Gina Barreca - If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?: Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times

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For the woman who rides the subway to the end of the line.

For the woman who wakes up in the middle of the night.

For the woman who spills out, spills over, overdoes it, and cant contain herself.

For the Tribe of Loud, Smart, Funny Women(and for the men who laugh with us).

Could you be talked into purchasing a foundation undergarment so restrictive, so unyielding, and so draconian it makes a wetsuit look like a nightgown?

Heres why I ask: Theres been a pop-up (rarely has the term been so grievously misused) ad appearing in the lower right-hand screen of my computer which at first seemed merely persistent but turned out to have been irresistible. It offered me a product that would, through cunning and science, give me a better figure. This week, I relented. Casting my integrity to the wind, I clicked on the link.

What I saw made me gasp, then wince, then toss my head and offer the hollow laughter of film sirens who discovered their boyfriends were no-good, gunslinging liars. The website was selling girdles. They didnt call them that, but thats what they were.

A girdle is a girdle is a girdle.

I grew up watching early womens rights activists burn their bras and girdles. Now times have changed and women are putting their undergarments into the flames for a different reason: Theyre doing it to forge the steel infrastructure more thoroughly by placing them in the refiners fire.

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Thats why theyre called foundation garmentstheyre made of metal and concrete. Theyre supposed to support the whole structure, from the bottom-up and the inside-out.

These new products differ from the girdles worn by women of my mothers generation only insofar as there are now girdles for the legs, girdles for the arms, and girdles for an adults entire body. Turns out you dont just have to flatten your stomach anymore. You have to flatten your whole self.

I started looking at various other links for womens foundation garmentsthere are more than 28 million entries, so I narrowed my search to the first 75,000and it seems as if the most popular brand at the moment is a product called Spanx.

Name aside, I dont believe this product has anything to do with the act of spanking because, as far as I can tell, the hand of the person attempting such an act would ricochet off the taut trampoline-like surface of the fabric and in all probability cause the spanker to put out an eye or cause severe damage to his (or her, but you know it would be his) wrist.

In some cases, of course, that would be appropriate.

But what might start out as playful could become deadly and we should all remember that, especially before wearing an item of clothing that resembles a lace-edged iron maiden.

The premise behind Spanx is this: if you put Jell-O into a Thermos, it wont remember its Jell-O.

This realization did not prevent me from wondering whether I might not be wise to purchase one. Ive always been fond of Thermoses, which are the cleverest of appliances. You put in a hot beverage, it keeps it hot; you put in a cold beverage, it keeps it cold. As the old joke goes, How do(es) it know? But so-called shapewear? It turns out its not so intelligent. Thats why smart broads were eager to shed it.

Todays advertising rhetoric says shapewear will smooth your silhouette, which sounds rather comforting and benign, but with a little research (reading another 48,000 articles) a person can start to believe in conspiracy theories concerning the deviousness of underwear manufacturers rivaling those put forth by flat-world theoristswith the same impulse to get rid of curves.

Researchers argue that these arcane garments will cut off the circulation of blood to several of your favorite major organsespecially those having to do with digestionand cause reflux, heartburn, and flatulence.

Fabulous, right? The fabric is virtually airtight; the wearer is trapped inside a Spanx garment. She is burping, belching, and releasing enough natural gas to keep the lights on in Tulsa for a three-day weekend, but the vapors are sealed in.

So now picture these ladiessmooth ladies, every one of themslowly wafting toward the ceiling at the end of a gala, rising with a kind of grand elegance until they are gently bobbing up there against the lighting fixtures like balloons.

Surely at some point they, and their self-esteem, deflate and return to earth?

So youll not be surprised I decided to skip the equation that beauty equals bondage, even when its trying to pass itself off as a textile buttress.

Women dont need to bring back the whalebone in our corsets; what we need is to develop enough backbone to shed them altogether.

Like almost every other woman I know, many of the lessons Ive had to unlearn in life I first learned in kindergarten.

For example, Ive had to break the habit of having cookies and a nap at three in the afternoon.

Thats because as an adult I developed this fetish about wanting to hold a steady job and not take up so much physical space I need to be hauled around by a winch.

Lying down every day after a heavy sugar and carb intake can undermine a girls ambitions as well as her ability to enter a room without turning sideways and breathing in.

After a certain age, I also had to learn to stop automatically holding the hand of the person walking next to me. I discovered in my mid- to late twenties (Im a slow learner) that the unoccupied hand belonging to my buddy (or boyfriend, or first husband) was often furtively engaged in holding a miniature bottle of cinnamon schnapps, the keys to a vehicle he didnt own, or the hand of another wide-eyed girl. (Sometimes all three. Remember: slow learner.)

One of the biggest revelations came when I realized that I did not have to share everything. That was fascinating. To believe I could be a good girl and yet insist that some stuff belonged only to me? It was hard to convince myself that somebody else wanting a piece of what Ive got (a piece of pie, a piece of the action, a piece of my heart, whatever) was not a reason to fork it over. I was in my forties when I learned that even if somebody asks nicely, it is OK to say no.

Over the years, Ive also had to learn that life is not a game of tag (nowhere is safe) and that in most workplaces time-outs are not the penalty for behaving badly. I also discovered, along with the rest of America, that although in politics, professional sports, and Hollywood there are no penalties for behaving badly, if youre working retail or for a corporation youll be fired before you can say, Im sorry.

Lately, though, Ive realized that Ive clung to the schematics behind the game of Duck, Duck, Goose as a guiding force for far too long. In womens lives especially (and since Im talking about the pre-K demographic Ill call us girls without fear of appearing patronizing), all sorts of lessons have encouraged us to sit politely and wait to be chosen. Remember the game Duck, Duck, Goose, where you sat in a circle facing the center and waited to be recognized as the goose, whereupon you were tapped and permitted to run around making choices yourself?