When I was a sophomore in college, making my dollars working in the theatre department’s costume shop, I stitched alongside a posse of unspeakably cool senior girls. Being prime players in the University’s theatre scene, they were into shock and awe when it came the way they dressed, did their hair, and even — or especially — in what they talked about.
One day, two of them were deeply engaged in a dialogue about how awesome pooping was. “Did you know,” said one to the other but for the whole room’s benefit as we ripped out seam after seam, “that when you take a shit, it triggers the exact same chemical reaction in your brain as when you come?”
“Well, that makes sense,” said the other one. “All that build up followed by a release, I can see it.”
They turned to me, and eager to be viewed as cooler than cool, I was all “Totally.”
Inside, however, I was questioning the veracity of their science. I was also rapidly going through the catalogue of every dump I’d ever taken to see if I’d felt anything that could have come near to being an orgasmic experience. As a late-blooming nineteen year old, I didn’t have a lot of (read: any) basis for comparison out of movies and my own limited self-fumbling. But since these women were my newfound experts on all things, I became deeply concerned that the best I could hope for from sex when I finally had it wouldn’t come near to rivaling say, my time in the bathroom in the morning following my second cup of coffee.
Everybody poops. There are books about it. Everybody has seen their own poop and the person who says that they haven’t is a vile poop-denier, and thus, ought not to be trusted.
If you’re a guy, and you have guy friends or work with other guys, you probably have at least one story about a guy you know doing gross, pranky things with his own poop. (Storing it inexplicably in a jar for months to “see what would happen” is one of my favorites.) You have, at the very least, discussed it. Of course, when you do this at work, you take care not to offend the ears of delicate ladies in your vicinity. If you aren’t at work, you watch the delicate ladies around you to see them squeal appropriately at the very thought of a twisted, faceless, stank-snake escaping from your bottom hole.
Because to be a woman and to talk about poop — about anyone’s, but especially your own — that’s subversive. It’s weird. It’s immature. It’s inappropriate. Those same senior girls in the theatre shop taught me a lot about being a modern feminist, sometimes engaging in serious debates about what being female even means, and conversations about sex and sexuality were explicit, positive, and frank.
Yet it was talking about shitting that had people in the costume shop up in arms. “You guys stop — that’s so gross,” said a male coworker during the Pooping as Orgasm debate of 2006. Strangely, I think if the girls had couched the subject differently, maybe talked about feces in terms of scat play or other fetishes, it wouldn’t have been met with the same outcry.
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