Impolite Society: Exploring the Weird, Taboo & Macabre – Details, episodes & analysis

Laura and Rachel are taking a little break for the rest of the summer but we will be back in October with all new episodes of Impolite Society! In the meantime, enjoy these re-releases of some of our most popular episodes. 

Nothing ruins a vacation faster than not being able to "let it go." Why do our bowels get so shy and how can we help our bodies make a movement when out of our comfort zone. Join us for this adventure on the alimentary canal, but hurry up, your connection to BM town is departing!

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Laura and Rachel are taking a little break for the rest of the summer but we will be back in October with all new episodes of Impolite Society! In the meantime, enjoy these re-releases of some of our most popular episodes. 

How did our birthday suits go from our natural state to being a crime? We expose the history of clothing and get to the naked truth of why nudity is so taboo in today’s episode of Impolite Society.


Sources:
BBC - Earth - We did not invent clothes simply to stay warm
Nudity and Public Decency Laws in America - HG.org
Why is public nudity illegal? The offense principle, the Bible, and taboos.
Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U.S. 560 (1991) (cornell.edu)
Sex and Reason on JSTOR 

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Today, we’re talking about cousins. Kissing cousins specifically, and some of the genetic malformations it may or may NOT produce.

If you live in America, the thought of kissing cousins probably makes you cringe. But outside of the Western world and throughout a lot of time, that wasn’t always the case. Throughout many wealthy families and cultures, it was and is considered par for the course. How was this taboo born and when did it really get it’s wings? That’s what you're in for today on Impolite Society.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/science/cousins-marriage-family-tree.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/there-s-nothing-wrong-with-cousins-getting-married-scientists-say-1210072.html

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-scientists-found-after-analyzing-cases-of-inbreeding-in-the-uk 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/graphics/cousins_042505.html?noredirect=on 

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/go-ahead-kiss-your-cousin 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2605922/ 

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/15/cousin-marriage-is-probably-fine-in-most-cases 

https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy201325 

https://www.the-sun.com/news/7232766/dupont-family-inbreeding-legacy-cousins-marriage/ 

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/prehistoric-humans-are-likely-to-have-formed-mating-networks-to-avoid-inbreeding 

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Today we’re digging into the world of diapers and the adults who love them. We’ll dig into how adults role play being babies and how they put the lovers in diaper lovers. We’ll also take a look inside the mind of an adult baby to try to understand what draws them to the diaper lifestyle.

We’ll cover all this with many more messytidbits along the way. That’s what you’re in for today on Impolite Society.

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Fashion is a complicated world. Youthful women, beautiful clothes, and the whiff of culture and privilege is a heady mix. It’s no surprise that the trends and fads in fashion have had us chasing our tails for eons. But before there was heroin chic and body positivity movements, fashion was shaping our health in a completely different way. Turns out it’s not just the culture of fashion that’s toxic.

Today we’re exploring the deadly fashion trends of centuries past. Industrial waste, poison hats, and columns of fire are on the docket today and it might make you think twice about what threads you decide to rock at your next big social function.

That’s what you're in for today on Impolite Society.

00:00 The World of Fashion: A Toxic Legacy

03:25 Historical Fashion: From TikTok Trends to Deadly Dyes

06:23 Aniline Dyes

19:17 Fiery Hoop Skirts

26:13 Felt Hats and Mercury Poisoning

37:00 The Legacy of Scheele's Green

46:06 Reflecting on the Dangers of Fashion and Industrial Chemicals

48:25 Share the Podcast and Stay Informed

 

Sources:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/toms-river-excerpt-on-aniline-dye/

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/MMG/MMGDetails.aspx?mmgid=448&toxid=79#:~:text=Aniline%20is%20irritating%20to%20the,acute%20or%20delayed%20hemolytic%20anemia 

https://mollybrown.org/death-by-crinoline/

https://thecowkeeperswish.com/2018/08/06/the-crinoline-fires/

https://www.famsf.org/stories/poisons-part-i-the-mercurial-world-of-felt

https://corrosion-doctors.org/Elements-Toxic/Mercury-mad-hatter.htm

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/scheeles-green-the-color-of-fake-foliage-and-death/

https://www.jezebel.com/the-arsenic-dress-how-poisonous-green-pigments-terrori-1738374597

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Secret sea labs, extraterrestrial intelligence and LSD experiments…. No this isn’t the plot of a new spy movie. This is the story of a very real experiment that took place in the U.S. virgin islands in the 1960s.

