The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Bisexual Situations, Limey Sailors With Scurvy, Origin of Morons

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast, joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned ranged from bisexual space stations to guinea pigs with scurvy. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on October 31st! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we always also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Sarah Tradesh. I'm Helen Soltzman. Helen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. As many of our listeners will already know, Helen is the host of the Allusionist, a wonderful Radiotopia podcast about language. Helen, thank you for joining us. we know that you have learned many weird things in the course of your day.

So we're really excited to have you share some of them. Thank you. I will warn you that I tend to also forget things almost immediately. So there's very little in my brain at any given time. I think that's nice because you kind of get to rediscover the weird things over and over again. Very true, yes. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, making great, hilarious podcasts, et cetera. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our

little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, welcome to the studio. It's been a while. Thank you so much. It's good to be here physically in person. It's recording somewhere other than under a blanket. I love it. A room is so much better. It's much less hot. Well, we are super-sight to have you here recording without Skype lag. Why don't you start with your T's? My fact this week is about how we repeatedly discovered and then lost and then discovered and then misunderstood and then lost and then discovered again the cure for scurvy. Wow. That was a killer. It's a saga. Yeah. It's like the simplest cure ever, but somehow. Were you counting precisely the number of rediscovery or was that kind of? We'll still. We'll

We'll say yes. Okay. Why not? All right. Just curious. My tease is that this is a story about my hometown, which is the part of New Jersey that like Springsteen songs are about. And also one of the birthplaces of the American eugenics movement. Great.

I love the boss. What can I say? Jersey is a beautiful place. So many ways. It is. It's great. So yeah, I found I got more than I bargained for with this one. Helen.

Well, mine is about the changing uses of the word bisexual, which has applied to so many things, including oysters and space stations. Wow. Okay, then. I would have thought that would be a pretty straightforward word. Oh, no. Bisexual. It's had a torrid time. Wow.

Haven't we all? Sarah, why don't you start with the many, many iterations of scurvy? I would have thought that would have been pretty straightforward one as well. I would have thought so as well. Also, because we know now that scurvy is just a deficiency of vitamin C, in my head it was always this kind of mild thing. Everyone got scurvy, but like, it's scurvy. Who cares? It's just all the raids then.

Yeah, exactly. Just very popular. But scurvy killed more sailors than all other causes of death combined. It killed two million sailors between like 1,500 and 1800, which is like. syphilis? More than syphilis, which given the amount of syphilis was incredible. How long does it take scurvy to kill you? It takes like a month for the symptoms to start, for you to like run out of vitamin C. And then it takes, I think, potentially weeks longer to kill you, but I think you wish for an earlier death. Fantastic. Yeah, it's great. So yeah,

so the like story about scurvy I always heard was that like James Lynde, who was a Scottish doctor, was considered to have cured scurvy in 1747 because he did this very famous experiment where he took like 12 men with scurvy and assigned them six different remedies including drinking half a pint of seawater. Ingesting. Great way to vomit. Yeah, an excellent treatment. Also drinking elixir of vitriol, which is a mixture of alcohol and sulfuric acid. Also a great way to vomit. He just really really thought that.

perching with the way to go. Well, I suppose you wouldn't die of scurvy if you'd drunk that. Yeah, you might dive something else faster, which could have been a cure in some ways. And then one of the other treatments being eating two oranges and a lemon per day for a week. And by the end of the week, the people who ate the citrus were absolutely 100% cured, and everyone else was still dying. I've always been curious as to how they ate the lemon,

because eating a lemon is a challenging fruit. I suspect that when you have scurvy, it's fine. Yeah. That's a good point, though. I'll be honest, I love lemons. I could eat a whole lemon. So that hadn't even occurred to me that that might not be a pleasurable experience for some people. Sorry.

Yeah, we need to. When I was a baby, my mom did the thing where, like, you give your baby a lemon because this cute. It's hilarious. And they hate it. And she gave me a lemon. And I was like, hmm. Yeah, I'm digging this. This is great.

