Author: Sophia Hiland

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 “One unpublished study [a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Mr.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.”

Mrs. America miniseries on Hulu.com

I found this show while perusing Hulu, which is a classic past time during this quarantine. This show has proven to be a great way to spend time and has also taught me so much about the women’s movement.

The show follows the two “sides” of the women’s movement when groups were working to pass and also block the ERA. The conservative backlash to the ERA is shown with Cate Blanchett playing Phyllis Schlafly, a woman whose writing we read for class, but whose personality and specific work I did not know much about until I started watching this show. One of the most fascinating things that the show highlights is that there were just as many factions in the conservative movement as there were within the women’s liberation movement. This was most specifically shown when some Conservative leaders from the south were espousing racist sentiments while they were talking about the need to stop the ERA. Schlafly goes through the challenges that any leader must face of figuring out how to unite the group in order to make her message the most potent, while also ensure that racism doesn’t pervade the group and give the liberals further disrespect the Conservative movement.

On the same theme of factions, the Women’s Lib group also faces a lot of group tensions ranging from those between Chisholm (played by Uzo Aduba) and Steinem (played by Rose Byrne) , Friedan (played by and Steinem, and so many more. These tensions highlight the politically sticky aspect of the work these women were doing, as well as the generational/racial/religious differences between these strong, smart and strategic women.

While I can’t sum up how awesome this show is in one journal post and I don’t want to just summarize the plots of each episode, I would HIGHLY recommend giving this miniseries a watch. It truly brings the personalities and the experiences of these famous and influential women to life. I enjoyed every minute of watching the first 4 episodes and I can’t wait to watch more as they come out!

Ps: the cast is just all around INCREDIBLE. While Blanchett is billed as the main character, each episode follows more closely specific women within the movement(s).

Among the great actors/actresses in the show are:

Elizabeth Banks, Uzo Aduba, Rose Byrne, Cate Blanchett, John Slattery, Sarah Paulson, James Marsden, Bobby Canavale, Margo Martindale and Tracey Ullman.

“I’m Working Remotely. Can I Keep Hiding My Secret Baby?”

By Caity Weaver, April 16th 2020

This question appeared in the Work Friend Column of the New York Times (and was also filed in the Style Section, probably because it is about a woman and pretty much anything about women is relegated to the Style Section, though that’s a conversation for another day).

This Column answers a question posed by a self-employed woman who has a remote business partner who is a man. She did not tell him that she was pregnant and now that her baby has arrived, she doesn’t know how to manage the noises the baby makes in the background of calls, saying that he probably thinks the noises are coming from a cat.

Why did this woman not share with her remote business partner that she was pregnant over the course of the 8ish months she was probably aware of it? She explains that 1) she had a project that was supposed to launch earlier this year that she didn’t want it to be a reason that he would push back the launch date of a project that was set to come out earlier this year (it has been pushed back anyway). 2) “I figured he might not think I was as committed to the project once I had a baby.” 3) she also explains that they only talk every few weeks and aren’t especially close.

This situation is fascinating to me. I think the biggest reason I find it so interesting is the idea that a woman is perfectly capable to do a given job when she is able to be 100% committed to her job (ie without a family, partner or even hobbies getting in the way of her work) while a man is always capable of being committed to his work even if he has a family, hobbies and a partner.

When women give birth, they do go through a physical and emotional experience which is exhausting. Men do not go through this same physical and emotional drain, but I’d hope that any father of a newborn was just as exhausted and drained as the mother of a newborn because that would mean he was putting just as much work into caring for the baby.

I also find the solution thought up by Weaver, who responds to this question, to be quite awesome. She suggests that the new mother just mention the baby by name “oh I have to go check on Baby” and go about it as if the mother had explained the situation in the first place. She goes on to say that feigning confusion is the greatest way to get around anything. She explains that lying creates a trap as work must go into keeping track of any lie.

This whole question reminds me of the news coverage of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, who took a working 2-week maternity leave in 2012 (when she had her first baby) and again in 2015 (when she gave birth to twins).

One article that appeared on the Daily Beast was titled: Marissa Mayer’s Two-Week Maternity Leave is Bullsh*t

“Working women can approach their policies however they choose” the article says, we should respect the decisions made by Mayer instead of judging the ways in which she goes about balancing motherhood and work.

On the otherhand, the article explains that Mayer’s decision suggests that women should “give up maternity leave for [their] careers”. The company, and the industry in general, often struggle to retain female employees, so this example set my Mayer, the article argues, is not one which encourages women in the workplace.

How Coronavirus Quarantining Could Lead To An Increase In Domestic Violence

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/03/9569893/coronavirus-domestic-violence-partner-quarantine-help

Written by Elly Belle, Published on Refinery 29.com on March 18th 2020

This article is about the ways why and how domestic violence is likely to increase during the period of quarantine due to COVID-19.

“on average, approximately 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States” and “nearly 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with severe impacts”

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

While Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline explains that they don’t necessarily expect to see new cases of domestic violence during this period of quarantine, the lack of options to escape make the frequency of violent interactions much higher.

