Apparently, many decades ago, women used to use Lysol as a feminine hygiene product and contraceptive.
Holy crap.
Now, look, I understand the whole idea that the 50’s weren’t the most sexually and medically enlightened period, but, I mean, seriously??? Lysol was used for that? I mean, I would guess that modern Lysol is stronger and not the same formula as it was back then (I’m guessing), but even knowing that, I can not wrap my mind around such a thing. Who sees a can of Lysol and thinks, hey, that’d be great for cleaning my hoo-hah and preventing pregnancy?
It turns out that once upon a time, it was marketed as a feminine hygiene product. Of course, now it is used for household cleaning and we know that it should never be used as a hygiene or contraceptive product. EVER.
This shocking knowledge came from reading the post Squeaky Clean Restores Marital Harmony: Say What? over at Bombshells and Rockstars (they have excellent toy reviews, by the way). They even posted a graphic of an advertisement from that era that says, among other hilariously sad things, that a woman should question her hygiene if her husband’s love for her begins to cool. Oh, 1950’s, you so crazy. I mean, it’s bad enough that it was used as a contraceptive, but advising women to douche regularly? Ha!
But maybe we aren’t as enlightened as we’d like to think. A few weeks ago, I saw on a sex and health forum that I haunt that some people were still curious about douches. I told this to Husband, who immediately said, “Wait, aren’t those bad for you?”
All this led me over to a Chicago Tribune article entitled, 10 Things You Might Not Know About Contraceptives. A fantastic, sad, and hilarious read. My favorite is number seven, which said that women in the middle ages were advised to spit three times into the mouth of a frog to avoid pregnancy. Oh, middle ages, you also so crazy.