And I still love lemons. They're a great fruit. The idea of eating a whole one seems to me potentially a tricky thing. You would think. Not for you. You're highly evolved. No, I will never get scurvy, which is incredible. So yeah, I mean, that story is true, but it is also true that sailors had been accidentally

rediscovering this for centuries prior, and it still took 50 years after that for the British Navy to implement a diet. regimen of lemon juice and then even still after that they forgot about the importance of lemons it's just incredible like in the 1400s vasco da gama's crew were given oranges like as a gift after they visited Kenya and they realized like hey when they ate the oranges all the scurvy went away which I guess until then had just been called like being a sailor yeah probably wasn't scurvy it was just yeah I mean like 50% like just it was expected 50% of your crew would die of scurvy.

I suppose it depends on where you're going, because if you're not going to one of the major citrus-producing regions, if you're sailing to, like, Greenland, you really shi-out a luck on you? Yeah, exactly. What were you supposed to do? But they discovered the oranges, and then after that, they would, anywhere they visited that had citrus, they were like, hey, could we get some oranges?

Because they're pretty useful last time. And, like, another Portuguese explorer did the same thing. Also in Kenya, Kenya really saved the lives of a lot of Portuguese soldiers. An English captain, like, accidentally did an experiment where he fed, like, his ship of four in a fleet, he had them drink lemon juice. I don't know why if he didn't think it prevented scurvy, but he insisted on lemon juice. Just a fun prank. Yeah. And, you know, when they got to their next destination, his crew members were all fine. Everyone else was like,

literally had to be helped off the ship because they couldn't walk anymore. But yeah, I mean, scurvy. I should also say, like, the symptoms of scurvy are bad. They're so bad. You wouldn't recommend it. Yeah. So, like, it kind of starts where you were just, like, really tired, you feel very weak. It was like to the point that people felt at one point that laziness was the cause of scurvy. You just refused to do your work and were afflicted with this terrible disease. And you get like bone aches. You start bleeding internally because you can't produce collagen if you don't have vitamin C. Until then it sounded like my life. Yeah. And now I'm and then you start bleeding internally. And yeah, your your gums start to like disintegrate and your

teeth get all loose. So you can't really eat anyway. your limbs swell, and then eventually you die, probably of like an aneurysm or some other kind of internal hemorrhage. So yeah, I mean, it's astounding to me that scrovy was so horrifying, but that somehow like when people discovered how to fix it, it didn't spread instantly all the way around the world. But after Dr. Lynde published his findings, the British Navy spent 50 years just kind of like debating, I don't know, maybe it didn't really seem all that, all that effective. People thought, well, maybe it's just like a lack of fresh air. But eventually, Eventually, in the late 1700s, the Navy said, you know, every day you're going to have this amount of lemon juice.

And it gave them, like, a massive advantage fighting the French because they all, none of them had scurvy. And it turns out when you're fighting a battle against people who are mostly dying, you win. Go figure. Yeah, it's also where the nickname Limey comes from. Right. Right. Originally meaning a sailor and then eventually meaning a British person for some reason. So lemons are very high in vitamin C, and it was originally.

originally lemons that Lind tested. But they also called lemon juice, lime juice, because at the time lemons and limes were just sort of generic terms for those things. And they didn't realize that they were actually different plants, like fundamentally. And that turned out to be a really terrible mistake. Because later on, so they originally got lemons, like from Sicily, like places in Europe or on the Mediterranean. But then eventually they realized that as the British Navy, they controlled a lot of places where they grew limes and they were much cheaper.

And so they stopped buying their limes from Europe and started just taking limes from the people that they had colonized. And limes do not have that much vitamin C. They have about a quarter of the vitamins. That seems fair, though. Yeah, they had to come into them. Should have colonized different countries. Yeah, yeah. If only they had taken over more of the world.

