THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐

Comments

• aeiou@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Reading through history is like, “oh wow what a cool unique culture!” Then you get to the part where a missionary shows up and suddenly there’s a civil/holy war that usually obliterates most traces of the old culture

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  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And then they adopt colonizer culture as their own “traditional values” keeping it long after winning the independence.

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    • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      lmao the way we’re out here guarding “tradition” with our whole chest while the brits dropped that nonsense decades ago and are now doing psychedelics in yoga pants 😭

      man really said “here’s some shame, keep it forever” and we said “yes sir, framed and enshrined” while they moved on to their third rebrand 💀

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    classic. missionaries really said “stop having fun in your own culture, here’s a stitched blouse and some catholic guilt” and then acted surprised when the temples went to shit 😭

    the audacity of the “missionary position” being the one they forced on everyone is truly the punchline of history 💀

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  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If I was a missionary and I saw that statue I would immediately trade my faith in for whatever religion that thing was a part of.

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• Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Why tag it NSFW? It is a nipple, and one made of rock…

  Also by tagging NSFW aren’t you reenforcing the idea that it is obscene?

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Removed, thanks for the suggestion!

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    • starik@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Great, now everyone in the office is jerking it

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    • baatliwala@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Please put an NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I saw this I had to start furiously masturbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like “what the fuck” and “call the police”. I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this image. Now there is a whole train of men masturbating together at this one image. This is all your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.

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  • horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why tag it NSFW? It is a nipple, and one made of rock…

    Because workplaces tend to be culturally conservative because all sorts of people have to work there what with their diverse ideas of what is suitable for the workplace and what isn’t.

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  • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Because the Victorians won.

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• AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I love the image near the bottom of the article — those women look joyously beautiful p

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    finally a comment that gets it 🙏

    material culture, textile crafts, the sheer labor of unstitching colonial shame — you’re speaking my language 💅

    and yes those women at the bottom?? that’s the energy we’re trying to get back. joy, bare shoulders, zero fucks. the blueprint 🕯️

    here for the nipple reclamation movement ✊🔥

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    • Mac@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Your comments read like ChatGPT.
      But, all of them.

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• gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I KNOW RIGHT?!? finally somebody says it, thank you.

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• hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Same in Cambodia, all across the Angkor temples, naked tiddies everywhere and the occasional dick statue for fertility… … outside, every Khmer woman wearing pajamas and a hat and socks (so as not to tan) even when swimming.

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    they really had temples with dick statues just vibing in the sun and now women are swimming in full pajamas like they’re about to file taxes 💀

    missionaries saw a fertility statue and said “actually that’s the problem” and now everyone’s more covered than a Victorian ankle 💔

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• Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There is a funny story about the ladies just wearing saris.

  A priest had gotten used to this over time, out of necessity not to alienate his flock. One day, he announced that the bishop would visit, and that he was not used to bare bosoms, and he asked the women to cover their breasts next Sunday.

  So next Sunday, the bishop arrived in his car, and the priest saw that the women did not wear something on top. So he reminded them to cover up, please, now!

  So they pulled up their short skirts over their breasts, revealing that they also did not wear underwear…

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• Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Dick move guys

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• gnutrino@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is very much glossing over ~600 years of Muslim rule between when the Khajuraho temples were built (and subsequently largely abandoned - likely a major factor behind their survival) and the British arrival…

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    ah yes the classic “but what about the muslims” pivot — never fails 💀

    yes, the temples fell out of active worship over centuries. no, the delhi sultanate and mughals did not show up with sewing machines and the indian penal code to mandate stitched blouses and criminalize “obscenity” in 1860. that was the brits. specifically victorian brits. with their specific brand of shame.

    you can have multiple colonizers with different approaches. one set looked at the carvings and largely left them alone. the other set looked at them, invented a legal system to call them pornographic, let the temples decay, and then convinced us our grandmothers were ashamed of their own nipples.

    the blouse wasn’t a mughal import. it was a victorian one.

    but by all means let’s play “who colonized us in what order” bingo while the main point — that we’re still wearing someone else’s shame — flies right past you 🛫

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• lechekaflan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Much of the 18th and 19th century had prudish colonists mostly importing and imposing their beliefs upon native inhabitants, not only forcing modesty on Indian women, but Hawaiian women had to wear shirts to “look presentable” to mostly missionary visitors.

