Wasn’t there something about this as late as the 1970s or maybe even the 1980s? A scientist swearing he had proof that menstruating women made food go rotten or something, a whole study and paper? I remember someone bringing it up a few years ago, in school, not as evidence of misogyny in scientific research (though, duh) but as proof that sometimes scientists just find what they want to find. Sound familiar to anyone?
Which reminds me: the Birchers and other ultraconservatives in the Fifties and Sixties were very suspicious of the flouridation of public water supplies, believing it to be some kind of insidious Commie plot.
I vaguely recall something like that. And I was personally told that women shouldn’t garden during “that time of the month” because their skin was acidic and bad for plants.
Bulgarians believe that sitting on cold stone will do all kinds of bad things to you. The most common bad thing I heard was that it would make you barren. Although come to think of it, I don’t know how to say “yeast infection” in Bulgarian, so if someone told me that, it would have gone over my head anyway.
But that’s not in the past. That was in like, 2007. I could do a whole thread on crazy shit Bulgarians believe in the 21st century.
BTW, Korean Fan Death came up on the SDMB awhile ago, so I asked a Korean friend about it. She said she’d never heard of it and that whoever told me about it was putting me on. I was like, there’s a Wikipedia page! She insisted it was bogus. So I don’t know. She is a Korean citizen, but she’s spent most of her life in the US, so maybe she hasn’t heard about it? I’m not sure what to believe now.
I always heard that sitting on cold stones or concrete will give someone hemorrhoids. In the Judy Blume YA novel “Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself” which was set in 1947, the lead character’s mother specifically advises against sitting on stones/concrete for fear of contracting nephritis. Sitting on such surfaces is always fraught with danger!
If they could only see Halle Berry.
Another vote for the period/bathing thing being fairly recent. When we were teenagers, one of my best friends’ mother was terrified that my friend was going to get some unspecified but awful illness because she washed her hair during her period. This was in the early 90s.
In my husband’s family, sitting on cold stone will give you a cold in your kidneys, or alternatively a cold in your bum.
That all gay people were child molesters. It seemed to take forever for homosexuality and pedophile to get untangled, and many people still don’t recognize them as two separate things.
Anita Bryant’s selling point was that, since homosexuals can’t reproduce, they have to recruit our children. I can’t begin to tell you what is wrong with that statement.
Along the same lines regarding fear of flying, flight insurance in case the plane crashed. AFAIK, it is still available, but it was a lot more noticeable back in the 1960s, when you could buy it at the airport from a stand (a key plot point in Arthur Hailey’s Airport), or from a vending machine.
The stigma of having a child out of wedlock. Bastard! Illegitimate! Go away, give birth, give it up and forget it entirely. Pretend it never happened!
I read “The Girls Who Went Away,” over the weekend. It’s interviews with women who got pregnant pre-legal abortion and were forced to give their “illegitimate bastards” up. Some of the stories are heartbreaking.
Does anyone who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s remember all the warnings about the dangers of discarded refrigerators? There were actual PSAs admonishing people to remove the hinges or disable the latch* before discarding them. Apparently, large numbers of kids were playing in the landfills, finding old refrigerators, and locking themselves in (and suffocating).
Seriously, was this really a large probem?
*Apparently, old fridges had locking latches, rather than the magnetic seal of today.
Marilyn Manson
One of the few times I went totally ballistic in my office was when someone put an old frig out with the door intact. I told them if the door wasn’t removed immediately I would call the cops and Code Enforcement.
Maybe only a few children died that way, but I was not going to risk it on my watch.
We’ve been informed of at least one.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13087599&postcount=49
The “fear of fans” that I encounter daily and have encountered throughout Latin America and the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and seen reported here from the Western shores of the same sea, is not about wanting to avoid feeling cold, it’s about believing that being in a draft will make you sick. Depending on the amount of sick you could end up dead, I guess, but it’s not about comfort, it’s about colds, upset stomachs and infections of the respiratory tract.
If you tell me that other people have managed to separate the fear of drafts from the notion of fans, I believe you but I’d like a location please.
It has already been cited in this thread – Korea
Yes, and it’s already been countered.
If you mean Kyla’s anecdote, then no it hasn’t. There are plenty of available references, including Snopes, that are evidence that fear of fan death does exist in Korea. That isn’t “countered” by a single proffer of hearsay.