Anyway, so they started using limes, but they're kind of saving grace at the time was that that was like 1860 when they sort of started switching to that. And by that time, people weren't making like many month-long journeys by sea. Ships could sail a lot faster. And they just weren't really getting scurvy, as it turns out, because the journeys were shorter. But they thought it was the limes, that the limes were fine. And then they started going to like the Arctic. And you can't, there's nowhere to stop and pick up some lemons up there. You're really stuck.

There are not native limes or lemons in the Arctic. So like in the late 1800s, they had a couple of, I mean, there were these very long Arctic expeditions and the crew brought lime juice with them. And they ate their lime juice every day, like the good explorers that they were. And yet somehow they were all dying of scurvy. Because the unfortunate thing is that A was a really long expedition. And being on polar expeditions, you don't have a lot of other fresh meat and veggies. And there's lots of other things that contain, you know, not as high amounts of vitamin C as lemons do.

But like fresh meat, fresh organ meat has potentially fatal amounts of vitamins in it. And the crews who didn't like fresh meat, like there was at least one expedition where the crew that like went out onto the actual expedition decided that they didn't want to eat like polar bear meat. but the crew on the ship were cool with it, and the crew on the ship was totally fine. But then that just confused the whole matter, because then it seemed like, well, everybody was having lime juice. But only some people were eating fresh meat, so maybe it was the meat.

It seemed like meat was definitely the issue. To the point where by the early 1900s, the prevailing theory was that it was definitely something about the meat. Like maybe there was something that spoiled the meat was the theory. And so that was the fresh meat thing. You had to have it fresh when really it was. just like fresh meat doesn't have bacteria that kills you, and also the vitamin C doesn't have any time to break down. So by the 1900s, like, they had just completely backtracked and just completely

lost track of the fact that they had totally found the cure for this incredibly simple disease. And then the actual cure for scurvy was discovered totally by accident because two Norwegian researchers were trying to study Beery-Berry, which is another vitamin deficiency, the deficiency of thymine or vitamin B1, and they were studying it in pigeons because pigeons are an animal that also gets beery-beary. And in pigeons, if you feed them like only grain, they get berry-beary. But they decided that they wanted to have like a mammal model.

So they started feeding guinea pigs grains. And the guinea pigs didn't get berry-beary, but they did get scurvy. And they were like, ah, well, we've accidentally discovered a really good animal model for this disease that is. still really plaguing people. And that was pure luck because most animals, like the vast majority of animals, can make their own vitamin C. But guinea pigs are one of the few that don't.

So they had like this very simple animal model. And then like not very long after a Hungarian biochemist isolated ascorbic acid, i.k.a. vitamin C. And the whole problem was entirely solved. Wow. Accidentally because of guinea pigs. Literally guinea pigs. So the lack of vitamin C also messes with your serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitters.

So apparently also like explorers who had insufficient vitamin levels and were starving and all they wanted was food. Like one of the consequences is that you have very vivid dreams. So they would have these dreams and they would dream about food to the point where they like hallucinied that there was food in front of them and they would wake up and like reach for the food. and then it wouldn't be there, which is just crushing. Yeah, that's horrifying. Yeah, it gets you in every way. Great. On that note, we're going to take a short break, and then we'll be back with more facts.

Okay, we're back, and I'm going to jump in with my fact, just a light-hearted romp about the American eugenics movement. As I've mentioned several times on weirdest thing, because it bothers me a lot and I like to talk about it. You know, America really, we made eugenics a thing. You know, we like to forget about how. the Nazis were inspired and enriched by the work of American scientists that was all totally mainstream. And I don't think that's something we should forget. So it's come up a few times. We had our episode about sideshow babies. We had our episode about the wave of nude air bathing among the founding fathers that ended up being about eugenics. So here's one. That's about my hometown.

