5 Genius Ideas Killed by Prudes

5 Lab Mice

The first scientist who rigorously showed how offspring inherit parents’ traits was Gregor Mendel, with his studies of pea plants. Kids who learn about Mendel in school dutifully nod along as they learn about this 19th-century guy studying plant height and seed shape, and few think to ask one big question about him: Why did he study pea plants? Why not study animals?

If you’re trying to uncover the mysteries of why we are how we are, you’d want to study organisms as similar to us as possible. Plants are more convenient than humans for studying inheritance, since humans take decades to grow up and sire a new generation while pea plants do it in just one year, but animals like mice reproduce even quicker than that, which is one reason labs do so much research on mice. 

You’d probably also want to study animals rather than plants because animals have sex, like humans do while plant reproduction is a whole different process. We sometimes liken pollen to sperm and flower parts to eggs, but that’s just a metaphor. In fact, left on their own, pea plants will usually self-pollenate. Mendel had to clip the plant's sex organs and cross-pollenate them by hand to get them to pass genes along.

So, why did he do that, instead of just putting mice together and letting them make babies the fun way? He did it because doing so avoided sex. Oh, he was fine with the sex part, but he was conducting these experiments in St. Thomas’ Abbey in Brno, and the bishop forbade him from using mice. There was to be no fornication in the abbey, whether by humans or by rodents. 

Because of this, his research took eight years, when he could have finished it much quicker if he used mice. Plus, the field he pioneered never really took off till half a century later, when another scientist tried doing his own experiments — on mice this time. That bishop held genetics back, and without him, we’d probably all have wings and custom tails by now. 

4 The Recorder

You think of the recorder as a musical instrument exclusively for children. Kids play it because it’s so basic that they can learn it before they’re ready to really learn to play music. But if we hop back in time 500 years or so, the symphonies of Europe considered it a serious instrument, to be played exclusively by serious men. 

That lasted right up until one of these men said, “Hey, does it look like I have a dick in my mouth?”

We don’t know who first made that observation, but it soon resulted in advice that men shouldn’t play the recorder in public. It should be in private and with a woman present, “but with tact and good judgement, for it is, after all, impossible to imagine all the things that could happen.”

Schools started teaching the recorder in earnest to children in the 20th century thanks to the advocacy of one composer, Carl Orff. It seemed that everyone figured children were too innocent to see any phallic significance in the recorder, which was one more way in which everyone was wrong. 

3 The Third Drink

Today, if someone offers you a hot drink, they will likely offer you two options: coffee or tea. Of course, you have so many different varieties when it comes to coffee or tea that you have many more than two options in practice, but it’s still kind arbitrary that we’re stuck with those. Even ignoring such alternatives as hot chocolate and hot Dr. Pepper, you’d think we’d have found other natural plants that we could brew and serve warm.

We used to have one. We called the resulting drink saloop and made it from orchids. People still drink it in some places such as Turkey, and over in England, it was quite popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite “orchid juice” sounding exotic, stalls sold it right alongside coffee and tea, and for a lower price.

The only problem was saloop was too good. Not only did it taste good — it also appeared to have medicinal properties. Those medicinal properties included treating venereal disease.

Everyone soon therefore associated saloop drinkers with infected genitals. The saloop industry died, and we decided that only caffeinated plants were allowed to create hot beverages. 

2 Oregon Bikes

All of you fans of moral panics will already know bicycles have faced many attacks. Some doctors said biking caused bicycle face, a very serious condition whose exact nature varied depending on who was describing it. Then in France, people feared that biking could turn you into a lesbian. 

Neither of those succeeded in killing biking. But if we narrow our scope just to Oregon, we’ll find a little bike scandal that did manage to do that for a while. 

Biking was huge in Oregon at the end of the 19th century. A Portland saloon owner named Elizabeth Smith then purchased a racing track and encouraged men to bet on her employees racing around it on bikes. When Liz’s employees weren’t biking, they were saloon gals catering to gentleman patrons, and the main point of this exhibition was to advertise her roster to customers.

Other sex workers followed their example, using bikes to show themselves off. As a result, everyone in the state soon associated bikes with that specific profession, and most women now quit cycling altogether. At the start of the 20th century (a little bit before cars became very available), Oregon’s biking craze suddenly died. A generation would pass before people biked again. 

Today, of course, most people in Oregon do have sex work side gigs, which means bicycles come with no stigma. 

1 The Moon Pose

If you enter a bodybuilding competition, you’ll want to show off every muscle that you’ve worked on. This includes showing off your gluteus maximus, and for years, people had a specific pose for doing so. They called it the moon pose. You would face away from the judges and bend over. 

Though the pose was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s now banned by bodybuilding organizations and the National Physique Committee. It’s a lewd act, according to current rules. Rumors used to say that judges would sleep with competitors, so the pose came off as the bodybuilders trying to seduce them. Plus, plenty of higher-ups in bodybuilding wanted to clamp down on allegations that the whole sport was kind of gay. 

Two counterarguments should have (but did not) convince everyone to let the moon pose back in. First, the pose is simply a great way to display some of the features being judged. Shorts cover the butt crack for decency’s sake, but the glutes must be allowed to bulge so you can evaluate them. The pose also shows off hamstrings, as well as additional leg muscles that aren’t under tension but still just happen to be enormous. This isn’t erotic. This is competitive.

The other counter is that, if you insist on saying that the moon pose is sexual — c’mon. Are you saying the rest of bodybuilding isn’t? 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.