Emergency Room June 4, 2011

Posted by FCM in gender roles Tags: antibiotics

its been discussed elsewhere that women do not normally defecate in public restrooms, unless its an emergency. there seems to be a near-consensus on that: women are known to self-report feeling embarrassed and ashamed of all of our bodily functions, and rightly so, considering that there are dire consequences to us for actually appearing human. i mean, its not as if we are misinterpreting this right? or that any sense of betrayal by our bodies is misplaced? we are supposed to stumble around in shoes not made for human feet, and smooth out our skin and remove hair so as to appear mannequin-like…and mannequins dont fart. or shit. or bleed. or anything. they are mannequins: their job is to be hangers for clothes.

and word to the wise: if a woman does take a shit next to you in a public restroom, and she knows you are there…the chances are good that either its a dire emergency, or shes not really female. this has happened to me. men shit because they need to shit, and it doesnt matter if they are wearing a dress when they do it; when they gotta go, they gotta go. this is learned behavior on the part of men: the entire world is their toilet. by contrast, when one is treated as a clothes-hanger for enough years, or too busy taking care of everyone else to even notice their own corporeal presence anymore, they can lose the urge to shit altogether.

so! being that this is the case, i have been wondering for the last year or so, if women would rather do just about anything than defecate in public bathrooms, why do our public bathrooms always smell like shit? this is a serious question. how can that be, if women avoid this like the plague if they can at all help it? either they actually *dont* feel embarrassed about their bodily functions enough to avoid shitting publically even though they say the opposite…or they are having bathroom emergencies.

so i looked it up. what could be causing this? regarding fecal incontinence in women, the american congress of obstetricians and gynecologists reports that

Bowel control problems occur up to eight times more often in women than in men. […] The most common cause of bowel control problems is childbirth. This is because as the baby passes through the vagina, the muscles or the nerves near the rectum may be stretched or torn. Injury to the anal sphincter muscles can cause stool or gas to leak from the rectum; loss of feeling in the rectum can make it hard to tell when it is time to have a bowel movement; and the inability of the rectum to stretch and store stool may make it hard to hold a bowel movement until you can get to the bathroom.

well theres a shock ay? but lets not dwell on that. just to see what else i could find, i kept looking, even though that about says it all. besides childbirth, another of the usual suspects appears to be use of antibiotic medications. antibiotics give you diarrhea, as most women probably know too well. but why do we need them? could it be…all the urinary tract infections we are getting from having “sexual activity” i mean PIV with men? looks like it: when i googled “why do women take antibiotics” the only hits returned were articles addressing UTIs. horrifyingly, some women have “recurrent cystitis” which is either of “no apparent cause” or “seems to be triggered” by PIV, depending on which paragraph of the article you read. and antibiotics give you yeast infections (as well as decreasing the effectiveness of your birth control pills)…and the medication for yeast infections gives you bacterial vaginosis…for which the treatment is…more antibiotics. yay! i did the BV/yeast infection back-and-forth for an entire year in grad school. it was great!

another thing that causes diarrhea appears to be stress. now, i wonder what women might have to be stressed about? what in the world could be causing so much stress? for women? whatever could it be? im confused.

also, the problem of womens homelessness is of some consequence here as well: women who have nowhere else to do it do bathe, sleep and otherwise perform their activities of daily living in public bathrooms.

so. it appears as if womens reality, including recurrent infections treated with antibiotics; peri-anal trauma, and homelessness could actually be overriding learned bathroom-avoidance behaviors, learned because they have adapted (necessarily) to mens insistence that women really are just hangers for clothes. a dilemma that sounds stressful in and of itself.

meanwhile, men shit because they have to go, and as far as i know, the issue of womens bathrooms smelling like shit has never triggered an ounce of curiosity from men, most of whom have never been in a womens bathroom and all of whom directly benefit from womens stress and mens enforced expectations that women act, look like, and function as hangers for clothes. and the only “bathroom dilemma” anyone cares about seems to be the one transwomen encounter: men who feel like women deep inside their precious minds, being disallowed in womens bathrooms by the evol radfems (and regular women, non-fun-fem variety) who want to preserve women-only spaces and protect women from penis-people who are likely to vicitmize and impregnate them.

interestingly, men using womens bathrooms wouldnt even notice (of course) that it was strange, that a public womens restroom would smell like shit. not only would they happily contribute to the smell themselves, it would never even occur to them that women dont usually do this if they can help it: in other words, the dilemmas that women negotiate daily, living as female-bodied persons in a world where women are hated, and not regarded as human or even animal apparently. even animals shit.