Vineland, New Jersey, where I'm from, is a very strange place. I'm from the pocket of South Jersey that's like, wordly Southern. But there are a lot of crazy things about Vineland, and I don't know if it's just because I'm like a person who's interested in learning about the ways I'm from. I'm kind of like, is everybody's hometown actually this crazy? Or is Vineland surprisingly crazy? I think it might be surprisingly crazy. It was founded in 1861 as a temperance utopia by this guy named Charles Kandis, who like, I could tell a whole other story about how he was probably the first person to plead temporary insanity after he shot a newspaper. editor for libeling his wife.

Wow. But that's not what this story is about. Okay, well, for another podcast, perhaps. So Vineland did not pan out as a temperance town, but Vineland's rolling agricultural pastures and healthy climate did attract a lot of like intellectuals, or at least a handful of them. And the Vineland Training School, which is this big residential special needs school and institution that is still thriving today, founded it on this beautiful mansion, 40 acres of land. It's lovely right in the center of town. Of course, in 1888, it was not called the Vineland Training

School. It was called the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-minded Children, because that is how people talk then. And this story started because growing up, I had heard that this guy who worked at that institution, he was actually the director from 1906 to 1918, named Henry H. Goddard, that he had invented. the word moron, which actually has like, you know, very dark psychiatric history. And so everybody had kind of shared that as like a funny fact that like, we're the moron capital of the world. Because of course now, moron is a totally non-medical term. But it in fact had a very clinical use and was a super offensive term. So Henry Goddard was really into intelligence testing. And he

He had the best of intentions in the way a lot of medicine did at that time. He really supported the idea of having some kind of intervention for people who had cognitive impairments or who needed extra assistance. And he said the only way you could possibly truly help them would be to have some way of testing how much help people needed. And so he sought out these kinds of early intelligence tests that were being used in Europe. and he really popularized the IQ test in the U.S. And spoiler alert, that was very bad. It was not a good move. But part of his obsession with IQ,

he developed the term moron to be a specific level of impairment above idiot, which was also a term that he used clinically. And the moron was, he said, society's biggest problem. because while an idiot would generally just sit and be institutionalized and be careful, a moron could walk amongst us and could have children. Oh, no. Yes, exactly.

All of this, in retrospect, it seems like really straightforward. Like, when you start categorizing people this way and saying, like, we should test people to decide how fit they are to be part of society, it is very easy to see where that slippery, slope leads and it leads to terrible shit. Henry Goddard did not have that hindsight or even that insight. And so he became this really big advocate for intelligence testing and was cited as an expert and his work was cited in the creation of laws in more than half the states in the US, which legalized sterilization of the, quote, unfit, which led to tens of thousands of involuntary sterilization surgeries. And in Ellis Island, actually, he was a big advocate of like keeping an eye out for morons at Ellis Island. And he trained all of these female field assistants, which is just so like hashtag white feminism that he was like we're employing the good women who have just graduated from university to go find the unfit people.

This just keeps getting worse and worse. No idea. No, no. And he came back with all this data about how 40% of Jews, Italians and Hungarians were qualified as morons. But he didn't say, that he had told his field workers to only seek out and test people that looked supposedly like morons. A very unbiased sample. So what's really the story here is that 60% of the people who looked like immigrants that they were like, you look like you might be a little slow. We're fine, totally fine. And that data was spread as if he had used large sample sizes of the general population.

So that was part of a lot of anti-immigration propaganda. So yes, all of this is eugenics. And the thing that I was not aware of before I started looking into Goddard's invention of the word moron, which is, of course, from Greek word for dull, he didn't just like pull it out of thin air. But he was the first one to be like, I'm using this. He was very into making up words from Greek words for his bad experiments, which is how we get to the Calicac family, which is a book that he published in 19, which was part of this whole genre of eugenic family narratives, which was where scientists, air quotes, were getting very into these pseudoscientific genealogies that were supposedly supporting the idea that certain people just like would propagate unfitness in the population.

