Toxic Cooking Show
Misogyny, $800 first dates, simps, and high-value women: Social media has been busy cooking up and feeding us an addictive but toxic slurry of trends over the past few years. Here at The Toxic Cooking Show we're two friends dedicated to breaking down these trends, terms, and taunts into their simplest ingredients to understand where they came from and how they affect our lives. Join us each week as we ponder and discuss charged topics like personal responsibility and "not all men" before placing them on our magical Scale O' ToxicityAny comments or topics you want to hear about write to us at toxic@awesomelifeskills.com
Toxic Cooking Show
You're Wrong About Women in the Past
Ever notice how the “good old days” always look like a movie set? We pull back the velvet curtain on the myths that won’t die—women who “didn’t work,” men who “provided alone,” teens “married off” en masse—and replace them with what the archive, archaeology, and everyday logic actually show. From hunter-gatherer bands to early farms, women hunted, gathered, planted, harvested, brewed beer that kept people safer than water, spun and wove the clothes on everyone’s backs, and shared childcare across kin and community. That picture is messier than a corseted fainting scene, and far more true.
We dig into why marriage ages were historically in the early-to-mid 20s, how land access changed timelines in 18th‑century America, and why later menarche and basic biology made “child brides everywhere” a poor read of the record. We talk fertility: cycle tracking long before apps, herbal knowledge that both protected pregnancies and ended them when needed, and the tragic ways witch hunts and gatekeeping erased that expertise. Then we follow the fashion: corsets as practical support rather than torture, gowns that survived because elites wore them once, and a photographic history literally retouched to create tiny waists. If your mental image of the past is brown cloth and breathless women, blame nobility’s archive and Hollywood’s shortcuts.
The stakes are current. Myths about “women at home” and “men as sole providers” feed modern policy and personal pressure, from wages to parental leave to how we judge each other’s roles. We argue for better education, smarter filmmaking, and asking a simple test of any historical claim: could you harvest in that outfit, feed a family with that schedule, and keep a village alive with those rules? If not, you’re looking at costume, not history. Listen for the full breakdown, a lively toxicity rating (how many green potatoes is this, really?), and a clear case for ditching nostalgia in favor of nuance.
If this conversation challenged a story you grew up with, share the episode, leave a review, and tell us which myth you want us to debunk next. Subscribe for more sharp, funny, evidence-first takes on the past—and the stories that shape our present.
Hi, and welcome to the Toxic Cooking Show, where we break down toxic people into their simplest ingredients. I'm your host for this week, Lindsay McLean, and with me is my fantastic co-host.
SPEAKER_00:Christopher Padgett, LCSW.
SPEAKER_02:Not too long ago in Podcast World, you did an episode looking at kind of the stereotype of this idea we have, oh, we gotta go back to the old days when things were good. You know, you could you could afford all the house, and you could, you know, wife sits at home and husband goes to work and there's two and a half kids, and how that, you know, maybe was semi-feasible then, and it ain't feasible now. And during that episode, you kind of touched on some interesting stereotypes about women that are incorrect. Did you know that?
SPEAKER_00:Ruhro.
SPEAKER_02:Ruhro. But in fairness, this is a type of stereotype that many people get wrong, including myself sometimes. This is something that I have to work on to remember that's like, oh, it's it's actually not the way that we think it was. Back in the day. For instance, you know, we have this idea that women just stayed at home all day, like sat around in pretty dresses, looked cute. And that was because they got married and started popping out kids when they were 15. Because uh, what is birth control? How did babies happen? What is medicine? And that they were just kind of nothing without men as a result, and that's just not true.
