We’re going way off-topic for this one. Some good advice, and bad advice, from days gone by. (After the jump.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this “magic powder” is probably not such a good idea.Good advice. Lions are large, wild animals.I’m going to say “good advice.” Be your freaky self.Very bad idea.Uh, good advice? I mean, what the heck, it’s decent cardio, and you’re probably not going to sprain anything.Bad idea. Just say no to peer pressure!Uh, good advice? I mean, if you’re both consenting adults and not in monogamous relationships with anyone else, why the heck not?What? Sure, it’s good to plan for all contingencies, but you’re creeping me the fuck out.Bad idea. If animals start ordering you to do things, DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. Animals cannot talk. Did you just take a massive dose of peyote? Try to remember.Uh, it’s dog food. It’s going to smell gross. Look on the internet to see what brands are safe and healthy like a normal person.I don’t know what the fuck is going on here but whatever you do, DO NOT DRINK ANY GROVE’S TASTELESS CHILL TONIC. I REPEAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT DRINK GROVE’S TONIC.
When I saw the “teach your wife to be a widow” one, I have to admit my first thought was: Great! There were too many cases where women were left helpless after their husband’s death, good that someone saw it as a bad thing and wanted men not to cause that.
I rather think the stories here reinforce that view.
Assuming, you know, that’s really what the book is about.
Lynne Daniels
9 years ago
I think the Teach Your Wife to be a Widow book is referenced in Lynn Peril’s Pink Think. I know I’ve heard of it before,and that’s the most likely place. The title is meant to be a grabber, and the contents are about letting a (possibly very sheltered) woman , who may have never held down a job in her life, know what to do in the event of her husband’s death. How to handle taxes,file insurance claims, stuff like that. In some homes, even non employed women handled all the finances, but in others , the man did everything and made pretty much all the decisions, and the book is meant for those women especially. Having to suddenly understand how to deal with financial contingencies and home maintenance while also wresting with grief is a terribly steep learning curve.
The reviewers insist on posting “humorous” reviews pretending it’s a how-to murder guide, but the rationale behind the book was certainly valid for that era:
Using amphetamine for weight loss is still less disturbing than purposely ingesting parasitic worms that live in the intestines and steal all your nutrients.
I’m honestly surprised that hasn’t come back in fashion. I read an essay once written by a woman who got infected with that parasite not on purpose. She became sick, malnourished and underweight. What happened? Other women were envious. She got increased male attention and it went untreated for a long time because the doctors kept gaslighting her and assuming she was anorexic and just needed to eat a sandwich.
Spindrift
9 years ago
@sunnysombrera “Evidence suggests that Redpillians don’t give a damn what happens to their wives and families even while they’re still alive.”
Some of them seem to care about making their wives miserable though, I guess that’s a sort of care. Just not a good kind.
Cthulhu's Intern
9 years ago
“Teach your wife to be a widow?” There’s an easy way to do that: die.
Mari
9 years ago
mildlymagnificent, I’d forgotten about the women who didn’t know how to drive. My parents taught two women, a widow and friend whose husband left suddenly, to drive. Not only had their husbands done all the driving, they’d convinced their wives it was some difficult skill beyond their feminine abilities. We weren’t aware of how controlling that tactic had been until Mom and Dad had to build up their self esteem just to get them into the DMV to apply for a learners permit. My parents made a good team, my mother being bracing and positive, while my father was endlessly patient and constantly pointing out the women in his life who were good drivers. He held me up as an example of someone who could not only drive but deal with a flat and change the oil, things he’d taught me to do.
When the divorced and cash-strapped woman got her license, my father announced he was buying himself a new car, walked her over to vehicle registration, and sold her his elderly but well-maintained Oldsmobile for $2. And now I’m sitting here thinking how much I still miss him and how much I owe him.
The story behind the term “snake oil” is fascinating. It’s used in traditional Chinese medicine, so it came to the US in the late 19th century with Chinese immigrants. US patent medicine sellers didn’t want the competition, so they spread the idea that snake oil was fake medicine sold by charlatans.
But here’s the interesting part. Snake oil, like fish oil, contains omega-3s, so it’s actually really good for you. And of course patent medicines were useless and sometimes harmful. So our term for “useless, harmful medicine” was created by the people who sold fake medicine and used to refer to real medicine!
Doh! I didn’t know the amphetamine one was fake. In my defense, there were a lot of really creepy and very very wrong drug ads in those days.
Have to agree with you there. Tapeworms for losing weight, vagina bleaching with Lysol, the reality is absurd enough for the fake to be believable. Curse you, Poe.
Irene
9 years ago
Is there actually evidence that the amphetamine ad is fake? The art could have been used twice.