So Stephen Jay Gould, who was a science historian and writer, he called the Caliak family the primal myth of the eugenics. movement. So not good. The reason that the Calcacque story, which was just one of these, like, you know, tracing back the history of a patient in Vineland, like so many of these other books, the reason that it was so wildly popular was that he claimed to have found the perfect natural experiment. He claimed that when he'd sent some of his lady field workers out looking for more data on this one patient of his, who he referred to as Deborah Calcac and all. talk about her more in a minute. He said that they found, as expected, you know, this long line of just terrible people, you know, real, not intelligent, ne'er-do-wells, getting up to no good.

Spreading their jeans. Doing crime, having babies that did crime. So he claimed they all found them, but then they found all these other people with the same last name who seemed fine. And instead of saying, maybe this means there's nothing to the whole eugenics angle, They traced back, supposedly, to this ancestor that they dubbed Martin Calicac, who'd been like a nice young boy, and he'd had an affair with a tavern girl of ill repute. Of course, it's a tavern girl. Then he'd reformed and married a worthy Quaker. And as you can see from this diagram, that made the good family and the bad family. So they were like, this is our perfect example of how eugenics works because this good, reputable man, you know, his great seed was wasted on the, he dallied with a feeble-minded tavern girl.

That's the exact wording. And so that whole lineage is terrible. But then, you know, when he did his Christian duty and married a lovely lady who brings up seven upright worthy. children for him. They're all doctors, lawyers, bankers, landowners. Were they really, though? No. The twist. Yeah. So the twist here is that it was all made up. Boom. Yeah. What a surprise. Yeah. So the issue here is that for starters, I found those excellent paper by Jay David Smith and Michael L. Weimar, where they talk about how Deborah Calacacque, whose name, by the way, was another of Goddard's fun little, fun little made-up words.

It was, he took the Greek words, callos for beauty and cacos for bad. So they were the good bad family. So Deborah Calcac was actually Emma Wolverton, who was totally fine. I mean, yes, she lived in this institution. It was a very different time. Like the bar was set pretty low for someone deciding you should go live in an institution. She was illiterate when she got there, her butt learned to read and write. She worked. She, like, volunteered as a nurse occasionally. And so, first of all, the idea that she was this, like, unwell and had all these cognitive impairments was just unfounded. Then there's the fact that tracing back her family line, there was no illegitimate son that started a second wave of the family.

That part was just apparently totally made up. There were cousins, some of whom had good lives and some of them. of whom had bad lives. But on the supposedly bad side of the family that Emma was on, there were landowners, there was like an army pilot, there were teachers, in other words, a normal family with an average distribution of people in circumstances and jobs. Emma had ended up institutionalized in part because her mother did have a pretty rough life and had been like married and divorced multiple times. And it seems like she probably was like a bit of a problem teen, but like they were very poor and times were very bad. And that really had nothing to do

with the family they came from. It was circumstance and a lack of access to resources to education, to public support. You know, if Emma was considered simple when she got to the Vineland training school, it was because she'd never gotten to go to school before. And she was reading and writing by the time that this book was published supposedly about how she was the result of generations of bad seeds. Oh, just in time. Also, for all of the eugenics bullshit that was being researched and written about, like the actual environment at the Vineland School was quite progressive for the time. You know, people learned trades and to read and had like beautiful grounds and friends.

And so obviously she should not have been institutionalized, but she did not have a horrible life except for this guy writing all this shit about her. But the thing that is crazy about this is that this book was a bestseller. And there were quotes from him saying, like, yeah, we stretch the truth a bit, but like that's what you have to do to make the layman understand science, which is not true. Americans. Yeah. And it really hammered home to me, you know, reading more about this, how many of the people involved in the American eugenics movement really thought they had the best of intentions. And all. also how interwoven it is in so much of our history.

You know, we were talking about the history of birth control a couple episodes ago and talking about Margaret Sanger, who was hugely into eugenics. Basically, most people who were like intellectuals with money loved eugenics. They thought it was just so reasonable. It was considered like a step forward in enlightenment and just a totally logical thing that nobody could argue with. And of course, there were degrees in the extent to which people like argued for a particular policies like sterilization or institutionalization. But yeah, it was just considered totally

mainstream. And there's one thing that I was totally unfamiliar with that I learned in reading this. So the Scopes trial, the like monkey trial where a teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution, the textbook that he was defending had a bunch of eugenics in it. It cited the Calicacac book as like proof that eugenics is real. And tons of people and sources did. Really, it wasn't until after World War II when a lot of the American eugenics movement was like, oh, we don't look so good next to that. Better revise on history.