SPEAKER_00:I I definitely am looking forward to seeing where this is going. Yeah, when I think of like women in the 1940s, 1950s, that that is definitely something that comes to my mind that the only time that they did go out of the house was to go grocery shopping.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. And even if I say a woman in the 1800s, you're going to have a a certain image that pops into your head, probably of like a woman in like a giant dress or something like that. If I say a woman during the Victorian period, you're gonna imagine maybe the like, you know, super cinched in corset and the big dress, and you know, tons of children, and she's just she's what does she do? She she is woman. Yeah, good enough. That that's her job. And we go, we do this all the way back through history. You even see it when people are like, oh, you know, hunter-gatherers, man go hunt for big important meat, and woman stay home with 18 babies and maybe pick some berries. So you can see it like all through history that we have this this idea that's there. And that has almost never never been true. So we'll start off with the first fallacy that women don't work. Women have always worked, right alongside men in many cases. Going right back to the idea of like the hunter-gatherers of man go hunt meet, women, woman pick berries with baby. We have proof from the Vikings, from the Scythians, from Peruvian societies. Basically, every time we do an archaeological dig, we find further proof that women were very active when it came to stabbing things. Regularly we come across that proof that women were very active in all aspects and roles in a community. And studies actually show then about 79% of hunter-gatherer societies, women hunted, which makes sense. You can't just exclude half of your population from hunting. That's that that doesn't make any logistical sense. If we're a society, you know, 3,000, 4,000 years ago, you need people participating, or even longer ago. You need every able-bodied person participating in this. And even if women were not the main hunters, they were still participating in hunting. And gathering is a little bit important too. Fruits, berries, nuts, grains, materials for building. You do need those. You cannot survive on meat alone. Don't listen to the carnivore diet, people.
SPEAKER_00:So there's two things that I do know of. So the the meat diet that that we all like crave or you know, the big craze of the day isn't true because it was like if we got meat, that was like a treat.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Meat was not like a three meals a day type thing. Like, we're not hunting that many deer. You know, you hunted what you could because it was important, but yeah, this was not a like routine every single day. It was, you know, 60% of the meal. No.
SPEAKER_00:I do know another thing is that one of the reasons why dogs kind of got incorporated into our lives is because the fact that we needed basically a babysitter. We needed someone where we could leave for short periods of time and that we would trust to not only protect the baby, but not to eat the baby as well.
SPEAKER_02:Very important. Don't eat the baby.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, here at the toxic cooking show, we are very anti-eating babies.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe that can be our fourth and final. You know, we we've sometimes we're like, it's gotta be more than antifreeze, baby. I'll get canceled in three, two, one. So you have that. You also have the fact that up until very, very recently, we may touch on this a little bit later too. The family, like the nuclear family, looks very different from what it does now. Like you had grandparents who were kind of around, you had aunts, uncles, cousins, other society community members who were there who were helping take care of all of the children. Uh, and you see this in modern day, well, not so much hunter-gatherer societies per se, but like, you know, kind of the modern version of that, that baby doesn't just stay with mom. Baby gets passed around to whoever is there. Baby cries, somebody will pick up baby and take care of them. So mom does not have to be physically present at all times with the baby. Mom can be out helping the community. Hunting, gathering, building, working. Like, I mean, all those things are working, but you know, work in the modern sense. You can do all of those things because somebody else is there.
SPEAKER_00:Like Mali.
SPEAKER_02:Like a Mali. So you have that in like more ancient societies, even within the past like couple thousand years, men and women have worked equally in the fields during planting and harvesting. Again, you cannot have 50% of your population not participating in events that are this important. Like when you need to plant the seeds, you need to plant the seeds. When you need to harvest, like you need to harvest. You can't just be like, oh, it's a woman. She just sits in the house and looks pretty. No, you are right there.
SPEAKER_00:Unless you're Molly.
SPEAKER_02:Unless you're Molly, in which case you are protecting your eyelids. The insides of the eyelids, of course.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, you just sit there and look pretty. Always. Pretty Dougie.
SPEAKER_02:We do kind of see the change of like women working less outside of the house as Christianity spread. And this is gonna be a very like, like most of our stuff is, but just you know, that little that little note in there. This is very Western society focused. I do not have the time and resources to do the whole world. If somebody wants to create a Patreon for us and just like donate a whole bunch of money every month, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But otherwise, we're looking at UCEO.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Otherwise, this is what you get.
unknown:Focus.