Robert
9 years ago
Bile Beans sound distressing. Although, from what I’ve read, some foods with bitter qualities (e.g., collard greens) stimulate the gall bladder to release bile; this actually helps you digest fats. One of the reasons eating such foods, besides the nutrients.
There was a time, not so long ago, when doctors and dieticians believed that ‘non-nutritive fiber’ was unnecessary, possibly even detrimental to health. I can believe that someone eating a diet rich in meat and dairy, but devoid of fiber, would become concerned about bowel function.
Curious thing about intestinal parasites; there is some evidence that they influence the human immune response. Since a vigorous immune system would destroy them, they secrete biochemicals that damp it down. Experimental use of deliberately introduced parasites has reduced the severity of conditions such as Crohn’s disease.
Ellesar
9 years ago
Robert – it is thought that the rise in allergies is in part due to us having virtually no intestinal parasites now.
Jarnsaxa
9 years ago
There are still plenty of elderly widows out there who don’t know how to put gasoline in their cars, because their husbands did all that. Fortunately there are still a few places where they fill your tank for you…
Ellesar
9 years ago
I have been thinking about the widow thing. I think that there must be quite a cultural difference here in the UK as we used to have, for working class families, the practice of the male wage earner giving nearly all or all of his wage packet to his wife to manage totally. There was no question that she would not manage it better than he.
Widowhood was still a major disaster though, as if the wage earner died his widow could not hope to earn more than half of what he had.
Georgina Hale
9 years ago
My 1910 Everywoman’s Encyclopaedia has many useful homemade cosmetic recipes – all based on healthful white lead (lead carbonate)
Indeed. There was once a fascinating interview with Les Dawson. He spoke about his “Cissy & Ada” characters. He had a lot to sat about how working class communities, especially Northern ones, were essentially matriarchal.
It was interesting how this all tied in with the tradition of “mother-in-law” jokes.
At one time (mostly in the 50s and earlier) it was widely believed that “regularity”, meaning not only that one must shit every day but at the same time every day, was essential to health. I overheard many discussions about the fact that my grandmother (who died when I was 11) had become a laxative addict late in life. Apparently this was a common problem — people trying to be more “regular” than their bodies were set up to be would take regular doses of more and more powerful laxatives, the effect of each one wearing off with time, forcing the sufferer to go up a notch.
In those days there was a lot of belief in regimenting and scheduling things. Dr. Spock became influential for the parents of the boomer generation because he suggested the radical idea that infants should be fed when they were hungry — that perhaps they knew instinctively when they needed to be fed. Previously it had been thought that unless you held infant feedings strictly to an arbitrary schedule it would irreparably damage the child in some unspecified manner.
There were a lot of ideas that did not survive the 60s — if they even got there in the first place. A lot of the turmoil of the 60s was blamed by conservatives on the “permissive” upbringing promoted by Dr. Spock, who responded by getting himself indicted and tried for counseling draft evasion.
Banana Jackie Cake, the Best Jackie and Cake! Yum! (^v^)
9 years ago
@GrumpyOldMangina
Laxative addiction…
…
Okay then
Banana Jackie Cake, the Best Jackie and Cake! Yum! (^v^)
9 years ago
@GrumpyOldMangina
I’m not trying to dismiss it, I just really need a better insight on how the hell laxatives can be addicting? Well, I guess something doesn’t need an addictive property to become addicting, but it’s just REALLY weird to think that laxatives can be addictive.
Banana Jackie Cake, the Best Jackie and Cake! Yum! (^v^)
9 years ago
@GrumpyOldMangina
And also not have laxative addiction in the context of an eating disorder but just keeping your bowels moving and shit.
It’s not a true addiction, of course, but if you take a laxative every day for an extended period the effect wears off and you have to go to increasingly stronger laxatives. It is quite possible that extended use of laxatives does interfere with the normal functioning of the bowels, but I don’t know of any evidence for this. The period I’m talking about is one in which the importance of dietary fiber was not understood, so probably the underlying problem was that she just didn’t have enough fiber in her diet. I understand that today laxative abuse is associated with eating disorders, but the obsession with having a bowel movement every day at the same time has mostly disappeared.
On the other hand, here’s our old pal Dr. Oz: “And finally, you’ve got to toilet train yourself. I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got to get on a routine. It works. It works for kids. It works for adults. You’ve got to go to the bathroom the same time everyday. You’ve got to train yourself. If you are not ready to go, push yourself a little bit, work at it a little bit. When you are regular, it’s heaven.”
So apparently the idea is not quite dead yet. Although given the “quality” of Dr. Oz’s advice in general; …
Robert
9 years ago
From what I’ve read, laxative ‘addiction’ can happen when someone uses them (especially the powerful chemical ones, e.g. phenolphthalein or magnesium citrate) regularly.* The GI tract, for some reason, becomes dependent on the artificial stimulus; when the user stops using, natural peristalsis fails to commence.
