Let’s travel back to the Bizarro World of the 1950s, where women were ashamed of being too thin

There’s some retroactive conflicting feelings generated by this ad. On the one hand, we should all applaud a time and place that didn’t pound body issues into women and plunge them into lifelong eating disorders — even though, in fairness, girdle ad after girdle ad, not to mention Kelpidine pep pills, were saying the exact opposite. On the other, this crap couldn’t have been healthy. A sawbuck says that this product’s nutritional label — if there was such a document — contained the words “100% pure cholesterol.”

And were you still supposed to cram all this lovely, ample flesh into a girdle? Or would said girdle be throwing off seams like a semi losing wheels on the highway?