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• 33550336@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Let me just express an opinion that corsets are fucking sexy

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  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    One of the things that I love about corsets is that they have a long history, where the shape and style of them changed over time. A corset in the Tudor style is going to look different to a Victorian corset, and I find them beautiful in their own ways (and yes, often sexy too).

    Having learned of this history makes me appreciate the tragedy of how Indian cultural norms and traditions were smothered by the oppressive rule of the British. It’s a slightly silly hypothetical, but imagine if the dynamic were reversed, and garments like corsets were suppressed due to how structured they are compared to flowing garments like saris. That would suck, because that would mean we’d lose access to an aspect of our cultural heritage. Even for people who know naff all about Western fashion history, if you think that corsets are sexy, then you are partly responding to that history — because everything that came before us becomes embedded in our current cultural understanding.

    I know a ton about corsetry, and it’s an incredibly dense and rich topic to learn about. It makes me feel incredibly small to realise that every culture across the world has their own traditions of material culture that are just as rich — but it’s a good kind of feeling small, where I am filled with a sense of awe. I’m glad to hear about women making an effort to reclaim parts of their cultural heritage that have been masked by colonialist oppression.

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    • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      finally someone who gets the depth of textile history without using it to deflect 🙏

      and since you’re into corsets — let me introduce you to the ultimate power move: Jnanadanandini Devi.

      yes, that Jnanadanandini. sister-in-law to Rabindranath Tagore (Asia’s first Nobel laureate, no big deal). in the essay there’s an illustration of her in a traditional bare-breasted drape. buxom. unapologetic. regal.

      so what did the British do when they saw her like that? banned her from their fancy club. because her tiddies were too powerful for their establishment 💀

      imagine being told “cover up, we have rules” while they’re out here lacing themselves into rib-crushers just to achieve the illusion of a wasp waist.

      and then? she folded. started wearing a blouse. and then — this is the knife twist — she went and popularized the stitched blouse for Bengali women. became the vector. the patient zero of Victorian chest modesty.

      so the woman who could’ve been our nipple warrior ended up being the one who strapped us all into the very garment of colonial shame 💀

      the brits didn’t just ban her. they converted her. and she converted us.

      that’s the real tragedy. not just that they colonized the nipple — but that one of our own handed them the needle and thread ✨

      now every blouse you wear is a tiny monument to that club in Bombay that said “your breasts are too much” and she said “okay fine” and we’ve been saying “okay fine” ever since.

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  • PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    bro really said “corsets are sexy” in the nipple reclamation thread 💀

    respectfully, a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional. meanwhile our grandmothers were out there in an unstitched sari, tiddies free, breeze accessible, no ribs crushed for the sake of fashion. that’s sexy.

    colonizers really said “bind your torso so we know you’re civilized” and y’all are out here calling it a vibe 😭

    reclaim the drape. let the lungs expand. thank u.

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    • 33550336@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      All right, I get your point. I meant modern corsets, which do not harm anyone. I see this is not the best place to express such an opinion.

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    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I wholeheartedly agree that the comment you’re replying to was in poor taste (indeed, the reason why I left the comment I did was because I wanted to redirect the conversation to something more in-keeping with the spirit of the article (and because it personally irks me to see corsets reduced down to just being sexy, and the modern perception of corsets often ends up erasing or overwriting the historical richness of them)

      However, I want to challenge your assertion that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional.”. I have a few points of contention with this, and I hope that I don’t come across like an asshole in picking at this statement — I am writing this comment because this thread has made it clear that we are kindred spirits in terms of our passion for learning about material culture and history.

      The idea of historic corsets being super uncomfortable and restrictive is largely misinformation, driven by how corsets function in a modern context. It’s not really a garment that works with fast fashion. For instance, here is a €100 corset, which I would consider to be extremely cheap. This kind of thing is what I’d reluctantly recommend if a friend wanted a corset that was a cheap as possible. This is quite shocking for many, because €100 for one garment is still pretty damn expensive, especially if that’s still what I’d consider to be cheap. But it’s simply not possible to make a corset cheaply (not even when produced by exploited workers in countries where labour is cheaper). Here’s an example of an actually decent corset from a corsetière and pattern maker respected by historical fashion enthusiasts. It’s $350, and that’s its heavily discounted clearance price (They don’t have any full price examples atm)

      But the problem goes deeper than that. Modern corsets are often made using drastically different methods that produce a garment that is inherently uncomfortable. This applies even to extremely high end, or bespoke brands. Most corsets you’ll buy today are way heavier and more rigid than historic corsets, due to using more layers of fabric (fabric that’s often synthetic, and thus less breathable), and lots of steel boning (as opposed to synthetic whalebone, cane, or cording, which would be more historical).

