A few months ago I moved apartment. Being the strong woman that I am, I attempted to do a fair amount of heavy lifting myself. Limited as it was, I still managed to hurt myself through my own complete inattention to the way I was distributing the weight of the giant boxes of reading materials that I was carrying (paper is very heavy en masse, this is why I was using my back to do the heavy work - ugh). After two months of completely ignoring the shooting pains in my lower back, I realized that this was not a reasonable form of treatment, and went to a spine injury doctor. He gave me two choices; surgery to slice of the portions of discs that had slipped (too damn scary for me), or wearing a brace for a few months and having a couple of steroid injections directly into the offending discs. I opted for the latter.

The brace he prescribed, which my health insurance paid for, looked like this one pictured above. Note the man, happily painting, while wearing this medicinal garment over his clothes. First of all, who the hell would wear something like this so proudly? Second, apart from some very gentle support, there is nothing about this so-called brace (more of an aggressive support garment really) to stop a person from bending from the back, and so re-injuring myself. After a week of wearing this feeble thing, I sought out something sturdier and more in-keeping with my aesthetics.

After some hunting, I found myself at my local corsetier. There I found that a handmade corset, made in the same fashion for the last 200 years, did the job and then some. With a structure of vertical metal "stays" all around, it made bending or slouching literally impossible. Overnight, I went from only being able to work part time, to going back to work and being able to socialize again. While I couldn't sit down for fear of re-slipping those pesky lumbar discs, I now had an exoskeleton that made standing for 8 hours relatively easy. The whole thing was incredibly helpful, and I immediately noticed that I wasn't re-injuring myself. Progress and healing could finally begin.

Then we come to the aesthetics: While wearing the grey, elastic, velcro creation wasn't very useful, and it also looked terrible. My choices were to wear it under tent-like clothing (shapeless little shift dresses and smock shirts worked to hide it, just about), but then it would slowly ride up over the day, until it was scooched up under my chest and supported nothing in the lumbar region where I so needed it. But a traditional Victorian corset can be worn outside of clothing, over a men's shirt, or a t-shirt, making anything I wore look strangely business-like and simultaneously, slightly kinky. Suddenly I was getting a lot more attention from people. And it wasn't just the tiny waist that the corset forced upon me, but my dramatically upright posture. I'm still not clear on whether it was the fact that I was forced to stand straight, or that the men I was working with were made so uncomfortable by my suddenly more feminine figure, but I found that I had more authority, particularly with men who'd previously treated me in a dismissive "there there little lady" kind of way. I know that I felt stronger and more effective in the workplace because of my forced good posture and unapologetically female structure.

Now as my back is almost healed, and I can get away with wearing the corset only once a week or so, I've retained the attitude that it lent me. I hope that in the future I'll always feel this way about myself, and I won't need to rely on a corset to do so.

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