Did the Victorians Think Ankles Were Too Scandalous?

The thing about legs that makes ME faint is the thought that if someone has legs, that usually implies that they have gasp something BETWEEN them! 😵‍💫

If one is genuinely to believe the Victorian covered piano legs out of some kind of modesty then one has apparently missed most of the art that came out out of that period

what an amazing video, especially your takes at the end. your videos have made me think about a lot lately as someone who wasn't too interested in history before i came across your channel. i never liked history in school because it seemed so dry and never made us really question anything. but the way you present things literally changes my worldview in profound and liberating ways, so thank you.

Not a fan of some hawty posh queen that exploited irish and other immigrants to build the country in horrible conditions? But c'mon she pushed back and tried to mask child work exploration as well as poor repression to say the obvious. But the giga Chads and kates love her☹️ wealthy bored people exploiting the poor with the Advent of film birthed a pornography boom 😮 shocker. Nothing has changed.

As to the idea of making fun of the past so that you feel better, you forgot the really big one of the Renaissance coining the term Dark Ages.

I saw a picture of a 1940's Southern California beach where women had their swimsuits measured to make sure that is was not too higher than their knees.

Ankles? lol, it was the time were mathematicians died over angles!

❤

Omg. "Call the National Guard!" I died.

Thank you for saying that about my ankles it really means a lot.

you have influenced my style and how i dresss god i love dressing in vests and all that fancy stuff

Super random: I don’t understand when people don’t appreciate who they are and their individuality. Seems like back in the old days people liked to be too much like each other. Even with making sure you are straight 🤣. Like yall can be lgbt fr. Yall can enjoy your own music. Everyone needs to be themselves fr

I’ve been to the Museum of Sex in Amsterdam, and if those artifacts and photos are any hint, ankles were hardly the sexiest thing Victorian men were focused on. They had…imagination.

I think you just cured my desire to be remembered by history

Your DIY bowdlerizations are SUPERB!

My ankles are indeed tré sexy.

Feet. If they have ankles, they have feet. You didn't say it, so I had to.

My understanding of the whole "Victorians were so prudish but also nasty" paradox is the simple principle that all that extreme hedonism behind closed doors just wouldn't be any fun if it wasn't naughty.

The whole point of Victorian repession in public was that one could give the outward appearance of being "holier than thou" and keep up that practicing-Christian virtuous façade, cultivating the respectable and pious (read: "uptight") bearing befitting the regal imperial British image. After all, one had to show one's moral superiority to the rest of the world, or the heathen foreigners might think Britain was no more cultured than anywhere else!

But in private, it was a titillating prospect to do all the things which polite society wouldn't allow... your "Eyes Wide Shut" orgies and Red Room antics were fun and sexy in themselves, sure, but it added an extra frisson if you imagined the horrified looks on the neighbours' faces if they ever found out. Except, of course, your neighbours had their own weird proclivities... so to keep the whole charade going so that everyone could enjoy it, everyone pretended that they were the only ones doing dirty deeds in the boudoir and that everyone else was as virtuous and vanilla as they seemed. You kept things secret and repressed when you were in polite society and made a performance of being shocked and appalled at even the slightest evidence of "sexual deviancy" because it was just what you did in "polite society," but secretly you knew that you had done things just as nasty but you hadn't been caught.

The ironic thing is, what started out as performative prudishness to keep the excitement going was so pervasive that when it came to all the pearl-clutching at the younger generation's behaviour, it was such a universally-kept secret that it all got taken as fact, so that the children and grandchildren of all those thirsty freaks ended up believing that the prudish front was how you were actually expected to act, and by the end of the Victorian era this was how people actually thought rather than it all being a game of "How saucy can I be in private and get away with it...?" This resulted in later generations being genuinely this prudish about sex (at least in mainstream polite society) rather than just being performative about it as an open secret.

(I have no sources for all this, by the way - this is just my understanding and theorising to square the paradoxial behaviour in my mind. But while it's all circumstantial at best, I feel like it explains so much about all the freaky Victorian sex stuff being committed by such a notiriously prudish society.)

I wonder if hundreds of years from now, historians will base us all on some influencer’s ice restock or 12 step skincare routine…

The 1920s literally had their own version of ok boomer humor 😭💀. People never change.

