man-adjacent individual who is going to be okay

———

There is no such thing as the shape of a woman; there is only the shape of an era. And in every era, there is a dictatorship, and this dictatorship is always – without exception – defined by the eyes of men. 

In Ancient Greece, Hesiod named the first created woman the kalon kakon. The ‘beautiful-evil thing’. To be a beautiful man in Greece was to be a blessing; to be a beautiful woman was to be a curse. And beauty was defined by mathematics – Pythagoras’ golden ratio. Helen of Troy’s gilded symmetry made her distracting and lethal, the ruination of the male species. 

During the Renaissance, women were expected to be pale and voluptuous. A well-endowed bust was the signature of wealth. They sat in the ambered summer sun, turning their hair flaxen with lemon and alum. Painted pink with toxicity, lounging hairless and soft-limbed. 

Tudor women were full-figured fertility symbols, but not overtly sensual. Elizabethan women wore ‘a pair of bodies’, stays of buckram and baleen, busks of wood or ivory. They were laced and cinched into a conical shape.

Early Georgian stays were narrow-waisted and flat-chested. Drawn out over the stomach and paired with panniers, to extend a woman’s hips into miniature horizons. Laced at the back by a second pair of poorer hands, because God forbid a lady should steward her own prison. 

And then a king went mad, and time tumbled into the Regency. 

The Empire silhouette necessitates a shapeless, pillar-like stature; dresses do not cling to a woman’s waist or hips. She should be slim, but not too slim; her posture perfectly erect; natural, save for a rosebud flush. Unblemished and pearlescent, a vision of cleanliness and temperance. And, unlike the ladies before her, her stays should force her breasts to near-shoulder height, rounded and focal.

Half-stays have less boning. They are, supposedly, more comfortable than vintage corsetry. Satoru still thinks they’re objects of torment. Unbearable – but then, isn’t everything?

(Sometimes, he imagines unthreading that long length of cotton cord and asphyxiating himself with it. With enough pressure and conviction, it might turn vicious as a garotte. Slice his throat clean in half, sodden his half-stays with blood.) 

“Miss Gojo.” Amanai stands behind him, that rancid title twisting her mouth. She holds the lacing in each hand as though they are reins and Satoru a skittish mare. “Are you comfortable? Is the fit too tight?” 

Satoru stands with his arms braced against the dressing table. He tilts his chin down and regards his bust with the sort of lurid dispassion reserved for carrion. The busk is already digging hard into the hollow part of his sternum, acute; the shelf his breasts make forcibly plump. He’s being strained into a shape he isn’t. If Amanai were to loosen the stays just a little, he might be able to tuck them surreptitiously away into something less conspicuous…

“Tighter,” his mother says from his bedroom doorway. Stiff, immovable. Immaculate – cornflower silk dress embroidered with white edelweiss, silvery coiffure pinned towards the back of her crown, stray ringlets artfully falling over one shoulder. Gojo Eiko, perpetually a picture of power and grace, to the point Satoru wonders if it could be considered chronic as consumption. “Your chest has always left a vast deal to be desired.” 

Satoru considers his breasts more than ample, but then, if he could score them wholly from his body, he would. “Surely a fault of my parentage,” he grumbles, just as Amanai tugs on the laces, the trim running across his shoulder blades biting.

Eiko kisses her teeth, but says nothing as Amanai finishes tying off his stays. She steps back to fetch his petticoat, and then his outer gown. A sheer, ivory muslin with whitework embroidery, so that the fabric turns to pale spider lilies in the light. Sweetness and purity in Hanakotoba, the Japanese language of flowers. 

Perfect for his debut. 

He turns to find his mother beside him, pinching one of his curls between her forefinger and thumb. She tugs on it, harsh, and sighs with great feeling. “How is it you appear persistently unkempt?” she asks. She retrieves the boar bristle brush from the dressing table and pushes him down by the shoulders onto the ottoman opposite. Her ministrations are anything but gentle as she tugs the tangles from his hair, but when she’s finished, it falls over his shoulders like the finest cirrus. It’s only then that something rare and tender crosses her face. “Oh, Renge,” she coos, fingers ghosting along the smooth cut of his jaw, the pink safflower staining his cheeks. “You must wear the silk nemophilas, to match your eyes. Do you agree, Amanai?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Satoru’s hair is gathered into a baby blue garden. The nemophilas do match his eyes, startlingly well; it’s as though two further flowers bloom inside of them, composed of the flimsiest petals, hollow pistils at their centre. The style they choose is loose, tousled, softening his sharp bone structure. He blinks and feels himself detach entirely.   

(In the mirror, sits a woman. Magnificent as starlight, worthy of a thousand tributes. He thinks perhaps he can hear her screaming, battering against his ribcage, churning him into leaden nausea. But her mouth doesn’t move. She stares and stares and stares, and Satoru can only stare back.)