I Feel Faint

After keeling over, I'm now so comfy!
Where's the laudanum?

I have a new sofa. Actually, it's a "fainting couch."

Class, take your seats. Time for a history lesson, a la Fragrant Liar. I want you to put yourself in the shoes—er, the corset of a Victorian-era woman. Go ahead.

Ready? All cinched up nice and tight? Imagine tighter. You can't breathe-tight. Now imagine all that pomp and frill beneath your skirts. Not your vagina pomp and frill, but long knickers and stiff crinolines. It might be 20 degrees outside, but you are freakin' sweaty and suffocating. Where do you turn? WHERE DO YOU TURN?

To the fainting couch, of course, which catches you at the very instant you keel over.

So says, not verbatim, the Great Oracle Google. But I question the veracity of a tightly strung corset figuring into the need for a fainting couch. Sure, a bunch of women dropping like flies could necessitate a special sofa for recovery, but during that same era, women rode horseback, played tennis, and performed other vigorous activities in corsets, no problem. More likely, women had a racket going.

Thanks, Hilary!

See, in Victorian times (1837-1901), the fainting couch served another purpose. Disease. Or more precisely, the inconvenient disease of female hysteria. If you had that disease, you could get special house calls. Professionals were standing by, conveniently, to perform therapeutic treatments on you. Therapeutic, as in manual pelvic massage. I'll just let you absorb that for a moment.

And it was also likely that you'd require constant, weekly treatments that could take hours of you supining on your fainting couch under a professional's careful machinations. Anybody feeling faint? I'm making a sign of the cross right now (just in case), in divine thanks for medically prescribed sex. Tut, tut! No judging.

Ahem, so if you were a 19th century woman of breeding, you owned a fainting couch and you damn well took advantage of it if you had any inkling of its true bennies. I'd be droppin' it like it's hot twice a day! Don't you know, those Victorian women begged their old fart husbands for a fainting couch. Please, please, sir!

Speaking of breeding, is it coincidental that the Victorian era saw a huge spike in fertility rates? I think not. Perhaps manual pelvic massage included other, shall we say, special instruments? That, or wives were so grateful for their disease relief that they actually had thank-you sex with their old fart husbands and thereby produced heirs.

I am feeling faint and hysteria.
How inconvenient.

So we've come a long way, baby, but I think in this case, we women totally got robbed. I, for one, am contemplating a return to simpler times, where female hysteria was a perfectly acceptable reason for stopping mid-day to get a good hand job. I'm asking my boss about instituting a new policy tomorrow.

Ho hum, it's all stormy and rainy outside in Austin, and to be honest, I feel a strong bout of hysteria coming on. I better go lay down on my fainting couch. Good thing I have a medical practitioner on speed dial.

See you in a few hours.
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