Persistent beauty standards—the flummoxing hourglass ideal for women’s bodies—may have been reinforced via societal duress, but the shape was obtained via the strictures of baleen: whale-buttressed garments, compressing women’s rib cages to a cinch. That we still have this body form as an archetype in culture is a legacy of whaling; the shrinking of the feminized figure at its waistline happened in lockstep with the vanishing of whales.
