Dancing...and smelling like a Giant dirty BUTT!!

Some of the greatest music ever written was written back in the 17th and 18th century. Some of the greatest masters existed back then.

BUT...they all STUNK!! (like Pee UUUUUU!!)

They wore wigs and powder to cover their hair falling out from lice and other maladies.

You were privileged back then to actually dance with a woman. Much of it depended on your lineage and how much you STUNK!!

Bad breath was the least of it! There was butt odor, crotch odor (gawd forbid you get her clothes off!), armpit funk, fumudacheeze, and too may other things to mention. Can you imagine how much people STUNK back in those days?

To some, it seems like such a romantic era, but in reality...this is why whale based perfume was invented! It was the one thing which could overcome the stink!

I say this as I empty my "chamber pot" over the balcony out into the street below. I slept with that stinky smell all night...so, look out below!~!

I love Classical music and listen to it all the time, but sometimes I wonder if they should have a 'Scratch & Sniff' thingie just setting the mood!

LOL!

Romance was a funny thing back then!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Well to be fair they may have had wooden false teeth and been a bit stinky,but at least they had true genius/masters back then.
Further back,maybe even more stinky but think of the renaissance artists,builders and statue makers,and people like Da Vinci and Galileo.
Those were proper genius level dudes.

We get slightly better hygiene(if we are lucky and in a developed country)
But where are our real genius level dudes and dudettes?

Einstein,maybe I suppose?
But recently? I can't think of any.

Oh well at least we got the soap and cell phones

I think i just puked a little..thanks for that, at dinner time too lol.

So glad they created the word hygiene (not that everyone uses it)!

True romance makes you forget everything.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Ugh... i couldn't imagine...

I wanna yak when i stand beside someone who doesn't ware deodorant... nasty son of a...

I guess you'd go nose blind after a while...

no idea how procreation happened back then...

A Million Ways To Die In The West - A Mustache.

Always a sign of good grooming.

I stopped washing this year as a natural "social distancing" experiment. Works great and at about day 10 it doesn't get any worse. Given enough time, I may develop an ear for classical music.

Butt, seriously, it's a very interesting thought... all those "cultured" minds, bottoms, crotches and armpits.

originally posted by: halfoldman
A Million Ways To Die In The West - A Mustache.

Always a sign of good grooming.

That musical number took us 10 days to shoot including rehearsals.
We had to bring in the dancers from NY.

Ahh ... a 19th century bath.

If 15 other men before me could stand the water, it's fine for me.

"Say, it says here that the Indians still own 20 percent of America".

"I know, they're so selfish".

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I watched a documentary about the Palace of Versailles.
The French nobles would spend all their time running around court trying to get on the good side of the King.

They would just wander into a corner of the room and squat, take a dump, the lot. Then just stroll back over and re-join the conversation.

Moving from the summer palace to the winter palace gave the servants a chance to clean up and shovel all the stuff into the garden.

Cities were worse without sewage systems. Imagine that today in your mind for a while...
You'd know your neighbours more than you wanted to

I smelled, the funk of my life
And I owe it unto you - yeah phew
Cause it's true
You do smell like pooh, yeah ...

originally posted by: igloo
I stopped washing this year as a natural "social distancing" experiment. Works great and at about day 10 it doesn't get any worse.

Oh, but 'it' does... 'It' gets much worse... YOU just can't smell 'it' anymore after 10 days. It's called Olfactory fatigue.

Olfactory fatigue, also known as odor fatigue, olfactory adaptation, and nose blindness, is the temporary, normal inability to distinguish a particular odor after a prolonged exposure to that airborne compound.

a reply to: ByteChanger

We used to camp at this place called Saldanha Bay, which at the time had a huge fish factory.
And the entire town and surrounds would smell like an unkempt dustbin.
But after the second day you smelled nothing.
People would visit at the campsite and complain of the awful stench, and we were like - what stench?

Nothing but healthy, clean sea-air we smell.

Ughhh no smell is worse then spilt beer on a bunch of Raders fans packed into the BART train on a 80 degree day! All those dark colored shirts. The sweat..... aweful. I was a teen trying go get home but got stuck on that train for 30 min.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

The rich used to stink, feared bathing more than once a year, brushed there teeth with acid, imported sugar and rotted what was left of them away (sugar was a status symbol back then) hence the long lasting ancient meme "Filthy Rich", ate almost entirely meat with very few or NO pulses, woman often used cages under there hair and even had poor birds to make there lice and flea riddled wig's sing in them but were known to have mice nesting in them as well since wearing fruit was actually a fashion at some point's.
Gout was a favourite disease of the rich and also obesity, the white makeup they used was usually white lead and they were rife with just about every venereal disease of the day especially syphilis.