But I think the important thing to remember is that a lot of it was just like revision. You know, the policies didn't really change for very long. There was forced sterilization and institutionalization for a long time after World War II. It's just that the very vocal eugenics movement by then. name kind of like was like oh oh no maybe not but yeah no um hitler loved a book about the calicax he mentioned it it was printed in in germany the same year he rose to power and we'll just keep reminding people that americans thought eugenics was just like not just that they liked it but that it was like totally irrefutable and mainstream i just think it's important that we ask ourselves like what

things we're starting to think of as totally irrefutable in mainstream or maybe not. This is more proof that every part of the history of like both IQ testing and then by extension SAT and other standardized testing, like it's just all terrible. It's all based on shoddy science. Yeah. Well, you wrote about IQ testing. Would you summarize your thoughts on IQ testing based on the data? My thoughts on IQ testing is that IQ testing is the biggest load of bullshit. that I've ever heard of. And it's, but it's like, I've met some, I'd say it's a very small minority of people who, when I talk about IQ testing, have any sense that it might be even a little bit wrong.

Like people, I just feel like everyone talks about it like, oh, yeah, like, you know, obviously some people are smarter than other people. And so IQ is real and the average is 100. And look at these super geniuses who are in MENSA. Like, it's all so terrible. IQ is bull's, it doesn't mean anything. If I could make one thing go away. Okay, it wouldn't be IQ.

For people who aren't aware, what's your, what's your, like, 20-second explanation of why we know IQ is bad? If IQ is supposed to be a fundamental, an intrinsic trait that you have, then IQ shouldn't be changing rapidly, but you see massive changes in IQ, especially in developing nations. And that's, like, basically the result of the fact that, A, if you give a bunch of people a test and, those people don't usually use pencils or paper or don't take standardized tests, they don't do that well on those tests. And that doesn't mean that they're not intelligent. It means that they're not good at taking your test. But for decades, researchers interpreted that as well, some people are just fundamentally less intelligent. Obviously, this fits in with everything. We've always believed about races and who's better than who and also better nutrition.

Like, if you've been malnourished your entire childhood, your brain can't develop to its full potential. And also, you're just probably a lot more concerned with other things than taking a test, like getting food. That's fair. Yeah. So it's like as nutrition has improved massively, and like if you just train people to take the test, they do better on the test, which would imply that it's not a great test. Thank you for that. That was what I was looking for. You're so welcome. So yeah, in summary, Vineland, New Jersey, home of the inventor of the Mason Jar, the inventor of the word moron, the movie Eddie and the Cruisers and me. So I think I win. I think I'm the, I think I'm, I mean, second to the mason jar, maybe the best thing that's ever come out of Vineland, New Jersey. Yeah.

Fight me. I would put you above mason jar. I could do it. I could do without the mason jar. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Helen's fact. All right, we're back. And Helen, hi. Hi. We're going to talk about some words. Yeah. Well, I learned thanks to someone called Mark Wilkinson who came on the illusionist, I learned about the many other uses of the word bisexual before it came to mean a human sexual identity. It has had quite the life. And so originally it meant hermaphroditic. It was a biological term.

So it was like creatures with characteristics of two sexes were bisexual. So like oysters, various plants. And tube worms, things like that. Bisexual, that was also a term. Bisexual. I love that. We should bring that back. Yeah, I like it.