SPEAKER_02:Look, what we both live in the West. That's what we're gonna focus on. But because then women were forced into or forced out of the jobs they previously held, then you see women kind of pull back from the society where they they used to be like very much present in. And even with Christianity, though, women still played huge roles in their work that they contributed. Up until like you know, 1300s, women were doing the cooking, the brewing, the spinning, the livestock care. And before you make some little you know, cooking make me a sandwich joke, uh you miss the brewing part. So no beer for you. And that is doubly bad because A, no beer, and B, that means you're drinking water which is absolutely full of tasty, tasty parasites and disease. That's why beer was so important back in the day. I don't know if you would ever like run into that, but you see people like, oh, they drank beer, even the children got beer. Because beer was mildly alcoholic, and we're not talking like an 8% stout here. We're talking like very low alcohol. It was more safe than the water in many cases, because the water livestock were just shitting in it, people were shitting in it. The beer is alcohol, so a lot of that has been killed off.
SPEAKER_00:Extra flavor.
SPEAKER_02:Yum. So you're drinking parasite water now because you didn't get any beer because the woman made the beer, and you're also butt-naked because you have no clothing because the sheep all died because nobody was taking care of them, and then you weren't even able to benefit from taking the wool and spinning it into thread and weaving it into cloth. Just some mildly important things there.
SPEAKER_00:Mild.
SPEAKER_02:Mild, yeah. It's all good. The second historical thing that we typically get wrong is that, you know, in addition to women just sitting at home, they were sitting at home because they were definitely married and pregnant when they were 12. That's something that comes up a lot of people. Like, oh yeah, people got married back in their like teens all the time, like 11, 12, you were just married off. Did you know that up until about the 1950s, the average age of marriage was in the early to mid-20s? Throughout the 1800s, you were getting married in your 20s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And you have this drop around like 1940, 50, uh, where suddenly it really dips, and then it's been going back up since then.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I well, you know, I think that especially nowadays where I mean a lot of women aren't even getting married until their 30s.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Oh, yeah, we're at the highest it's ever been since people kind of started recording that, which you know, probably accurately tracks. But I think a lot there's this really big stereotype that you see, like, you know, like pictures from back in the day, and the bride is definitely, you know, she would still be in in middle school in today's world. You're like, oh no. But that that was extremely uncommon. And again, the facts kind of show that you weren't you you were in your your 20s. So not we're not so far off these days from what has been the historical kind of average.
SPEAKER_00:I I'm I'm kind of curious because I I mean like I think I well, I think that is probably just the fact that it's so far off in our our mind that we do tend to we hear these stories of like I forget what president it was, but he ended up marrying the the the girl that he babysat.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah. I feel like I ran into that when I was like doing the research for this. It was one of them he had his like first wife, and they were like around the same age, and then his next wife was like the same age as his first wife, but now he was like 25 years older.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So like I I think we hear stories of that, and it's like, holy shit, that's fucked up. And though those are the stories that that we formed that that stereotype around.
SPEAKER_02:It's true, and we'll we'll talk a little bit about why we have a lot of these stereotypes soon.
SPEAKER_00:Ooh.
SPEAKER_02:I know. I even give you like the reasons for it, but they all have the same reasons. I'm gonna wait until the end. But the reason why you actually most people were waiting until their 20s for this is like a first marriage for everybody, is because you had to be able to support your family. Men needed to have a profession, they needed to have been like earning money because you needed to have land, you needed like a place to live, you needed to be able to provide, like, you know, buying food and all of that type of thing for everything your family's going to need. Interestingly, to kind of back that up, you see that in 18th century America, the typical age for marriage was lower than what it was in England at the time. And that's because in America, you had ready access to land. Everybody could get land for real cheap. So it was easier to start your homestead, your family, which meant that then you could get married, as opposed to other places where you actually had to work for a little while as a man to earn enough money to buy the things for your family to have. And then women also, again, women were working. Let's not forget, women were working outside of the house and inside of the house. Women needed to gain the skills to support a family. Like you needed to know how to cook, you needed to know how to clean, you needed to know how to sew, you needed to have the money, the items that went into your dowry. So, you know, livestock, all that type of thing. That doesn't just happen over the course of a year. That's something that kind of has to be built up over time. And for women, in addition to needing to have like the skills to support your family, you also had to be physically mature enough to have kids. That's that's a big thing. You don't want to be trying to have kids if your hips are too narrow, if you haven't like gone through puberty all of the way, that can create some major, major problems in terms of having children. We know that in general, you know, that really young girls and women like maybe higher pregnancy risks because of that. Also, something interesting to note is up until like our age, even for you, I think it probably would be your cohort. Women haven't been starting menstruation until their mid to late teens, anyway. There's a variety of reasons of why it's dropping, and like now it's around the age of like 10 to 12, is when you'll start. Some of that is due to having higher body fat and better nutrition. That's why women who play competitive sports may not get their period until later. If you don't have enough body fat, or if you have like really low body fat, it may not trigger it. And even if it has started, if you are actively, like really actively training, it can it'll stop. It'll start back up again. But it can stop as a result of that. It's not like you you train too much for one month and it's like switches turned off. But yeah, if you think about, you know, 100, 200 years ago, yeah, you had less access to nutritious food. It's gonna take a little bit longer for your body to get that point where it's like, oh yeah, we we can support, we can support having a baby. So you didn't have like this huge period of time when women were able to have children but were choosing not to get married and have children. That was when they were they were still children, they were still learning things, they were still in their family's household, contributing to that, working, then they got married, then they started having babies. Speaking of babies, the last stereotype that we're gonna cover is that you think about women back in the day, and she's got like 84 kids hanging off of her because how do babies happen? What is birth control? I don't know how to stop this, and I got married when I was 12 and just pop out a kid every year.
