Over at American Times, beard enthusiast and first-among-LOOG-equals E.D. Kain reminds American women of a happier time, when they could gorge themselves on ironized yeast in hopes of turning into Jayne Mansfield.
But lest the League‘s distaff readership pine too hard for happier days, I feel obligated to remind them that the middle of the last century wasn’t all strolls on the beach. It also held this harsh reality:
That’s right, sisters. Your lady-bits were apparently such a teeming, pestilential hazard that there was little to do but flush them with Lysol. As in, the household cleanser. (Sadly, not all women heeded this prudent advice, and their disgusted, frustrated husbands were forced to leave them. They eventually formed colonies in Key West, Chelsea and the Castro district of San Francisco.)
Another one after the jump.
That’s right, housewives! Your husbands shun you because of your foul, foul private anatomy. (That must be the reason you “spend the evenings alone.”) The only hope is to clean like the dickens with the same stuff you use to scrub the toilets.
(I came across this priceless bit of Americana a few years ago, after discovering a really old bottle of Lysol in a forgotten utility closet at work. There were instructions on the label for various uses, including “personal hygiene.” Google confirmed what my unbelieving eyes told me. Suddenly I had a whole new appreciation for Betty Friedan.)
Yowzas. What were they thinking?
(Oh, yeah, “they” were thinking they could manipulate womens’ irrational anxieties to move product.)
You don’t suppose any women actually, you know, did this? What would happen? It couldn’t possibly be a good thing to do.
I am sure that some women did this. How many, I have no idea. But there must have been some women who thought that this was an important part of their… um… upkeep.
What would happen if a woman did this? A gross disruption in the normal physiology and bacterial flora of the vagina. This could lead to overgrowth of pathological bacteria, or a rip-snorting yeast infection of the non-ironized variety.
And thus a second chance to move more product!
“What would happen if a woman did this? A gross disruption in the normal physiology and bacterial flora of the vagina. This could lead to overgrowth of pathological bacteria, or a rip-snorting yeast infection of the non-ironized variety.”
My guess is that this would be the least of their problems; I imagine that there’d be severe irritation and inflammation.
Yeah, I wrote my reply in a bit of a hurry. “Gross disruption in normal physiology” was meant to communicate the same thing as “severe irritation and inflammation,” but wasn’t as precise as I meant to me.
It should be noted that the Lysol of then is very different than what’s marketed now. But it was still an antiseptic household cleanser that should have come nowhere near a woman’s vagina.
I presume that the instructions provided for douching included heavy dilution, perhaps to the point where the result was basically water.
I didn’t go to the trouble of mixing the old Lysol to the recommended concentration (though I still have the bottle, having found it too fascinating to discard). If I recall correctly, it was certainly meant to be diluted, but not so much that it was chemically inactive (essentially “homeopathic” dosing).