Panty Girdles and Merry Widows

It was another day, another time way back when girls wore girdles
in which we sat tightly confined—no jumping over hurdles
or doing other boy things like breathing with great ease—
as waist-cinchers contributed to our daily squeeze.

Our efforts for confinement may seem to you as needless,
but your suggestions way back then would have turned out heedless.
Emphatically, we all believed in our need for constriction.
Our bodies couldn’t just hang out. They called out for restriction.

And what we squeezed and corseted lest parts of us might flop–
those parts down on the bottom and the other parts on top?
Those assets that were hidden in the past by all the rest of us,
today, by the Kardashians, are revealed as the best of us!

Prompts for today are another day, suggest, needless, emphatic and effort. A 
merry widow, by the way, is what we called the corset pictured above.