Beauty standards are largely based on supply-and demand trends.

Take a look at this video BuzzFeed produced, a walk through women's ideal body types in different eras of history.

Looking back to times of peasants and the cog-in-machine workers of the Industrial Revolution, according to the video, your ideal was:

- Italian Renaissance (1400-1500): Ample bosom, rounded stomach, full hips, fair skin.
- Victorian England (Late 1800s): Desirably plump, full figured, cinched waist.

The average factory worker or poor farmer’s wife has no hope of attaining that. It’s about status, wealth and the ability to achieve the “correct” look.

Compare that to the 1990s, specifically in America after the fast food revolution, and the standard is “Heroin Chic”- androgynous, waifish girls, extremely thin with translucent skin. But the majority of America is middle class or lower, and the reality is that affordable food is often less healthy, which is a lot of why modern American poverty tends to be strongly related to obesity.

More impossible still is “post-modern” beauty: A flat stomach and being “healthy skinny" are necessities, but large breasts and butt are equally valued. All that, plus a thigh gap. The onscreen text ominously warns that “many women use plastic surgery to achieve their desired look.” And this, what we’ve arrived at in the 21st century, is the epitome of non-attainability.

Recently, I’ve done a lot of reading about the female experience in American culture throughout many eras, and I came across a particularly fascinating point that I’ve been mulling over ever since.

In "The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls," Joan Jacobs Brumberg analysed a swath of diaries from adolescent girls from the 1880s to modern day, and she noticed something strange: girls don’t really mention watching their figures, dieting (or as it was called, “reducing”) systemically until the 1920s. "Clad in a variety of comfortable clothes, [...] my students [at Cornell] deplored the corset and lamented the constraints of Victorian society imposed on women. Clearly," she writes, "they considered themselves much better off." But are we?

In the book, Brumberg posits that while we look back on the 1900s as an oppressive, backward time when women were laced into steel-boned body shapers, we haven't really changed all that much in terms of the restrictions placed on the female body, and I have to agree. All we've done is exchange the external policing for internal policing.

Today, what women eat, how much they eat, and the shape, size and volume of their bodies are all heavily regulated, just not with whalebone and elastic. Instead, "most adolescent girls control their bodies from within, through dieting and exercise, rather than externally, with corsets and girdles."

So, are we really that much more free?

Discussion of Victorian and Edwardian fashions almost inevitable veer towards the modern bemoaning of corsetry and its restrictive and unhealthy hold on women, but rarely do we recognize the irony in these complaints. What does it mean, in our world where average-sized mannequins are criticized for "glorifying obesity," when we measure our liberation in the lack of corsets, girdles and body shapers women wear for daily life, but are at the same time deeply, restrictively conscious of our body shape and size? Women are still expected to have the perfect figure-eight shape, but, in the absence of the assistance of various garments that were present in generations before, the rigidity required to achieve the ideal female shape must come from within.

"American girls at the end of the 20th century actually suffer from body problems more pervasive and more dangerous than the constraints implied by the corset." - Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls" (x)

As an actress, I've worn a variety of historical undergarments, from a '50s girdle to a real, honest-to-gosh, hands-on-the-bedpost, gasping-for-breath corset, for extended periods of time, and it gives me unique insight on this particular issue.

Struggling to pull the constricting, resistant, elastic lace of a girdle up your sides, the bunched excess fabric digging painfully into your legs as you negotiate your unacceptable stomach into the confines of the garment and closer to the flat, firm goal it represents is an ordeal...

But it feels the same as trying on jeans in a fitting room, staring at every side of yourself in a 360 degree mirror as a litany of: gross ... disgusting ... failure ... humiliating ... runs on a loop inside your head.

The boning of a "merry widow" jabbing your flank and leaving angry red marks on your chest and back as you try to angle it to find some remotely comfortable position is agony...

But it feels the same as being stabbed in the pit of your stomach by a glimpse of yourself in the window of the subway car, and immediately adjusting and rearranging your bra, bra band, the front of your shirt and everything else you're wearing, an effective visual excuse for the body they house.

And having someone pull the laces of a corset tighter and tighter and tighter still, carving and compressing four, five, six, seven inches off your waist, until you're bracing yourself on a desk and barely able to breathe, every inhalation representing a goal and every exhalation a failure, is restrictive and constraining...

But the crushing, ever-present tension feels the same as I feel, every single day, when I walk our world in my female body.

The external forces physically controlling the body are not something women, on average, contend with every day, at least not in the same way they have in generations past. The internal forces, however, are just as restrictive and painful. I am aware of my body and its shortcomings and deviations from the ideal every second of every day. I dress to apologize for it or camouflage it. I cannot sit without arranging it in the most flattering possible pose, disguising its undesirable curves and accenting its coveted ones. I never eat without an acute awareness of the picture I and my body present, and the ways in which that action is inherently juxtaposed with my unavoidable exceeding departure from the size I should be. My internal monologue is on a Charles Dickens by-the-word salary, helpfully narrating and internalizing every possible criticism of my flesh vessel in a last-ditch effort to preemptively neutralize their devastatingly hurtful power.

So I ask you again: are we really better off, 100 years later?

Because I'll be honest:

The corset didn't feel all that different.