SPEAKER_00:See, I think of the Irish when I think that Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, it is true that historically people did have a lot more kids than they do now for a variety of reasons. You, you know, kids were more likely to die. So you needed them, and you did need kids to help support, you know, the farming or to take over the business that dad has or to just, you know, help around the house. Like that was an important thing. And if you knew that a certain percentage of them were gonna like kick the bucket before they hit five, you needed more. You did need more of them. And you know, the birth control methods that we had back then are maybe not as effective as the ones we have now. But they they were still effective and we did still know them. We've known for centuries like what type of herbs you need to uh a hundred percent avoid to keep the baby, you know, def definitely don't eat way too much of this.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god. So like as soon as I hear that, I'm I'm now thinking like of like Instagram, of like all those times that we see like if you want if you want more muscles, avoid these. And it's just like, oh god.
unknown:Fuck.
SPEAKER_00:So it's good to know that Instagram was around before Instagram was around.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. Avoid these three herbs if you don't want to lose your baby. I'm sure that's what the old you know, women back in the day were peddling walking around town. 1300's Instagram. Oh yeah. But it goes back even further than that. Like the Romans actually drove an herb to extinction because it was such a great abortifagant. Abortifigant? Is that how you say the word? It caused abortions. You you ate this thing and baby was no more. And the Romans thought this was so fantastic they they used it all up.
SPEAKER_00:Huh. Romans were kinky little motherfuckers. Fucking Romans.
SPEAKER_02:I know, right? So if you are sitting here and you're like, well, how how come I've ever heard about like any of this stuff? Like, you know, we've known about this for centuries that there are certain herbs and things that you need to avoid. I'm not talking about stuff like, you know, oh, sushi or something. That's because of the witch hunts. Everyone's favorite.
SPEAKER_00:Come on, uh, the 1600s.
SPEAKER_02:Uh, such a great time to not be alive. You know, because we can't have the women knowing about all these, you know, herbs and concoctions and stuff like that. Like that's that's no good. Can't have them doing stuff that's not under our control. Which is also why women were blocked from the medical professions for so long, amongst so many other things that they were blocked from. And to be honest, we've probably lost like a ton of knowledge because of that, because this was the type of thing that wouldn't necessarily have been written down for a variety of reasons. You don't want people to find out. You may not have been literate enough to write it down. And even if you could, could somebody else read it? Yeah. Unclear. So you've just passed oral knowledge down from person to person. It's like, yeah, you know, you might want to eat a whole bunch of this, or you might want to not eat a whole bunch of this. Because it goes both ways. It's not just about like, oh, everyone was having abortions left, right, and center because they didn't want these kids. It also is the fact that, you know, if you're pregnant, you want to avoid eating really high doses of vitamin C. That that is something that is good to know.
SPEAKER_00:I did not know that.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:But then again, I've never been pregnant, so I am not surprised to hear that.