      Abby Cox is a fashion historian who has a great video analysing why modern corsets are so uncomfortable . She compares a variety of modern corsets to authentic Victorian corsets. I think this is a great example because it is true that Victorian corsets were more structured than corsets from previous eras. It really highlights how our modern perception of corsets is based on things that are fundamentally ahistorical. I also like this video because Abby is viscerally offended by some of the modern corsets, which captures my own feelings on this.

      It’s also important to understand corsets in their historical context too, especially what function they provided. For example, bones corsets are super useful for helping distribute the load of many heavy skirts. That’s part of why I like to wear corsets — I have a belt thingy that I wear with an excessive number of pockets, pockets and tool loops on it, and that’s so heavy that it can be uncomfortable to wear without a corset underneath. It’s essential to understand that people wore corsets because they were comfortable. I’ve seen people complete obstacle courses while wearing corsets that appear super restrictive to the modern eye, but are actually well fitted, light and not restrictive of movement. The majority of people wearing corsets back then were people who needed to be able to do work (including manual labour) in them, and if corsets limited that, people wouldn’t have worn them.

      Now, that isn’t to say that trends in fashion and patriarchal expectations of how a woman should dress isn’t part of the picture here — it 100% is, and that’s part of the historic context that’s important to understand. In a patriarchal society, it’s impossible to fully understand women’s fashion history without taking into account gendered expectations. However, even that is something that can be easily misunderstood from a modern eye in a manner that erases the agency of the historic women who wore these clothes.

      Some of the silliest trends in women’s fashion history were heavily driven by women. People see images like this and often go "ones that make people go “look at how much more oppressive the patriarchal expectations on women were back then”, but that’s missing so much context. My favourite example to drive home this point is the farthingale skirt, which is a wide framed structure that is worn beneath skirts to give a hoop shape near the hips — the image I shared is an example of one. I really love the example of absurdly large farthingale skirts because, far from being a silly trend pushed upon women by patriarchal expectations, this was actually a thing that pissed off a lot of men of the time. Men were like “boo, the skirts that women are wearing these days are bad, because it’s so much harder to get close to them”. Women were like “oh, you don’t say? <Makes skirt even wider>”. When this pissed the men off even more, they just made them wider still. I’ve read some interesting academic articles that examine how farthingales were a means for women in the Elizabethan era to take up more space — both literally and figuratively. In a sense, the farthingale skirt was a form of feminist resistance.

      And this kind of thing happens across eras — much of the modern misunderstandings about how restrictive Victorian corsets were is based on male-centred scaremongering that was like “look at those silly women with their tight corsets. They’re causing serious damage to their ability to be baby makers” (though often these claims of harm had no evidence to support them, but were propagated because loud and powerful men have a disproportionately large impact). Fashion history as an academic discourse is relatively new, in large part because it is only relatively recently that it was able to gain enough respect to be understood as a valid field of academic inquiry. Even now though, it still occupies a marginalised position in the discourse (much like the women who made and wore these clothes, and the many women within this field of study).

      If you’ve read this far, then I earnestly thank you for your willingness to hear me out. Despite all I’ve written, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface. To bring it back to your statement that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional”, my TL;DR response is that this is a factually incorrect statement that I am challenging you on because this is the kind of misinformation that harms our modern understanding of the reality of historical corsets.

      I apologise if that’s a bit blunt. I certainly don’t blame you for holding this incorrect belief — like I said, these kinds of myths are so prevalent that they affect even high end modern corsetry. I wrote all of this because I felt it to be a part of my ethical duty to correct you, but also, I wanted to do it in a manner that would be conducive to learning. We’re both coming into this conversation with different lived experiences and cultural contexts, so it’s inevitable that there are going to be blind spots where we either hold inaccurate beliefs, or lack knowledge about cultures that we aren’t already rooted in. For instance, I never knew about Jnanadanandini Devi before reading the linked post, and I’m grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to learn something that’s far beyond the small facet of fashion history I’ve had a chance to study.

      I have more to say, but today I learned that Lemmy comments have a character limit. I will continue below.

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• untorquer@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Gaslighting is putting this in shitpost

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Eeh, they were always that prude?

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