#628 Judgment from your Lips

The effects of lead poisoning are pernicious. In America we’ve tried to eliminate lead from our daily lives.
We’ve forgone the convenience of lead toothpaste tubes that used to stay rolled up, we’ve abolished lead paint in children’s toys, more or less, and we’ve employed vast resources to remediate lead-based paint in the workplace.
Lead has been blamed for destroying the Roman Empire, whose innovation of lead pipes helped quench the thirst of its masses and apparently cause mental problems while it did so. Nero’s violin-ing may have been facilitated by lead poisoning.
In children, lead exposure can cause retardation and behavioral problems. Excess lead exposure in adults causes impairments in attention and executive function, short-term memory loss, confusion and fatigue. Typically, it does not affect language centers in the brain.
Impulsive, forgetful, confused, and talkative. Hmm.
So what a surprise recently when it was revealed that the most popular brands of lipstick contain lead.
Gee, I don’t suppose it’s a good idea to be constantly applying lead to the opening of your mouth, do you?
Not unless you want to go crazy.
Confusion, fatigue, impairment in judgment. Hey, sounds like hysteria—a great male doctor word that attributes all aberrant female behavior to the hysters, as in hysterectomy, as in ovaries. The implication being having ovaries (translation: being female) is responsible for craziness.
And all the time it was lipstick.
The lipstick makers poo poo the whole thing, this isn’t new news, they intone, it’s just trace amounts.
Sounds like the way they used to minimize the devastating effects of the first birth control pills. Women could suffer and die from “side effects”¾no problem¾as long as men got what they wanted.
And when men couldn’t, medical science would throw all its resources into inventing Viagra for them.
I know one thing. Just about every woman I’ve ever known that uses lipstick, uses it a lot. Applying and reapplying all day long.
Trace amounts add up. Like water from a lead pipe.
You mean we’ve been driving women crazy with make-up?
Holy Roman Empire Batman!!
America, ya gotta love it