SPEAKER_02:Not a worry for you. You know, and again, this is not like a surefire way. Like, this is that is not the point of this podcast, is to tell you how to have an abortion or how to not have an abortion. But, you know, especially considering like there weren't other options, could you have used something like this, or would it have been helpful to know to avoid something like this? Yes, very, very helpful. Also with the 10,000 kids that we imagine everyone having, your body can only kind of handle so many full-term pregnancies, especially if they're super close together, especially if you have limited nutrition. Because babies will leech whatever nutrients they need from you.
SPEAKER_00:So 9,000's good, but 10,000.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no teen.
SPEAKER_00:No teen.
SPEAKER_02:No teen. Okay. But yeah, if you uh fun fact, if you have a whole bunch of kids back to back to back to back, and you're not paying close attention to your nutrition, your teeth will start to fall out.
SPEAKER_00:I will remember that.
SPEAKER_02:I I know that's really helpful for you. I know you were really worried about getting pregnant 10 times in a row and your teeth falling out. Good times, the toxic cookie show. We're so focused. So, yeah, you you were not having in general tons and tons and tons of kids back to back. You will see it start to get spaced out. And that's also partially because giving birth was dangerous. There's a lot that can go, there's a lot that can go wrong now in 2025. There was a lot that could go wrong, you know, in 1825. And so people were maybe a little more cognizant. That's like, yes, we need a lot of kids. Yes, we have limited birth control, you know, methods. We do know how children happen. So we we can kind of you know work around that a little bit. Because women also like, we've known how our cycles work. Just because men don't know it or haven't been aware of it doesn't mean that women haven't been tracking that type of thing and are aware that's like, oh yeah, it seems like it's about this long, which means that during this part and this part, something's okay. And then this part, like, oopsies. The last little one that I do want to talk about is that and this one I've I've left it for last because there is some validity to it. But hold hold your excitement till I finish. And that's this idea, like kind of all of this put together. You know, women are nothing without men. You know, women couldn't do anything without a man in her life. And there's some truth to that. You know, we've talked about this before on the show that like you know, women in modern times, you know, couldn't open a bank account, you know, couldn't couldn't hold down a job without a a male of someone, you know, husband, a father, whatever, you know, saying yes, they're allowed to do this, going back in time. Certainly, divorce has not been an option in many societies. You know, if you have this idea of like what is a marriage, then you're probably gonna have this idea of like what is a divorce. And that usually up until very recently has just not been possible for anybody, for for men, for women, but I think women in this case would have probably suffered the most because you're the one who says, like, oh, I want out because you know, maybe husband's being abusive, or I'm trapped having more children than I want to, and I don't have access to all these other things to not have the children.
SPEAKER_00:And we can thank uh King Henry VIII for that.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. I was about to say, if you want to look and see like how difficult abortion could be. This man created his own church, not abortion. How bad like how how difficult divorce could be. There we go. Own church. Just so he could get divorced, because within the Catholic Church, like you could you couldn't.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But we do know that there have been plenty of instances where women were given rights, more or less. For instance, in 18th century Romania, women were actually given some control over their dowry, which meant that they could prosecute their husband for squandering it. Which I think is beautiful because that meant that like if your husband was going to be a deadbeat and a horrible person, you did have a way out. And so you weren't completely, you know, up shit screak without a paddle. If you needed to leave and you had kids or something like that, like that you had a little bit of something to fall back on. You had your dowry. In case you've forgotten, like dowry obviously in many cases could include like land. It often included goods that you needed for the home. So sheets, quilts, clothing. It might include livestock, it might include just household goods. It was that payment that was made that the woman then took with her. And in many cases, that then became the man's. But we do have a lot of instances where some or part of that actually got to stay with the woman and her family. As I I hinted at before, you're like, well, why then do we have these stereotypes of like pretty tiny woman sits at home, does nothing, needs man for everything? Nobility. It's always the bourgeoisie, you know? Gotta just cut off their heads and we'd be so much better. That's where we get this idea, though. So, okay, so was it that they were trying to push something onto the common person, or not so much that, but more so that you know, when when you got the monies, you can kind of do whatever you want. And it's gonna be a lot more about like politics. So that's why you had girls getting married off when they were like 10, 11, 12, was because this was a political thing. This was we need like we need the two of you to be linked up so that we're not gonna go to war with each other, or so that we have access to these things. And so that's this the the you know, the 12-year-old bride, that's where a lot of that comes from. That's also why we have a lot of clothing, historical clothing, that's really small, because it would have been worn by somebody like that who was higher class one time in their life, which is why it survived because it wasn't worn every day. It was like a one-time event. And so that's not necessarily a good example of what average people looked like or what average people wore. You know, these huge fancy dresses that you would just lie around all day. And yeah, you can wear a huge fancy dress like that if you are not working in the fields. No woman in 1700s France was wearing like the giant panier hoops, you know, the ones that like stick out to the side, like you were not picking turnips wearing that.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's funny because like when you when when you first start talking about like like the 1800s, there's there's a game that I absolutely love. Red Dead of Redemption 2. And you see every woman wearing that type of dress.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No.
