Hello, my dears. It’s been a while. I’ve had a birthday, had my website hacked, then unhacked, done a lot of sleeping and gardening and enjoyed the brief heatwave. Now, I’m back and want to give you something pretty to look at. Here’s one of Jean Paul Gaultier’s new designs for Madonna to wear on stage during her upcoming tour.

From Harper’s Bazaar:

‘We played with the ideas of a suit and corset. But the corset is now like a cage,’ Gaultier revealed to American press last night. ‘It’s all about masculine and feminine, Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier classics reinterpreted for 2012.’

All about dominance and submission too, I notice. The corset is a contradictory item of clothing in the fetish world. Having been shed by flappers in the ’20s as a sort of physical and symbolic emancipation, the corset increasingly came to represent societal constraint over womankind’s bodies and minds. While mainstream feminism tore off the corset, contemporary femdom embraced it.

The go-to item of clothing for most dominatrices is the corset. It’s become part of our stereotypical image. Our corsets squeeze our bodies into pinched toothpaste-tubes of exaggerated femininity, pushing our breasts, hips and buttocks out to a position of visual prominence that no cowering subby’s gaze could possibly avoid. Our sexual power is inescapable in our corsets. Yet they’re uncomfortable. They’re impractical. The Urban Chick Supremacy Cell, with tongue tucked very slightly into cheek, shuns them as garments of oppression by the patriarchy.

So, is the corset dominant or submissive, a garment of female power or female oppression? Well, it depends on a person’s choice and motivation for wearing it. Madonna’s corset seems to combine the two. Those pointy boobs and enormous hips suggest femdom, yet the cage exterior reminds me of whatever the full-torso equivalent of a chap’s chastity cage would be.

Beloved reader, what do you think?