Loved the video !

"vagoinus" now entering my lexicon forever...

Great now I’m hungry 🌽

Of all the words you edited to avoid being canceled, the concept of nuance may be the most likely to start riots.
Lol

Man I love creators that make me question my assumptions especially when it comes to history. Love your content and love the prospective you offer! It’s hard to find content that is both exciting and grows your brain so from the bottom of my heart, thank you for creating content that is dopamine source that I can indulge in without the sting of regretting the brain rot I inflicted upon myself. Can’t wait to see more of your stuff!

You are not "assigned female at birth", you either are female or male and doctors just write it down because that's a deterministic, objective, binary biological fact, and it's 99% of the times unambiguously observable. Love the video but this is also what it looks like today to live in a society desperately trying to feel superior to older societies by coming up with ludicrous, pseudoscientific concepts mistakenly meant to be freeing and progressive.

So in a hundred or so years they are all going to think we were eating tide pods and getting BBLs... Lovely

Can't handle that Victorian man bussin it down scandalous style in the beginning 😂

I do indeed have the most beautiful ankles of them all

"noted rat from the sewer..." a throwaway line that requires some explanation.

What you're describing here is what I call the Keith Richards effect - a joke becomes pervasive enough to cannibalise serious commentary. It's always a relief to see someone trying to reverse that process. Keep fighting the good fight.

Great video! I am busy catching up on your past work. So well presented, creative and comprehensive! My mom always said of her grandmother (born in Victorian England), that she had nothing between neck and feet. Modesty is a total understatement. From my perspective looking back at her, I feel like she seemed to be hiding, in the shadows and suspect. I think that pressure, which developed to the point of paranoia in some individuals, was put upon the working middle class women who were always subject to some level of judgement, church, society, parents or husband whatever, but it was 24/7 and in all aspects of life. It was all about control of course. There was a standard, which probably was a reflection of the upper class standard, which was a rigid 'way' to live and be. I know in my family the grave concern of what others would think, that detached control of behaviour, lived on in some form for generations. Only in my 30's was I able to start recognizing and rejecting these concepts, ridiculous now, but at least I could see where they came from.

I don't have much reference for this sort of thing. I only remember that there's a part of Les Misérables where Marius gets worked up seeing Cosette's calf in public (from the wind blowing her skirt up), especially with the idea of other men possibly seeing it, but I don't get the impression that Victor Hugo was presenting him as reacting in a very "normal" way, especially because later, after he's actually talked with Cosette, he feels embarrassed about the idea of recounting his feelings of that moment at that time in his life when he was so caught up in his emotions and obsessive. Marius is a really awkward, sometimes silly young fellow.

Pygmalion / My Fair Lady is a good example of the difference in expected behavior for women between classes at the tail end of the Victorian period. Eliza's freedom of dress, expression, and movement are greatly restricted as she learns how to be a "lady". She gives up free laughter, speech, association, and even her ability to have a job, to rise in the class system and escape poverty.

This video was so very good but I can't get over the Victorian man throwing it back 😭

Love your suspenders😊

I made it to the end, and I have to say I'll be flashing my ankles only at strangers thank you very much

I know what you mean when you say corn, but my brain refuses to stop showing me images of body parts made of corn. The feet are the weirdest

Annie Oakley was very savvy in that she'd give the audience just enough of a glimpse of her ankles without being scandalous.

To be fair, "thicc" is the working classes idea of the "perfect woman". The weight of the "perfect woman" varies based on food supply. When you have nothing, you want your woman morbidly obese (upper Paleolithic figurines). When you have everything, you want thin women (evalangelical church current age, twiggy current age).

Reminds me in V Wolfe's Orlando, when Orlando had become a woman, she had carelessly let her angle show causing some poor sailor to fall to his death.

I think that a lot of people who believe in the ‘sexy ankles’ myth don’t know the difference between finding something attractive and finding something extremely sexy. For example, in modern day you might find someone’s collarbones to be attractive, but you wouldn’t be unable to control yourself at the sight. Similarly, many Victorian men would have found women’s ankles to be attractive, but would not have had a strong reaction to seeing them.