New York Times building by wsifrancis, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

It would appear that the New York Times is, indeed, at it again.

Taking social media by storm is a new piece in the NYT‘s Style section all about the greatest taboo of them all: Women who poop at work.

No, dearest friends. I am not kidding.

We may be living in an age where certain pockets of the corporate world are breathlessly adapting to women’s needs — company-subsidized tampons, salary workshops, lactation rooms. But even in the world’s most progressive workplace, it’s not a stretch to think that you might have an empowered female executive leading a meeting at one moment and then sneaking off to another floor to relieve herself, the next. Poop shame is real — and it disproportionately affects women, who suffer from higher rates of irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In other words, the patriarchy has seeped into women’s intestinal tracts. Let’s call it the pootriarchy.

And this would be fine. I would be okay with this story existing. Sure, I don’t want to read about poop, but I understand that it is a topic of interest to some of the Times readers. I don’t have any issue with the story whatsoever.

I have an issue with the graphic.

we regret to inform you the NYT is at it again pic.twitter.com/WGlH3iKdy0 — Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) September 17, 2019

Look at those stalls. Something is amiss in the corporate bathroom. I first have to ask if the New York Times is aware of what is actually supposed to go on in multi-stall bathrooms.

In the first stall… okay, look. I know the cliches about women going to the bathroom together, but I am struggling to understand the physics of what’s going on in this stall. The woman in the white shoes is facing away from the toilet toward the left side and the woman in orange(?) shoes is facing the toilet from the front, but angled toward the woman in white shoes a bit. Being a heterosexual white male, I can only assume something unwholesome is happening.

The second stall clearly shows the Times‘ commitment to gender-neutral bathrooms, as I am pretty sure that is a man (slacks without heels is a dead giveaway). He is also decidedly not pooping nor are his pants even pulled down. He is also apparently unaware that woman are going to be pooping in the stalls around him, as that is (according to the Bible For Men) something that doesn’t happen.

The fourth stall is occupied by an apparent psychopath with the urge to feel the ghosts of hundreds of poops before her between her toes. This is unacceptable, and we must remove this person from society.

That leaves the third stall. I thought this was the normal person’s stall. This stall was used by someone who recognized the chaos going on around her and fled in terror. But… no. This is perhaps the evilest person of all. She (assuming that this person was a she) has done the unthinkable, and we could be tempted to keep the shoeless pooper among us in society in exchange for barring this one.

“Why?” you ask yourself, not seeing an obvious problem. Because she has left the toilet paper to roll under instead of over. The best-case scenario here is that she did not fix someone else’s mistake. That is just as bad as the person who accidentally scratches their fork across their plate. We know it was an accident and that you didn’t mean to, but we’re still going to have to murder you.

I don’t know what the New York Times thinks goes on in bathrooms, but here in Real America, we don’t tolerate this Grey’s-Anatomy-Meets-Coprophilia behavior in our bathrooms.