Human beings are an ever-evolving species. Once, we carried spears and created fantastic works of art on the walls of French caves. Today, we carry smartphones and trip over things because we don't ever look where we're going. Yes, the human species gets better and better all the time.
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Since the Industrial Revolution, things have changed at such a blindingly fast pace that we sometimes forget just how weird the world used to be.
(Because it's not at all weird anymore, right?) Things that were once commonplace seem strange or even bizarre today, although it's probably also true that humans who lived 100 years ago would think the things we do are pretty strange and bizarre. Sadly, we don't have any way to actually show an early 20th-century person a YouTube video of someone eating a Tide Pod. But we can at least enjoy our own bemusement at the strange and bizarre habits of our recent ancestors, mostly because it's okay to make fun of people who have been dead for decades.
This sounds like the plot of post-apocalyptic fiction but sadly, it's actually pre-apocalyptic non-fiction. One hundred years ago, in many big cities in the United States, it was illegal to be ugly.
Let's take Chicago as an example. According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1881, Alderman James Peevey decided he'd had enough of the eyeball-assaulting horrors of other people's misfortune, so he introduced an ordinance to ban people who were "diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" from the streets of Chicago, where they might make people uncomfortable. If you were deemed too ugly to be in public, you had to pay a fine of $1 to $50 (which was a decent sum in those days) or go to the poorhouse, which was kind of like an insane asylum for poor people.
After World War I, when veterans returned home with missing limbs and other disfiguring battle scars, public opinion toward the disabled started to change, but ugly laws remained on the books and their enforcement continued up until the 1950s. Chicago's ugly law wasn't officially dropped until 1974.
Now we'd love to say we're way more enlightened today but fat-shaming is still a thing, so collective enlightenment is perhaps still forthcoming. But at least fat-shaming isn't written into law.