Oh the Dirty, Stupid Past. Again. Shouting Ahead ...

They're at it again, our bigoted contemporaries, crowing all the most deliciously lurid lies about The Stupid, Stupid Past.  Everyone was dirty, diseased, smelly - "and ignorant," says the obvious subtext.

Look, I won't say the scent of the world didn't have a whole different relativity in times gone by.  I've pointblank stated it did.  However, to pretend that the ubiquity of chemical perfume and CONSTANT water-and-detergent ablution is the only definition of clean, or means by which a human body may be maintained properly is beyond idiotic, it is offensive.  See also:  other cultures, which place a premium on cleanliness, and STILL do not submit to this manner of regimen.

Cleanliness can be managed in many ways.  It isn't limited to our hair.  The reality of human life has ALWAYS fallen along a spectrum rarely addressed or represented properly in 20th-21st century entertainment

How I wish the article Madame Isis wrote debunking the terrors of lead-based makeup were still to be had, so I could point out its cogent research.

How I wish, too, that people insisting upon writing about The Past would do audiences the service of remembering:  England, America, and/or Europe DO NOT COMPRISE THE ENTIRETY OF HISTORY.  Southern hemispheric indiginous peoples, islanders, Asians, subcontinentals, Africans, middle-Easterners - all people of color and origins outside the western north - were not imaginary supporting players waiting around in some sort of cosmic waiting room for the twentieth century to come along so they could exist or have voices.

Even Europeans - it's a misnomer to call the instrument of personal relief a "gravy boat" (and ridiculous).  It's overly sensational to yip about DEATH BY LEAD MAKEUP - which, as the lady above could have told us (and did - if only that link were still extant!), could tell us is a poorly researched contention indeed - and vermin-infested hair.  Even to crow, from our presumed self-superiority, about how laundresses only cleaned clothing once a month is both inappropriate blanket presumption, but also a misunderstanding of the methods of freshening garments which could not have been dunked in a river (see also:  MODERN DRY CLEANING).

Too many people currently straddle the most bizarre set of beliefs both about how incredibly gross and outre' people once were - and simultaneously, how repressed and backward they were because of that/morality.  As a reader of historical research, texts, and fiction, I get so very tired of the whole "oh The Stupid, Stupid Past" bigotry, which posits our own world as some sort of pristine paradise.

It isn't.  Any more than The Past was utterly, irredeemably the opposite.

Ask any hipster who thinks a filthy beard is invisible to the women he can't understand not sleeping with him.  And ask that one girl I know why she hollered at them recently, "A SPRITZ OF AX BODY SPRAY DOES NOT SUBSTITUTE FOR A SHOWER!!!!" to the actual, literal applause of all the other young women present.

It doesn't require centuries-old history to find slovenly, repellant human behavior.  And it isn't reasonable to slot ALL of history into such a category.