https://web.archive.org/web/20190308191004/https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/dubious-history-chastity-belts/
https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/dubious-history-chastity-belts/
The page was up for several years, but apparently has been removed.
When I was age 10, I and my family were vacationing down in Florida, Miami Beach to be exact.
In the lobby of our hotel, there was a rack filled with tourist brochures. One of those tourist brochures was from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in Saint Augustine, Florida.
We did not actually visit the museum, however.
The brochure had a small picture, actually just a line drawing, of the chastity belt they had on display.
I remember asking my parents what it was, and that they were unable to give me a straight answer.
I could see that the belt was something that would be worn on the human body. I couldn’t tell whether I was supposed to put my penis through the narrow vertical slit, or the somewhat larger heart-shaped aperture which was nearly at waist level. (The line drawing looked somewhat different from the photo that’s currently on the page.)
I could see that it probably would have caused considerable pain in either case.
I guess I wasn’t completely up to spend on the differences between the male and female bodies at age 10.
I remember making a phone call to the museum back in 1992 or 1993 to ask if the belt was still on display. The woman who answered the phone told me that it was.
The Ripley’s “museum” is not really a “museum” in the same sense that the Smithsonian is a museum, or that the American Museum Of Natural History is a museum. It’s really more of a P. T. Barnum-style roadside attraction I guess.
