Contraceptives and Hygiene Get Hilarious.

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.