The Chastity Belt
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A deathless popular myth, but one echoed also
in achademic publicationes, mystifies these devices. The fable will have
it that they served to ensure the fidelity of wives during long absences
of husbands, and particularly –no one knows why, considering that we
have no documentary evidence to support such a notion– af the wives of
knights-crusaders about to depart for the Holy Land.
Perhaps sometimes, but never by way of normal usage, “fidelity"” was thus “ensured” for brief periods, for a few hours or a couple of days –never for any greater length of time. A woman thus locked up would soon fall prey to death from the sepsis caused by unremovable toxic accumulations, not to speak of the abrasions and lacerations caused by the rubbing of the iron, nor of the possibility of an incipient pregnancy. |
| The prevalent use of the belt was in reality
a very different one: viz., that of forming a barrier against rape, a
frail barrier and yet a sufficient one under certain conditions: in
times of the quartering of soldiers in town, during overnight stays in
inns, on journeys generally. We know from many testimonies that women
locked themselves into the belt on their own initiative, a fact that
some old Sicilian and Spanish women alive today will still remember.
Thus a question arises: the belt is or is not a torture instrument? And the answer is an unequivocal yes, because this humiliation, this outrage to the body and the spirit, is imposed by terror of the male, by fear of suffering at the will of the masculine nature. |
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