to go corset-free by her lesbian lover.
• When Victor laces Lily into a corset for the first time in Penny Dreadful and puts her in fashionable shoes, she thinks it's extremely painful and uncomfortable. There's a brief exchange where Victor says that the purpose of corsets is to prevent women from overexerting themselves in case they conquer the world, before he tells her to take the corset off if it hurts, since he doesn't want anything that causes her pain (even if he does think she looks nice). She keeps the fancy shoes, though.
• Done implicitly in the Star Trek TNG episode "Time's Arrow," when Picard et al are in 19th century San Francisco; neither Troi nor Dr. Crusher looks comfortable in period fashion.
• There was a scene in the first season of The Vampire Diaries where Katherine Pierce was having her corset put on by Emily, her handmaiden, and by the expression on her face and her small gasp at every tightening of the corset, we could just imagine what it felt like.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS Steampunk 2: Steam and Shellfire, a supplement about equipment and gear in the steampunk period, has a section on problems with period clothing, including game rules for the effects of restrictive corsetting.
  While worn, a historically accurate tight corset moves the wearer one or two steps down the fitness scale ... Tight corsets may be mandated by some combination of fashion and a Compulsive Behavior or other disadvantages.

Theatre

• In The Waiting Room, one of the patients is a woman from the Victorian era who's experiencing severe health complications from wearing a corset.

Video Games

• The Action Girls of Assassin's Creed are very much not fond of corsets. Aveline de Grandpré puts up with it for Black-Tie Infiltration, but she can't free-run in it. Elise de la Serre wears one for her initiation into the Templar Order, but complains to Arno that she "feels like a mummy, wrapped up in this thing". Evie Frye wears one to enter Buckingham Palace, and as soon as she has an excuse, she changes out of "this infernal contraption"... with her Hidden Blade.
  Evie: (tossing the garment aside) Requiescat in pace.
  • Ironically enough, Evie has several alternate outfits that appear to be corseted, which never seems to be an issue. However, Evie's frustration with her Buckingham Palace attire is less about the corset she's wearing and more the dress as a whole, which would be difficult to perform an assassin's duties in due to the sheer weight of it as well as the extra layers.
• In BioShock Infinite, after Booker DeWitt frees Elizabeth from the electronic leash she was strapped to inside Comstock House, she winces in pain when Booker ties her corset. In this case, the corset is not entirely to blame; there's a cord that was just unplugged from her back.
• Kingdom of Loathing features the "Whalebone corset" as an accessory. Equipping it will give your character damage reduction, but at a health loss penalty. Funnily enough, both genders can use this item.
  This corset is made of sturdy whale bones, and is ribbed for her displeasure.
• Miitopia: A random conversation between a character of the princess job and another Mii will have the princess talk about all the good things in their life... before wheezing and admitting that the corset is a bit of a downer.
• In One Step From Eden, Violette starts with a Corset spell in her Doubletime deck. Using it deals 40 HP damage to her before applying 100 Shield Points.

Webcomics

• The Continentals has a dinner party scene in which the gender-bending Lady Fiona Fiziwigg and the conventionally feminine Evelynne Poole spar verbally on the subject.
• Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures has a (female) corset maker who likes "crushing people to death while watching them slowly suffocate". Naturally, she's a snake.
• El Goonish Shive has a strip where two extras converse about corsets and one mentions that traditional corsets are evil.
• Little Tales: Gen comments that she feels like she's been "keelhauled" after Uriel laces up her corset for a cosplay.
• A Sluggy Freelance 'MITDOP' strip features a demon who tormented its victims by... forcing them into corsets and high-heeled shoes. Unsurprisingly, the rare female victim laughed it off.
• While all of the genderbent characters in Exiern (and there's a bunch of them) hate being women in general, they reserve their worst complaints for corsets — all except for one priest who appears to have been transgender in the first place.
• VG Cats parodied corsets in this strip. Now they're beautiful!

Web Original

• Bernadette Banner averts this in one of her videos. One of the corset myths she debunks is that tight lacing wasn’t a common practice, but rather something done only by a very small percentage of women.
• Jill Bearup made a video about whether or not you could fight in a corset. She found that a (presumably correctly laced and correctly fitted) corset presented no problems, though stated that anyone not used to wearing one may find it uncomfortable.
• Morgan Donner (fashion historian) averts this in one of her videos by wearing a correctly laced and measured to fit corset for a week.
• Karolina Żebrowska has done several videos being active in well fitting corsets to pointedly avert the trope, and has complained about Hollywood's insistence on using not historically accurate tight lacing in period dramas and forcing actresses into badly fitted corsets and/or not giving them time to get used to wearing a corset ensuring the actress is miserable too.
• Whateley Universe: channeler Jimmy T. gets an earful from the ghost of Annie Chapman about this, mostly aimed at the Mystic Arts teacher Circe for her role in popularizing the garment in the 19th century.