SPEAKER_00:No. And the th the thing is, the the funny thing is, is that they put in a lot of research into that into that game to try to make it as accurate as possible. But yeah, I mean, I I've never seen a single picture of a woman without that dress.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly, because that was and you know, within different time periods, you're gonna have, you know, what was fashionable, what was not fashionable. And sometimes things got bigger, sometimes things got smaller. But if you look at what working class people, i.e. the majority of the population, were wearing, it's going to be a lot more toned down because you had to be able to do your daily activities and your work while wearing it. And so you might have a big fancy dress as a woman for wearing to like a ball or a marriage or an important event in your life, but your daily clothing had to be it, you you had to be able to do your job in it.
SPEAKER_00:And then you kind of figure, like, at the time, like pictures were extremely expensive.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. So the only people who had their picture made were people who had money, which meant they were also wearing their nicest shit. They were gonna be like top fashion at the moment. Again, not representative of daily daily life at all. So yeah, there you go. It's it's mainly nobility, just doing nobility things. Oh, yeah, same thing for the corset. That's another kind of stereotype of like, oh, why why women couldn't work? Because they're wearing these corsets that cinched them in to the point of you know, they couldn't breathe if they walked more than six steps. You see that in movies all the time. You know, the corset, and they're like it like really, really tight, and she Like and can't breathe and has this like minuscule little waist. First off, the Victorians were you know when photographs came out. As soon as they realized they could take photographs, they started photoshopping the shit out of those photographs. That's where those tiny wastes come from. They photoshopped them. 1800s Photoshop.
SPEAKER_00:I'm curious how that would look.
SPEAKER_02:I've seen info about, and I don't remember it off the top of my head, but they were able to, like as the photo was developing, or somehow after there was a way to go in and like very, very carefully, you know, remove stuff or change something in it. And again, this was not for everybody, but if you were super rich and fancy and you'd paid for this, you know, photo to be taken of you, why not pay extra and have them make your waist look snatched?
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Now corsets were the bras. That's that's what that's the job they were doing, and they may have come down a little further, but most of history, they were not there to like in your waist at all. That was again a nobility thing who were not necessarily working. The men weren't working either, if you were nobility. The Duke is not out plowing his fields.
SPEAKER_00:They were just, you know, having incest uh sex.
SPEAKER_02:Yum. The other thing, in in addition to like nobility being like the vast, vast majority reason why we like have these stereotypes is people just cherry picking stuff throughout history, as we like to do. Like, this is not just an exclusive against women. There is so many of these that you think about, oh, in the XYZ period, people did this, this, and this. And it's like that is not true.
SPEAKER_00:Vikings were in how or horns. People believe that the earth was flat until uh Columbus. And yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. This this is just it's stuff we like to do because it's it looks cool when you say stuff like this. You're like, oh, see this, whatever, you know. Wow, people back in the day were crazy. Who the thunk? Like, we like that type of thing. We eat that shit up. You have that, you have people who are also cherry-picking it to prove a point, to say, well, you know, that's why women in this case, you know, need to stay home and just cook and clean, is because this is what you've done for centuries. Like, this is the woman's job. She she's in the house, she has babies, she's barefoot. All these you know, beautiful things to serve her husband. And so if you can point back to some examples and be like, ah, it was see, in the 1600s, that's what it was. In the 1800s, that's what it was. So, where do you see us going from here regarding false stereotypes?
SPEAKER_00:Education. I mean, flat out, like uh it's it's because I mean, I remember like I first learned about Columbus in in fourth grade or something, and that was the way it was taught.
