Punishment Dress
From the highly sought after Phoenix 14, with superb illustrations by Hans Braun. In the span of history, until relatively recently, a beating was given across the bare flesh, and dress had a significance limited to the procedures and drama of its removal. Before the great change, the chances were that a victim would be crudely stripped and flogged without more ado, but, if dress played any part at all, it was as an agent of humiliation rather than as a layer of protection: a soldier was the more shamed by being stripped of his full-dress uniform and, by the same token, many a principal of a girls’ school would choose an occasion when the girls were in their ‘Sunday Best’ to take out one of their numbers for the enforced exposure that preceded a bare bottom birching. The ‘great change’ was scarcely more than a hundred years ago — in the middle of the nineteenth century — when a supposed Victorian morality, and an even more suspe