Western Animation

• The Critic: Lampshaded by a maid pulling on corset strings, yelling, "Suck it in! Suck it in!", and it's revealed to be Jay Sherman. The corset, however, is put on more like a straitjacket than a corset, with Jay's arms bound as well. He mutters, "I don't think this is right." The maid scoffs at this, puts a top hat on him, and boots him out of the room.
• Family Guy: Peter Griffin tried this one to get on a rollercoaster. This causes his organs to rearrange.
• Johnny Test: When Johnny experiences glandular swelling/weight gain from one of Bling-Bling's experiments, he attempts to temporarily fix the problem by forcing Johnny into his mother's girdle (it does not work).
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Rarity tries to squeeze Twilight Sparkle into a saddle when they first meet.
• The Simpsons: In the episode Helter Shelter, the family signs up for a reality show where they must stay in a house from in 1895 and live according to the norms of that time. Marge in one clip is shown wearing a tight corset, and the camera zooms down to her horribly swollen feet.

Real Life

• The 1900 House: In this PBS television series, the women found that corsets made it almost impossible to get the endless housework done. Finally, Joyce discovered a period magazine with an article denouncing corsets as bad for women's health (perhaps written by female physician Alice Bunker Stockham), and they promptly discarded theirs.
• Coco Chanel is often credited with subverting this trope by not including corsets or other restrictive elements in her clothing. Her whole ethos was based on comfort and practicality, and corsets gradually fell out of favor in the years following her ascendency as a major designer.
• Corset aficionados of all genders get their corsets custom made to fit their bodies in order to avert this trope. A corset that doesn't fit properly, which is often the case for ones that can be bought off the shelf (and would very much apply to male wearers), can get very painful to wear when tightened to more than a simply snug fit. Also, they tend to not fit the dimensions of the wearer right. Lacing too tightly before the body is used to it is also painful, and tight lacing is a process that is supposed to take weeks so that the body can gradually adapt to it. A corset that is properly fitted to the body, even when pulled tight, isn't supposed to hurt and if it does, then the one wearing it should loosen the lacing. The body needs time to adapt to it. In most cases, wearers should also have something under the corset, like a camisole or chemise. (This is so you specifically do not get the welts that pop up in other examples of this trope, and also to protect the corset from being sweated on.)
• Corsets have somehow become the outfit of choice for action girls in movies and TV (Wonder Woman and Xena have likely had something to do with it.) Multiple actresses, such as Bridget Regan (Kahlan Amnell◊ of Legend of the Seeker) and Caity Lotz (Canary◊ of Arrow) have said their corsets felt fine during their initial costume fittings, but when they had to start doing fight scenes in them...
• Elizabeth Ryan: On tennis courts before the First World War, where Ryan eventually won 30 Grand Slam titles, she recalls that at her first tour of England (1914), the ladies’ dressing rooms would have a fire (it was an English summer, after all), above which would be a rail on which the players’ corsets were hung to dry. “It was not a pretty sight”, she said, “as many of them were blood-stained from the wounds they had inflicted”. ^SourceThe Encyclopedia of Tennis, ed. Max Robertson & Jack Kramer (London; George Allen & Unwin, 1974), p. 239a.
• Empress Elisabeth of Austria was (in)famous for tight-lacing, to the point that her waist was 40 cm (16 inches) at its smallest, and 18 1/2 –- 19 1/2 inches at the time of her death. Coupled with her sleeping issues and eating disorder, this made her "inhumanly slender" — she was unusually tall (172 cm or 5'8'') and only weighed 50kg (110 lbs). Ironically, it initially kept her alive after the stabbing with a stiletto knife that eventually caused her death, and it was only after her corset was removed that she bled out.
• Lady Mary Montagu, wife of Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, remarked in one of her letters that when she undressed in front of other Turkish women to join them in a Turkish bath was greeted with exclamations of horror at her corsets, which the Turkish women believed was a cruel device of her husband to keep her locked up.
• Mary Halliday dropped dead in 1903 for no apparent reason. During her autopsy, it was discovered that two pieces of corset steel had become lodged in her heart. However, a news article about her death said that the pieces of steel seemed to have been SWALLOWED, making her a very unusual non-wearing-related example of the trope.
• Once Upon a Time: Lana Parrilla, who plays the Evil Queen, said in an interview that the corsets in her costume are so tight that she cannot properly swallow food while wearing them and has to be on a liquid diet while filming scenes in them.
• The Victorian House (US title Inside the Victorian Home): Author Judith Flanders wrote that "It is difficult to say how tightly {Victorian} women really laced. Large quantities of writing, by both pro- and anti-lacing campaigners, seem to have been written by sexual fetishists, as a sort of soft-core porn... The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine correspondents whom we would today guess to be fetishists used words like 'suffering', 'agony', 'delicious', and 'exquisite' to describe the effects of tight lacing, while what appears to be genuine correspondence contained words like 'comfort', 'ease', and 'freedom'."
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Lucy Lawless said that her corset was perfectly fine... after they removed the boning out of it.

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