By Jessica Bennett and Amanda McCall
Part of the NYTimes Series “The Office: An Analysis”
Published Sept. 17, 2019 Updated Sept. 20, 2019
The article begins by telling the stories of three different women who work in professional office settings who go to great lengths to cover up the fact that they poop. One forces herself to poop so fast that there are medical repercussions, another carries a match book and can of air-freshener wherever she goes, and a third leaves the office mid-day in order to walk across the street and use the bathroom at a hotel.
“Girls aren’t born with poo shame — it’s something they’re taught.”
The article explains that women suffer from IBS and Inflammatory Bowel Disease at higher rates than men but that women are continually taught to feel shame around these issues even as great strides are being made within corporate America to address other aspects of women’s lives by providing lactation rooms, subsidized tampons and other resources.
“there is a kind of Kinsey scale to gas-passing and it goes like this: According to a study called “Fecal Matters” that was published in a journal called “Social Problems,” adult heterosexual men are far more likely to engage in scatological humor than heterosexual women and are more likely to report intentionally passing gas. Gay men are less likely to intentionally pass gas than heterosexual women, and lesbian women are somewhere in between”
“If a boy farts, everyone laughs, including the boy…If a girl farts, she is mortified” – Sarah Albee, author of “Poop Happened!: A History of the World from the Bottom Up.”
Yes, there are plenty of men who go to great lengths to keep their pooping habits, and farting, to themselves. And yes, there are women who don’t go to these great lengths to avoid anybody knowing that they, too, poop. However, women are more likely than men to have “parcopresis” which is when there is anxiety around bowel movements (this term isn’t in the D.S.M, while “paruresis” or “pee-shyness” which is experienced much more often by men than by women is).
The article explains that one reason women feel so inclined to hide what happens in the bathroom from the rest of the world is that there is a double standard which associates women with purity. Additionally, women are expected to be odorless, clean and groomed more than men are.
“One unpublished study [a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Mr. Haslam] mentions in his book found that a woman who excused herself to go to the bathroom was evaluated more negatively than one who excused herself to tend to ‘paperwork’ — while there was no difference in the way participants viewed the men”
This history of women experiencing poop-shame goes all the way back to the Gold Rush when men went about their business without any extra effort to hide it, while women would “stand in a circle, facing out, holding their skirts out to the side to form a ‘wall'” Ms. Albee says. She continues to explain that “Then one at a time, they’d take turns going to the bathroom in the middle of the circle, away from prying eyes.”
71% of Canadian women surveyed (out of 1,000) said they go “to great lengths to avoid defecating — especially in a public washroom.”
The article goes on in explaining that while men and women may have restrooms with equal numbers of square footage, men can move much more quickly through the bathrooms due to the urinal situation which women have periods, wiping, changing tables and more complicated clothing to work around that makes lines longer and makes poop-shame even more intense. Additionally, in Congress, “women didn’t have their own bathrooms on the House floor until 2011” (in 2011 there were 76 women in Congress).
The last paragraph of the article is as follows. I find it pretty wonderful. Instead of all investing in squatty potties to try and make toilets built to fit the more simple colons and higher heights of men, the article suggests a much better alternative:
“Or, a better idea: We could invest in educating girls to accept their bodies as they are, along with all the smells and sounds that come with it. Because, quite frankly, women have enough crap to deal with.”