Anyone carrying a bladed weapon carried oil. (More on that in a sec) Oil is what you use to clean and condition steel, especially, since water will rust it.

Many people in the Middle Ages used scented oils for their skin and hair from noblemen to lowly serfs.

Oil was incredibly abundant and quite cheap. The TYPE of oil however does matter in this.

Sheep oil (rendered from their fat) was very common and used for all manner of things from making soap to treating skin conditions. Rendered sheep fat has a very light texture and is a decent carrier oil without too pungent of a scent. Unfortunately it did rancid fast so it was common to add lots of herbs to it to help preserve it, especially rosemary, borage, marjoram and citron peels. This is how it became a common “perfume” oil used to scent hair skin or clothes. Nearly anyone would have had this handy somewhere.

Rendered pork oil was very common too and was most popular as a cooking oil.

Vegetable oil made from walnuts, almonds and flax seed was by far the most common non-animal oil. Nearly anybody had a bottle of almond or walnut oil in their pantry or on their person. These were by far the most popular oils used for conditioning steel, with walnut oil preferred because its tannins also gave armor a patina that kept it better. Only the absurdly wealthy ever wore polished armor. Everyone else blackened it to make it keep better. Walnut oil is good at doing that.

Walnut oil also works well as a lubricant. People back then DID use sexual lube by the way. No prostitute would be caught dead without it. Their favorite types were walnut and olive oil, though almond oil might be used in a pinch. They also used watered down acacia gum in southern Europe, which was sticky but slick and easy to re-wet.

Olive oil though was THE oil in Europe. It was expensive, comparatively, but obviously people considered it well worth its cost because it was found everywhere south of the Seine and frequently seen in even minor lordly houses or knights quarters much farther north. Considering quite a few people of the time thought it had aphrodisiac qualities when applied as certain way (likely because raw olive oil has a warming effect) I think you can imagine the most common reason it was sought after by men in particular.

Olive oil was also used in medicine and just about any church had some floating around somewhere because it’s conveniently good at treating minor infections and is wonderful for toothaches.

And UCD reportedly payed $175,000 for this image to not appear when you search it on google:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

& those are real and important critiques! but when you combine that with what Koyama termed "reverse essentialism" (the idea that gender is not a construct but an immutable trait but done in a gender-affirming way, such as "trans people have the opposite brain sex") which is itself fundamentally exorsexist and tied to patriarchy, you take it from "trans women's experience of social gendering throughout their life is very often not the same as a cis man's and trans women can experience misogyny from a young age" to "the patriarchy can See your True Soul Gender and no matter what is always treating you as your True Soul Gender" and what's really fucking insane is that people then treat this as a materialist take. yeah sure its materialist, if you only consider the material reality of a select group of trans people. which btw is exactly the same mistake transphobic "materialist" cisfeminists make by saying that trans women universally grew up with male privilege and don't have materially "female" experiences.

anyways, as far as i know, that is why people are so insistent that the patriarchy sees trans people as our "real" genders and misgendering is just a mind game. and look, i'm all for "the patriarchy as a system is deceptive about its own beliefs" and i do think how trans people are socialized and socially gendered is more complex than people tend to act like it is. but this comes from basically the same impulse as "i'm trans because my brain is the opposite sex!" it's trying to both appeal to exorsexist, gender-essentialist society while also affirming one's one gender by the rules of that society, even when its done in a supposedly anti-patriarchal manner. and hence why nonbinary people always get shafted, because we are fundamentally A Problem for trans people who see themselves as temporarily embarrassed cis people.