You could. I don't know if anyone's using it. Maybe in biology, but... So was it, where was the overlap between referring to those animals as having himaphroditeism versus being bisexual? Well, being bisexual as in the attraction, do you mean? No, so like using the term bisexual to mean that they had characteristics of both sexes? That was, it goes back to 1824. Okay. So most of the 19th century, it was just...

homaphroditic organisms and creatures, but not humans. The first known application to humans was in 1892, there was an English translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebbings, 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, which was a very significant book in the field of sexology, and it was the first appearance in English of terms such as heterosexuality, sadist and masochist, and bisexual. But it did also say that any sex for purposes other than procreation, was perversion.

Sure. You know. I figured with that name, it either goes one of two ways. It's either really dope or really awful. Yeah. We talked about just like parapherias in general and we talked about how like until like just a few decades ago in the DSM like being gay was listed as some kind of condition. It was a psychiatric illness until what's it?

1974. I think it was declassified in the States. Yeah. And in the same classifications of parapherias like enjoying. dirty phone calls was listed as a as a, scandalous. It was just, we had a very wide sense of what was deviant. It was really just like anything you could do. Very heterosexual, very vanilla sex.

Well, anything was deviant except for going into a church and self-flagellating for your mortal sin. That as well. Puritans really ruined all the fun, didn't they? Yes. They did. For so long, for so many people. It still sticks in people's minds now.

There's still so much shame. Although dirty phone calls, maybe now you wouldn't bother going to get treatment for that. I suppose, unless you're pasturing people. If they're consensual dirty phone calls. It depends on the dirty phone call. Well, no one makes phone calls anymore, do they? That's right. They'd be like, something's wrong with you.

So that was a fix. But the word didn't really catch on as a sexual orientation label because, like, Kinsey Report was huge influential, but he didn't use it. He used the numerical scale. He didn't like it because he was like. It means oysters. There's too much oyster association there. But it was that. Maybe he didn't like oysters.

Maybe he had an allergy. And so then around the middle of the 20th century, they were using it in all sorts of different ways. So one of them was bisexual situations. That just meant a situation where men and women were present. Is that really an essential term? Or maybe because there was so much division. I was going to say how rare was that that there needed to be a term

specifically for a situation where men and women. They consider saying like we're in mixed company. We're in a bisexual situation. I kind of like that as well. Yeah, that is a term I will probably adopt. In 1967, someone describing a character in a novel sending bisexual letters, meaning he was writing letters to men and women. Wow.

Wow. Again, you just think why is that? an essential bit of vocabulary. And was it, like, was there a derogatory sense of it? Like, that was scandalous? Or was it just, like, a fact of, like, he sent letters to men and women. And so that was bisexual. Yeah, that wasn't, it wasn't about anything sexy, sexual at all.

The letters themselves were of a bisexual nature as they were going to both sexes. Yes. And yet there was no sex in it. Yeah, exactly. Okay. As sex is, right? Yeah. Purely about who letters.

are being received by. And they also had bisexual musical instruments, but that was more the musical instruments nature. And this is where I really got lost. So the flute and the drum are bisexual, but the violin and the cello are not. I did play flute, so that can confirm. That follows.

I just didn't know that instruments were gendered in any way. Flute and the drum were bisexual. Yeah. I mean, if I'm going purely on, like, really boring gender binary stereotypes. The flute and the drum are the two that I would, I would, I would make them very binary. Which way would you gender them? I would go like just classic.

I'm not saying that a flute is feminine. I'm just saying that like I think modern society would have said like a flute's high pitched. It's adorable. It's tiny drums, big, loud clanging. Militaristic. Yeah. Whereas like a violin and a cello, they could go either way. They could go both ways.

I don't know. I would have thought those. I'm not sure which way they did go, according to this classification. And they also said bisexual in the way that we might say unisex later, where it's like bisexual fashions and bisexual hats. Oh, my God. The hats that can go both ways. What kind of hats are those? I think probably just, I don't know.

Like a baseball cap. I don't know. I'm picturing like one of the macaroni hats that the macaroni men wore. Just like a knitted cap, something that. Something very suits all. And also there were other uses like bisexual parenting, which meant they were talking about a single mother and saying she was a bisexual parent in that she was fulfilling a masculine role as well as the traditional feminine role, which felt kind of dismissive in so many ways. Right. Not that she could be a parent on her own without any gender associations at all.

