They are not meant to be seen, only suggested. They are a woman’s private accoutrements, after all: the garter belts, the crotch-less panties, the stockings, the camisole, the sensuous red lace underneath the over-sized black coat. In public, their erotic symbolism is, at best, implied, like the invitation communicated in an illicit lover’s glance.
Yet many who claim to be feminists condemn what these garments have come to represent for society as a whole in the MeToo era.
Not all women can look like dolled-up lingerie models, they argue, and so the contents of a woman’s secret drawer tend to celebrate an exploitative, anti-feminist archetype.
Can anything else explain why the garments pinch and insult the average woman’s physique so mercilessly? They choke, suffocate, and bind those corners of a woman’s body that yearn to be free the most. Surely, no man on earth is worth this much suffering and discomfort.
But Debra Smouse, an author, entrepreneur, and life coach, says that’s exactly the attitude that causes many in the new feminist movement to miss the point. For her, wearing erotic lingerie is about loving yourself.
“Whoever said buying sexy lingerie is for turning men on had it all backward,” Smouse writes in an essay for Your Tango. “Wearing beautiful lingerie isn’t about guys, ladies.”
What Does Erotic Lingerie Represent?
In many ways, the confusion derives from the perplexing abundance of meanings that we’ve come to associate with female sexual imagery. Stripped of their symbolism, sexy lingerie items are simply clothes like any other: objects that help to separate the body from the elements. Yet, of course, they are so much more than that.
With their plummeting necklines and sumptuous chiffon fabrics, they make bold assertions about feminine beauty, feminism, power, and sex – and how those ideas often oppose each other.
Depending on who wears them, erotic lingerie can either exalt women for what they are or mock them for what they are not. Women who wear them choose their meaning day by day, week by week, from one special date to the next.
Clearly, Smouse – who says she usually wears jeans, black t-shirts, make-up, and jewelry at home – is a feminist who exalts with feminine flair.
On her website, the self-professed “Tarnished Southern Belle” offers an online syllabus that includes a course on helping women unleash what she calls their “inner sex kittens.”
“I know it isn’t as soothing as those t-shirt bras, but there’s something magical about a lacy bra that makes you feel feminine and sexy,” Smourse says. “When you feel feminine, you tap into that magnetic feminine power of yours…”
“Impress Yourself”
Smouse’s gloriously exuberant appreciation for erotic underwear is nothing like the passivity of women who are uninformed or oblivious to the feminist cause.
The Ohio-based author is well-aware that the activist’s quarrel against erotic lingerie is less about discomfort than it is about society’s conflicted relationship with the female form.
Over the years, men have abused a sexually-charged feminine ideal to sell cigarettes, beer, real estate, automobiles, watches, diet programs, pornography, guns, cheese, sneakers, and toaster ovens.
They have employed it to wash dishes, make money, establish business connections, launder clothes, raise children, and make their beds.
Enough is enough, armies of rightly-outraged feminists have been shouting for decades and decades now. Women are none of those things anymore – at least, not without a fierce fight. Somewhere in the fog of protest, somehow, the love of prettiness came to be regarded as an embarrassing – even corrupt – response to feminist objectives.
Smouse’s counter-argument is coherent and even more spectacularly feminist. That is, a woman should be able to enjoy an ideal image of herself without regarding it as a false picture of who she is.
“The goal, after all, is to impress yourself,” she says. “When a woman wears lovely undies on a daily basis, she always feels beautiful and confident.”
What Every Woman Deserves
In Smouse’s view, the militant argument against erotic lingerie is therefore one that pits real-world cynicism against our shared understanding of beauty.
Some hard-boiled feminists would even have you believe that ideal feminine beauty does not actually exist. What we have come to think of as feminine beauty is a mirage conjured by ad campaigns and hundreds of years of exploitative misogyny.
That is, of course, demonstrably untrue. In fact, that is the gaping error around their argument.
You can no more deny the universal compulsion to look at a pretty face than you can refute our common aversion for the smell of rotten fish. What’s beautiful is beautiful and no amount of righteous protestation can change that.
The Best Part of Beauty
Francis Bacon suggests that our love of pretty things is intuitive: an instinct embedded into the wiring of human nature. In this way, we might say that an attractive woman wearing a corset under her clothes pins down its core significance.
“That is the best part of beauty which a picture cannot express,” Bacon said of the subject in an essay he wrote in the early 1600s.
Designers who produce erotic lingerie most certainly exploit this instinct, but they didn’t invent it any more than Ronald McDonald invented our love of unhealthy food.
Ultimately, feminism and our rapacious consumer economy have nothing to do with what is universally beautiful.
“Choosing to wear panties that match your bra is a secret that only you know, yet makes you feel powerful,” says Smouse. “Because what you think about yourself extends into how the world sees you.”
We could not have said it any better.