So you wind up having to dose yourself, or you experience even more severe constipation.
This was one of the selling points of Swiss Kriss, Gaylord Hauser’s first product. It was senna extracts in a base of powdered herbs, promoted as a safe, natural alternative to the harsh laxatives then popular. Louis Armstrong was a fan.
I found this on Wikipedia concerning stimulant laxatives, which were much more heavily used in my grandmother’s time:
“They are the most powerful among laxatives and should be used with care. Prolonged use of stimulant laxatives can create drug dependence by damaging the colon’s haustral folds, making a user less able to move feces through the colon on their own. A study of patients with chronic constipation found that 28% of chronic stimulant laxative users lost haustral folds over the course of one year, while none of the control group did.”
When I saw the “teach your wife to be a widow” one, I have to admit my first thought was: Great! There were too many cases where women were left helpless after their husband’s death, good that someone saw it as a bad thing and wanted men not to cause that.
I rather think the stories here reinforce that view.
Assuming, you know, that’s really what the book is about.
I think the Teach Your Wife to be a Widow book is referenced in Lynn Peril’s Pink Think. I know I’ve heard of it before,and that’s the most likely place. The title is meant to be a grabber, and the contents are about letting a (possibly very sheltered) woman , who may have never held down a job in her life, know what to do in the event of her husband’s death. How to handle taxes,file insurance claims, stuff like that. In some homes, even non employed women handled all the finances, but in others , the man did everything and made pretty much all the decisions, and the book is meant for those women especially. Having to suddenly understand how to deal with financial contingencies and home maintenance while also wresting with grief is a terribly steep learning curve.
The reviewers insist on posting “humorous” reviews pretending it’s a how-to murder guide, but the rationale behind the book was certainly valid for that era:
http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Wife-Be-Widow/dp/B000BK2F9S/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430657403&sr=1-1&keywords=teach+your+wife+to+be+a+widow
Evidence suggests that Redpillians don’t give a damn what happens to their wives and families even while they’re still alive. :/
Unfortunately, amphetamine works for weightless 🙂
@Sunnysombrera,
true, sadly true.
Using amphetamine for weight loss is still less disturbing than purposely ingesting parasitic worms that live in the intestines and steal all your nutrients.
I’m honestly surprised that hasn’t come back in fashion. I read an essay once written by a woman who got infected with that parasite not on purpose. She became sick, malnourished and underweight. What happened? Other women were envious. She got increased male attention and it went untreated for a long time because the doctors kept gaslighting her and assuming she was anorexic and just needed to eat a sandwich.
@sunnysombrera “Evidence suggests that Redpillians don’t give a damn what happens to their wives and families even while they’re still alive.”
Some of them seem to care about making their wives miserable though, I guess that’s a sort of care. Just not a good kind.
“Teach your wife to be a widow?” There’s an easy way to do that: die.
mildlymagnificent, I’d forgotten about the women who didn’t know how to drive. My parents taught two women, a widow and friend whose husband left suddenly, to drive. Not only had their husbands done all the driving, they’d convinced their wives it was some difficult skill beyond their feminine abilities. We weren’t aware of how controlling that tactic had been until Mom and Dad had to build up their self esteem just to get them into the DMV to apply for a learners permit. My parents made a good team, my mother being bracing and positive, while my father was endlessly patient and constantly pointing out the women in his life who were good drivers. He held me up as an example of someone who could not only drive but deal with a flat and change the oil, things he’d taught me to do.
When the divorced and cash-strapped woman got her license, my father announced he was buying himself a new car, walked her over to vehicle registration, and sold her his elderly but well-maintained Oldsmobile for $2. And now I’m sitting here thinking how much I still miss him and how much I owe him.
The story behind the term “snake oil” is fascinating. It’s used in traditional Chinese medicine, so it came to the US in the late 19th century with Chinese immigrants. US patent medicine sellers didn’t want the competition, so they spread the idea that snake oil was fake medicine sold by charlatans.
But here’s the interesting part. Snake oil, like fish oil, contains omega-3s, so it’s actually really good for you. And of course patent medicines were useless and sometimes harmful. So our term for “useless, harmful medicine” was created by the people who sold fake medicine and used to refer to real medicine!
Have to agree with you there. Tapeworms for losing weight, vagina bleaching with Lysol, the reality is absurd enough for the fake to be believable. Curse you, Poe.
Is there actually evidence that the amphetamine ad is fake? The art could have been used twice.
Bile Beans sound distressing. Although, from what I’ve read, some foods with bitter qualities (e.g., collard greens) stimulate the gall bladder to release bile; this actually helps you digest fats. One of the reasons eating such foods, besides the nutrients.
There was a time, not so long ago, when doctors and dieticians believed that ‘non-nutritive fiber’ was unnecessary, possibly even detrimental to health. I can believe that someone eating a diet rich in meat and dairy, but devoid of fiber, would become concerned about bowel function.