I thought you were going to say, she had to be an oyster. I thought you were going to say that bisexual parenting was when actually the mother and the father parented because I feel like at that time dads were maybe not so much into the parenting. Yeah, that would have been a huge shocker if you had. Exactly. That would be so, it would be so rare for the man to really be that helpful. In so many ways, bisexual parenting would have been ahead of its time. Yeah.

And there was even talk of a bisexual god. Again, a god that kind of defied gender classification. Oh. Who has a... That's interesting. I mean, because Judeo-Christian-wise, pretty straight-male. Yeah. Cis-male, macho, god.

Somehow without having any physical form of those. But then there is discussion of being like, why? That's arbitrary. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe that... So, like, I definitely have heard from Judeo-Christian sources the concept of being like, God probably doesn't have a gender, being that it's God.

Why would you limit yourself? if you were a god. Why would you stick to one? Yeah. But then why would you even invent the binary system in the first? Or maybe you'd like, well, ah, I didn't. Humans did. It was a test and you failed.

There it is. Absolutely. That feels right. So right up until the 70s, they were still using it in kind of scientific ways. And there was a description of a bisexual space station, which was to do with the docking. It was the bisexual system that is neither male nor female, and design enabling any craft to dock on with any other craft. And you do think, because even now, I was trying to buy some microphone cables today.

And it's like, male to female, XLR. And you're like, well, why don't you just describe those in terms that are not related to humans at all? Right. I think that's such a, I think it's wild that we still use that. And just so casually, like, yeah, well, you know. The penetrator is male. Yeah, obviously. It's a mic cable.

The only one ever doing any penetrating must be the male. And so that's just logic. Right. God. Yeah. I feel like if it had been women inventing mic cable sales, because, I mean, don't wish to stereotype, but audio equipment still seems to be largely dominated by men.

I'm not sure that women would have come up with that terminology for the cable. No. No, we wouldn't. And then, so the time when bisexual really kicks in, in the sense we recognize now, it had started to when you got the Christopher Street, demonstrations and the first pride. Brenda Howard was campaigning for B to be included in LGBT at the time, but also happening around this time, as the word is taking off, you then get the AIDS crisis.

And so Mark was studying appearances of bisexual in the Times newspaper in Britain, which is sort of centre-right, but it's a fairly politically bland newspaper compared to a lot of them. because he wanted something that wasn't like violently anti-sexuality things, but also wasn't like way ahead of the curve on it. And so he said at that point it was always associated with, it was like gay and bisexual men, gay and bisexual men, gay and bisexual men have got this disease, gay and bisexual men are vectors for this disease.

So it's gone from being a fairly obscure term to being a terrifying term for people. So basically, the word bisexual has just had a real rough time of it. Yeah. Because then after that, it's just the whole thing where people are like, you can't be bisexual. It's not a real thing. Prove it at all times. You just haven't decided yet, obviously.

Right. Exactly. Or, no, now you're reinforcing the gender binary. So pansexual. You see, it's had such a difficult time. Maybe it was easier when it just meant musical instruments. Oysters. I think we should go back to maybe being referring to oysters as bisexual.

Yeah, I think I'm going to try to bring bisexuals back. It's just a nice word. Wow, that was super interesting. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? The most upsetting thing was yours for sure. That was horrible. Oh, wow, thanks. My hometown is pretty horrible.

Yeah. Well, the Mason jars were okay. Yeah. Unless there were storing. The only saving grace. Or something. Yeah. I think Monster as well used to be a similar kind of pejorative term for disability.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're just riddled with these things. Yeah. Well, and there are so many things that, like, people have no idea, have such a and upsetting and offensive history. And, you know, it's worth doing a quick Google. Yeah.

Is it okay to say moro? Anyway, thank you so much for being on. Thank you. This has been great fun. This was a joy. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now.

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