Join us as we tell the story of a scientist and intellectual who became obsessed with unlocking the secrets of language and the young, star-crossed lovers who would get entangled in the messy affair. This is a story of strange science, unorthodox experiments and interspecies love. And you’re going to hear it all today, on Impolite Society.

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Stories are unique to the human race. They inspire us, delight us, and cast the familiar world around us in a whole new light. Everyone has been wrapped up in a good story at some point in their lives- curled up with a book you can’t put down, binge watching television shows late into the night, or being so obsessed with a story you find yourself dreaming about it. And every one of us, at some point, has thought, “What if….”

Today we are entering the online world of fanfiction: what is it, who writes it, and why the subject matter often leans to the dark, the sexual, and the taboo.

That’s what we’re in for today on Impolite Society. 

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/surprising-18th-century-origins-fan-fiction/606532/

https://reporter.rit.edu/views/fanfiction-legal-battle-creativity

https://noraphoenix.com/2018/03/26/introduction-into-mpreg/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/questions-about-mpreg-you-were-embarrassed-to-ask 
https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/v9h4ae/analysis_of_the_top_fandoms_on_ao3_percentages/

https://screenrant.com/fan-ships-highest-number-fanworks-ao3-ranked/#keith-amp-lance-voltron-legendary-defender

https://archiveofourown.org/tags

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

La petite mort. This phrase, meaning the little death, is an old school French euphemism for Orgasms. But, what happens when our pursuit of these little deaths results in the big one? Around the globe, thousands die each year from these autoerotic fatalities, and those are just the ones where the family let the coroner put that down on paper.

So how does the five finger shuffle turn deadly? Today we're talking about masturbation and all the ways the grim reaper might catch you with your pants down. We'll explore the famous cases from the medical journals and how you can avoid a similar fate.

This episode is not for the squeamish,  so buckle up because that's what you're in for today on Impolite Society.

Sources:

https://usstore.tenga.co/pages/globalreport2021

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3177356/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11453096/#:~:text=We%20report%20a%20case%20of,a%20sufficient%20amount%20of%20air. 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/mar/23/drugsandalcohol.uknews2 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35315374/ 

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/autoerotic-fatalities-power-hydraulics#:~:text=This%20article%20describes%20two%20cases,used%20a%20frontend%20loader%20shovel. 

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

In the 1950s, the Canadian government forced many Inuit people into high artic settlement camps. But one man refused to go, no matter how much his children and grand children begged. The family was scared of what would happen if he refused to cooperate. In a desperate plan to force his hand, his family abandoned the man in his igloo. They took everything- all the food, the furs, and tools- in the hope that he would have no choice but to join them in their journey to the camp. All they left him with was his two dogs and the clothes on his back.

But a determined man can win any battle. The man went outside, pulled down his seal skin trousers, and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade.

Human feces is a noxious substance, but there is more than one way you can be killed by poop. Today we’re talking shit- what it’s made of, what diseases it carries, and the wildest ways humans have used poop as a deadly weapon. That’s’ what you're in for today, on Impolite Society.

Sources:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vdx4ad/brown-death-a-history-of-poop-as-a-weapon-111

https://www.britannica.com/science/feces

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19305371

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!

Between the covers of a medical school anatomy textbook, you'd expect to find all of the knowledge we've accumulated on the human body over the millennia. Every bone, muscle, and tendon accounted for. But there's one organ that's missing.  

Throughout history, the clitoris has been ignored, misidentified, and deemed vestigial. Even today, 90 percent of the organ is left out of the textbooks.  Is this pleasure producing part of the female anatomy some leftover hand me down from male genetics or something entirely different?

Like the clitoris, the truth can be hard to find. That's why we're exploring anatomy, embryology, and physiology to learn more about this hot button topic and find out if the clit is simply just a teeny tiny penis. That's what you're in for today on Impolite Society. 

Got your own thoughts? Text them to Impolite Society!

Support the show

Text Rachel and Laura your rude thoughts or email us at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com. Visit our website for info about the show, your hosts, and where to find us online. If you'd like to support the show, visit us on Buy Me a Coffee- every little bit helps!