The poor used to bath more often, there teeth were often in better condition so young girls would be waylaid and there teeth forcibly pulled to be implanted in some rich fiend's gob.

The poor house maid was usually raped by the master as well as the footmen (Whom were often his illegitimate offspring or half brothers etc while the lady of the house often liked the handsome stable hand and so her offspring were often shall we say not of noble lineage).

Back then they did not have genetic testing but if they had many family lines even royal ones would have been toppled very quickly.

Weirdo's then and weirdo's now.

I am of course talking about European nobility of a couple of hundred years back.

By comparison the stinky cowboys of the old west were positively clean.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I don't know if I should laugh or barf.

I can't imagine how filthy and smelly it was back then. GAH!
I love my scented soaps and oils and a long soak in my antique claw footed tub.

Sort of like this...

a reply to: Night Star

Nice looking tub, bit small for a guy though I for example would get into that and the water would get out no room for the two of us me or the water.

Joking aside there were other disgusting period's, in Ancient egypt the woman wore a cone made of rendered animal fat on top of there head, this was filled with herbs to make it smell sweet and it was the deodorant and perfume of the day, over the course of the day the idea was that his lard which also helped to keep there hair free of parasites would melt and run down there body's masking the sweat.

a reply to: LABTECH767

By comparison the stinky cowboys of the old west were positively clean.

Oh, I dunno about that! Some of them were likely just as bad. Probably the biggest difference was the cowboys of the old west didn't really try to cover it up, whereas many of the people from the centuries before them tried, and mostly failed, to cover up the stench. A pig in a sty may stink, but a pig doused in perfume smells like perfume with that acrid stench underneath wafting through all the time. It's far worse!

So, for the record, what prompted me to post such a stinky topic for the OP was...

My wife absolutely loves to watch old royalty movies of Europe from the 13th to 18th centuries. She likes the lineage and the pageantry, and she's actually kind of a history buff in this respect. The other night we were watching one which had some particularly risque' sections in it. We got into a discussion about sex during these times and how rampant it was. I just couldn't imagine courting someone at the grand ball who smelled like perfume and powder but every now and then you got a serious whiff of butt, and knowing that when it came down to time to getting 'busy' this would only get worse...far worse.

The movies, as always, make these moments seem sexy and romantic, but in reality there was probably a lot of impulsive scratching of privates and unpleasant smells.

Someone made a good point earlier about how you get used to it, olfactory fatigue I think it was described as. And this is true, to a certain extent. In other words, you're around it so much you don't really smell it. As many here know, we work cattle, and sometimes this can be a stinky proposition, but it doesn't seem that way to me or the wife (most times). There are times when things can get particularly "odiferous" though. HOWEVER, I never get used to it to the point where would consider not taking a shower / bath before going around others, AND I never get so used to it that I forget what the smell of clean is like. In modern times today we have a choice, for the most part, to be clean and scrub off the stink, but back in those days things like bathing were a luxury which entailed quite a bit of effort. They didn't happen all that often as a result.

I was in Europe one time on a business trip and I went on some tours of some old castles. It was fascinating. I remember one tour where some lady commented about how cold it was inside and opined out loud about how, back during the glory days, it would have been warmer with all the fires in fireplaces and such. I looked around the room we were in at the time and noticed it had modern windows to keep out the elements and help preserve the history, it had electric lights so you could see, and I thought to myself how back in the day windows as we know them today were pretty much unheard of. So, while there may have been a lot of fireplaces burning, there were also very cold drafts everywhere. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but the notion of stripping down to my birthday suit when it's 30 degrees in a stone bedroom to take a bath doesn't sound like such a fun proposition. People of the day felt much the same way, and therefore things like baths were certainly not a regular thing. The reality was, castles of the day were actually grim, cold and dark places. They may have been monuments and fortresses for a kingdom, but at the same time they also had a lot more suffering going on inside than luxury.

Much of recorded history overlooks these simple realities. And, I guess it's probably just as well. Reading about the harsh daily realities of an era would certainly take away from the romance of it all.

And so, there you have it.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Why pick on musicians, to blame them for the characteristics of a whole era?

a reply to: DISRAELI

Huh????

I wasn't doing anything of the sort! I was just pointing out the stark differences between some of the elegance of the music and the not so elegant smells of the day.