“those confined with an abuser in close quarters for long periods of time, such as the holidays, actually call into hotlines less, because they aren’t able to find a safe space to reach out from”

– Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline

Ray-Jones also explains that negative financial situations or where there is additional stress in a home, there is a higher frequency of incidence of abuse, as well as an increase in the severity of abuse.

Often, Ray-Jones explains, the ability to go to work or have a partner go to work provides relief from abuse which many do not have right now.

A handful of organizations are working to continue to provide resources to those experiencing abuse of all kinds. These support systems come in the form of: “financial resources, shelters to go to, legal protections, domestic violence and child custody resources, transitional housing resources, legal expertise, and emotional tools” (Belle).

Additionally, the article points out that partner abuse can happen differently in a LGTBQ relationship versus a heterosexual one.

Lastly, the article offers a way to donate directly to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which I personally think is pretty incredible.

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The social club’s employees have a story to tell about the company that sold the world Instagram-ready feminism.

I read this article a couple of weeks ago without thinking much about the ways in which this business, one built to serve wealthy working women who wanted to be a part of a community of likeminded women, is incredibly fragile.

This article first explains what The Wing is, saying that it is “pitched as a social experiment: what the world would look like if it were designed by and for women, or at least millennial women with meaningful employment and a cultivated Instagram aesthetic.”

The physical spaces that make up The Wing offer members 72 degree working space (as women’s body temperatures are higher than men’s), in-house child care and a color coded library with books exclusively written by women. All these amenities, and so many more, come at the cost of as much as $3,000 a year.

The company is backed by more than $100 million in funding from VC and among its stakeholders are Megan Rapinoe and Mindy Kaling.

The Wing does not claim to be a-political, supporting Female Democratic candidates for office. Unfortunately, the company’s idealistic image for the future, at least as suggested by this article, fails to include the very women who work there. After a year of working at a Brooklyn location, an employee who originally took the job with enthusiasm for the all-women space explained that employees “don’t get paid enough for our immense physical, intellectual and emotional labor” and that as a first-generation Librerian-American they were used “so that [The Wing] could exploit my presence and my image for their own purposes,” they say, “to make it seem like they were more inclusive than they actually were.”

The article goes on to explain the ways in which the company failed to treat employees, many of whom were coming from much lower income backgrounds than those of the members, with respect.

Overall, this article highlighted a couple important questions I have:

1. would a men’s club face this same scrutiny?
2. is “feminism” as it exists today actually as intersectional as it claims to be?
3. is it an improvement for gender equality to see that women (instead of men) are now in positions of power in which they can deny respect and fair pay to women?

The article begins with a recent quote from Weinstein’s defense attorney, Donna Rotunno, who has made a career out of defending high profile men who have been accused of misconduct.

Rotunno “claimed that she has never been a victim of sexual assault, ‘because I would never put myself in that position.’ Her words immediately drew backlash for not only being cavalier about survivors’ suffering, but also for deploying a worn-out misogynist trope”

https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/weinstein-lawyer-donna-rotunno-accused-of-victim-blaming.html

Along with this incredibly problematic statement, which is a clear example of victim blaming, she stated that she never made the poor decisions that she sees as leading to rape.

“I’ve always made choices, from college age on, where I never drank too much, I never went home with someone I didn’t know, I just never put myself in any vulnerable circumstance ever”

https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/weinstein-lawyer-donna-rotunno-accused-of-victim-blaming.html

When asked if she thought all survivors are to blame for what happened, she quickly denied that statement and asserted that “women should take precautions”.

While there is so much to unpack throughout this interview, the thing that strikes me the most is how it frames rape and sexual assault as 1) the fault of the victim and 2) as incidents that only take place in social settings such as at parties. Though so many assaults and rapes do take place in these instances, she is purposely framing these events as far from the business world in which many of those who have accused Weinstein say they were assaulted or raped.

This whole article also pushed me to think about what it would be like to be on the legal defense team for someone accused (so many times) of sexual assault and rape. While it could easily be hard for a man to defend Weinstein, as believing and supporting survivors isn’t reserved for women, I would have never imagined for his attorney to be a woman. Perhaps that’s presumptuous of me.

Reading the comments section was fascinating. While commenters expressed both horror and support for her words and actions, I think the most interesting comment was made by “tatterj” and said: “1) she needs to do her job or the system will not work 2) Exaggerating her comments and taking them out of context is a sign of poor intelligence, yours 3) If she doesn’t put her self in situations (ie in hotel rooms with strangers, out drinking with people you don’t know) that’s called being smart. I don’t think she said being randomly raped is impossible, just that she takes precautions. 4) Everyone deserves a defence [sic] because everyone is capable of redemption, except maybe you”

I don’t quite know how to respond to this comment because it’s true that everyone deserves a defense and that sometimes lawyers must believe their clients in order to do what they’ve been hired to do.