And curious I was. Like you, I scrutinized the women's underwear section of the catalogue, but for more reasons than just sheer perversion and furtive masturbation.
Though catalogues were the hotbed for developing ambisexuals, like me,
if a girl wanted to make sure her boobs were coming in, well, you know ~ right,
she had to buckle down to serious scrutiny of the home shopping catalogue.
In the early days I saw the underwear images and assumed that it was the shape of the boob that made the shape of the bra.
Boy how wrong could you be? It was all damning confusing to a boob-less little girl. Were my boobs supposed to be round, or incredibly pointy? Closely scanning the boobs of movie girls from the 30's to the 70's did little to disabuse me there was one concrete concept of what the established norm might be.
All I knew is that I wanted the ones that made men drop their newspapers and spit-take their coffees at the diner.
So I studied the catalogues, hard. As we rarely ordered anything out of the catalogue it took some fancy 'esplainin' as to what we were doing with it. Alone. You were always easy off the hook however when the Christmas Wish Book came out. That's the book o' glory your parents would give you when they wanted to know exactly what was on your wish list that year. Hinting and sighing and bent pages were permissible, outright circling in pen was considered crass.
My really biggest wish back then, after waking up one morning unaccountably with curl-able blonde Farrah Fawcett hair, was to find myself in the possession of an amazing rack!
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| Sears 1979 |
But how to be sure you were getting one? Most of my forays into the catalogue were in the bathroom, putting the lingerie pages up to my budding chest, to, you know, ensure nothing freaky was happening 'up there.'
Were they round enough? High enough? Big enough? Pointy enough?
Was pointy up, weird?
Was pointy middle any good? Definitely pointy down had to be bad. Very bad.
Did you have to be able to put a pencil under them and it not get stuck 'under there'?
Say, what size and colour were 'normal nipples' supposed to be anyway?
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| Sears 1979 |
These were some of the things the catalogues remained schtum on despite my tense scrutiny and I'd have to find out the hard way (usually in the company of guys like you who had seen them in the same catalogues, or in their father's porn stashes ~ or found around construction sites and jammed in stone walls).
By the way, from the latter I concluded that there was nothing more than an honest workman liked more than a sandwich and a lunchtime wank.
I scoured the catalogues for clues about what a woman should physically aspire to and to what she should be wearing while she was at it.
I assumed the following was something you bought to wear for your husband. Because it was perfectly natural to want to dress like a whore if you troo-leee loved Him. As far as I understood, a self respecting wife wasn't supposed to wait until He bought you some frilly thing, you were supposed to buy it yourself and surprise him.
I assumed I'd grow up one day and surprise my guy wearing one of these at the door, and holding a dish of steaming meatloaf ~ to get His juices going after a hard day at work. In my scenarios, we never got to eat the meal hot.
Women's lib was still a pretty fragile and uncertain entity back then. It still is.
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| Sears 1979 |
I remember the year after one ad came out I refused to walk up the stairs in front of a fellow at school ever again. What did my arse in panties tell about me? I'd hike up my panty legs to 'high-cut,' 'cause my mom only believed in battleship-sail-span granny gonch, and that high-cuts were for sluts.
So I'd roll up the panty legs, roll up the waist elastic to hold 'em up and pray the high cuts'd stay even. I'd beg my sisters to critique me before I'd head out the door to school, this never far from my mind:
Admitting defeat, I learned to walk sideways up the stairs, trash-talking and bedazzling the fellas with my burgeoning boobs instead.
With all this hard-core worrying, it's amazing I ever found time to visually grope the men's sections. But early multi-tasker that I was, I found these sections to be worthy of careful, close study.
The best of it was the imagination exercised which filled in the gaps with fevered brow and quick hand. The worst of it was wondering what really was under that cotton and velour. What did 'it' feel like? A mixture of horror, fascination and irrational lust was evoked by the poking I did in the men's clothing sections.
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| Ladies ~ 1977 |
I'd study each line and crease, looking for clues. However, girls like these did little to enlighten me. Girls like these did little to inspire dread or awe:
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| Just us Girls ~ 1972 |
I used to go picking through the seasonal log, making mental notes which one's I'd 'do.'
Usually, the daddy-looking ones with the greying temples caught my eye.
I'd go scouring through the pages, looking for tell-tale bumps. I'd only ever seen Playgirl once. And at that most tender age of nine I wasn't much taken with the goods I'd seen there. I was curious, but it was the kind of curiosity one displays when lifting a rock to see a bug one's just smushed. I mean, what in the hell was I looking at exactly, anyway?
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| Eaton's 1975 |
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| Eaton's 1975 |
Stuff like this one had me quite worried, until my older sister swore on a stack of bibles that they used 'cups' to 'smooth out the boys.'
It was here I learned to spend nights travelling down the hair highway to the treasure trove at the end of the rainbow.
I just knew there was something good down there if I ever got the chance to trek on a live subject.
At those tender pre-pubescent ages,
if I'd only known what was really under those get-ups,
I'd have run. Become a nun.
Darling Nicimos, you know they'd have never let you become a Sears catalogue model.
There's simply not enough duct tape in the world to keep your good man down.
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"Nicimos, making catalogue boys and grown women, nervous" |