Back in college, my best dude friend laughingly told me a horrifying — and quite possibly apocryphal — story about a “friend of a friend” whose one-night stand lost control of her bowels during a particularly energetic bout of anal sex. Embarrassed for the woman, I tentatively asked what the man did at that point, figuring he’d gotten angry or flipped out or ran into the bathroom to vomit.
“Oh,” my friend said nonchalantly, “Duh. He took her into the bedroom and kept going.”
The story’s stuck with me for years and not just for the gross-out factor: the more I’d hear about women afraid to crap in their boyfriends’ apartments or in shared hotel room bathrooms on weekend getaways, about psychosomatic constipation related to the mere presence of a man with whom a woman was having sexual relations, the more I’d think about the nonchalant way men talk about shit and wonder if we were really just doing all of this to ourselves. Is it really that men (or, at least the kind of men you’d want near your genitals) need us to be poop-and-fart free to want to fuck us, or have we just convinced ourselves they did? Or, worse yet, are we projecting our own learned squeamishness about our bodily functions onto men, as a way to rationalize yet another internalization of the “our bodies are gross” myths that pervade society? Keep reading »