Curious thing about intestinal parasites; there is some evidence that they influence the human immune response. Since a vigorous immune system would destroy them, they secrete biochemicals that damp it down. Experimental use of deliberately introduced parasites has reduced the severity of conditions such as Crohn’s disease.
Robert – it is thought that the rise in allergies is in part due to us having virtually no intestinal parasites now.
There are still plenty of elderly widows out there who don’t know how to put gasoline in their cars, because their husbands did all that. Fortunately there are still a few places where they fill your tank for you…
I have been thinking about the widow thing. I think that there must be quite a cultural difference here in the UK as we used to have, for working class families, the practice of the male wage earner giving nearly all or all of his wage packet to his wife to manage totally. There was no question that she would not manage it better than he.
Widowhood was still a major disaster though, as if the wage earner died his widow could not hope to earn more than half of what he had.
My 1910 Everywoman’s Encyclopaedia has many useful homemade cosmetic recipes – all based on healthful white lead (lead carbonate)
@ Ellesar
Indeed. There was once a fascinating interview with Les Dawson. He spoke about his “Cissy & Ada” characters. He had a lot to sat about how working class communities, especially Northern ones, were essentially matriarchal.
It was interesting how this all tied in with the tradition of “mother-in-law” jokes.
At one time (mostly in the 50s and earlier) it was widely believed that “regularity”, meaning not only that one must shit every day but at the same time every day, was essential to health. I overheard many discussions about the fact that my grandmother (who died when I was 11) had become a laxative addict late in life. Apparently this was a common problem — people trying to be more “regular” than their bodies were set up to be would take regular doses of more and more powerful laxatives, the effect of each one wearing off with time, forcing the sufferer to go up a notch.
In those days there was a lot of belief in regimenting and scheduling things. Dr. Spock became influential for the parents of the boomer generation because he suggested the radical idea that infants should be fed when they were hungry — that perhaps they knew instinctively when they needed to be fed. Previously it had been thought that unless you held infant feedings strictly to an arbitrary schedule it would irreparably damage the child in some unspecified manner.
There were a lot of ideas that did not survive the 60s — if they even got there in the first place. A lot of the turmoil of the 60s was blamed by conservatives on the “permissive” upbringing promoted by Dr. Spock, who responded by getting himself indicted and tried for counseling draft evasion.
@GrumpyOldMangina
Laxative addiction…
…
Okay then
@GrumpyOldMangina
I’m not trying to dismiss it, I just really need a better insight on how the hell laxatives can be addicting? Well, I guess something doesn’t need an addictive property to become addicting, but it’s just REALLY weird to think that laxatives can be addictive.
@GrumpyOldMangina
And also not have laxative addiction in the context of an eating disorder but just keeping your bowels moving and shit.
It’s not a true addiction, of course, but if you take a laxative every day for an extended period the effect wears off and you have to go to increasingly stronger laxatives. It is quite possible that extended use of laxatives does interfere with the normal functioning of the bowels, but I don’t know of any evidence for this. The period I’m talking about is one in which the importance of dietary fiber was not understood, so probably the underlying problem was that she just didn’t have enough fiber in her diet. I understand that today laxative abuse is associated with eating disorders, but the obsession with having a bowel movement every day at the same time has mostly disappeared.
On the other hand, here’s our old pal Dr. Oz: “And finally, you’ve got to toilet train yourself. I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got to get on a routine. It works. It works for kids. It works for adults. You’ve got to go to the bathroom the same time everyday. You’ve got to train yourself. If you are not ready to go, push yourself a little bit, work at it a little bit. When you are regular, it’s heaven.”
So apparently the idea is not quite dead yet. Although given the “quality” of Dr. Oz’s advice in general; …
From what I’ve read, laxative ‘addiction’ can happen when someone uses them (especially the powerful chemical ones, e.g. phenolphthalein or magnesium citrate) regularly.* The GI tract, for some reason, becomes dependent on the artificial stimulus; when the user stops using, natural peristalsis fails to commence.
So you wind up having to dose yourself, or you experience even more severe constipation.
This was one of the selling points of Swiss Kriss, Gaylord Hauser’s first product. It was senna extracts in a base of powdered herbs, promoted as a safe, natural alternative to the harsh laxatives then popular. Louis Armstrong was a fan.
*Pun intended.
I found this on Wikipedia concerning stimulant laxatives, which were much more heavily used in my grandmother’s time:
“They are the most powerful among laxatives and should be used with care. Prolonged use of stimulant laxatives can create drug dependence by damaging the colon’s haustral folds, making a user less able to move feces through the colon on their own. A study of patients with chronic constipation found that 28% of chronic stimulant laxative users lost haustral folds over the course of one year, while none of the control group did.”