Women and bodily functions: poop

My fella is pretty modern-thinking. He’s well-acquainted with the necessity of my diaphragm, and he is not afraid of my period. When we camp out, I get pretty smelly and greasy, and often piss within his visual and aural range. Farts are not a big deal. He understands that I am a person and thus have bodily functions. He is comfortable with the processes of my existing.

But he does not like evidence of my bowel movements. If something does not sufficiently flush, he is upset. If I mention being backed up, he is visibly uncomfortable. If someone brings it up in conversation, he goes suddenly silent.

Though poop, feces, bowel movements are common conversational fodder for men in social conversation and in media depiction, for women they are taboo. In society with men, poop is something we don’t mention unless we’re desperate to shock, desperate for laughs. Discussing it in public is crass and uncomfortable. “Everybody poops. Except for women,” as Sarah Haskins says in one of her hilarious Target: Women sketches.

Women and poop are supposed to stay very far away from each other. We’re supposed to be on opposite ends of the spectrum: uncritical unblemished object Women at one end and messy stinky human Bodily Functions at the other end. We’re not supposed to do it. We’re not supposed to talk about it. Though there’s an entire industry around making us poop – Metmucil, MiraLax, etc – it’s about Fiber or Cholesterol or [Euphemism], as Haskins ablely points out in the video quoted above.

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