SPEAKER_02:1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
SPEAKER_00:That that everybody thought the earth was flat, and that's why, oh my god, Columbus wants to uh go around the world, like he's gonna fall off the edge, and it's like find out fucking you know, decades later that people have known that the world was round since the time of the Egyptians. So I think that's getting that information out there and being able to actually prove that things are wrong, because again, I mean we hear about this all the time, and I would like to think of myself as being knowledgeable of history, and I mean, if up until now, if you would have asked me the the woman in the 1800s, the first thing that would come to mind is like the the big big dress and everything like that. I think another thing that that adds to it is is movies. So like I remember when I did the episode on uh gaslight lighting, the movie was taken movie was actually filmed in the 1940s, but it was taking place in the 1880s, and that's how everybody was dressed.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, I would agree with you that it just it's education, and I think people need to stop being lazy. People being those who create stuff about this, like you said, movies, because that's why we have so many of these ideas about stuff. Is yes, we you know, we have limited paintings from back in the day. So if you want to see stuff that was made back then, you're you're not gonna see the peasants. Nobody was out there painting the peasants, unfortunately. But filmmakers, you know, in particular, like I do point to them because that's where you get a lot of these images of women wearing the super tight corsets, and oh, it's so terrible, she can't breathe. It's it's an easy stereotype, it's a cheap stereotype. Same thing for peasants in England just wore brown. We know how to dye clothing. Yes, there were certain dyes that like were very hard to do, certain colors, because the material that you needed to create the dye was not readily available, it was super expensive, or it didn't take very well. Sure, so there were certain colors that you wouldn't see that often, you'd only see with nobility or just never. But we we do know how to make things pretty. Everyone was not wearing just like brown, you know, 16 shades of brown clothing all of the time. And it's an easy, cheap stereotype to throw in there, and people can instantly be like, aha, English peasants. Yes. Recognize them by brown. It you don't have to. You can you can have color, you can have all of that, and maybe do a little more research into what the things really look like and how are they actually going to better portray? And that would go, I think, a long way to correcting people's false images about all of this stuff. So, with that being said, where would you rate historical false historical stereotypes about women on our scale O toxicity? Would you say that this is a green potato? Just shave off the green bit and it's just fine. Is this death cat mushroom 50-50 chance of death or survival? Or is this antifreeze, a delicious but deadly last meal?
SPEAKER_00:I want to say green potato, but maybe two green potatoes. Just because of the fact that it does become slightly harmful when we do kind of have this whole thing, like especially now, where it's like we need to go back to the uh, you know, the uh good old days and things like that. And it's like, yeah, you're going for an image that never was.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I don't think it's quite yet, or I don't think it's quite deathcap. So I would say two green potatoes, not not peeling off the uh the green.
SPEAKER_02:I would I would agree with that. It's definitely a couple green potatoes because it's not death cap, just because we have so many of these stereotypes, not just about women, about men, about in certain ex society or ex time period here. Like it just it runs rampant, the type of things where like, yes, back in the day it was very straightforward, and it wasn't. But as you pointed out, this type of thing is really harmful when people get a hold of it and start trying to use it to be like, this is why you have to do XYZ, because this is your role, you know, since time memorial, like you have been this type of person. And men are also hurt by this too. When you say say to women, it's like, oh, you're just supposed to stay at home and cook and clean and have babies, and the man has to go out and work, that perpetuates that stereotype of the man has to work now in 2025. You have to provide for the whole family. The man didn't do that 2,000 or 5,000 years ago. He was not providing for his family all on his own. So why would he need to do it now? So I I would say this is four green potatoes. I counter your two green potatoes with four. Just because it can so easily be turned into modern propaganda that has a negative effect on us all today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I'll go with that. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Glad we could get it up to four. Five.
SPEAKER_00:I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna say three. I'm I'm going middle there.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. All right. You say three green potatoes, I say four green potatoes. If you think it's a different number of green potatoes, you can let us know by email, toxic at awesome life skills.com. You can find us on social media. We are occasionally active on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Twitter. Let us know. You can also follow us there. You can like and rate the show wherever you're listening to it. That is very helpful. And until next week, this has been the Toxic Cooking Show. Bye.
SPEAKER_00:Bye.
