„Neuroses of the anus are perhaps the most common and socially encouraged bodily anxiety—the disposal of waste is pretty universally accepted as gross, and no one wants to talk about it much. At what point though, do manners become cumbersome and rarefied, robbing us of our rightful earthly amusements? Certainly, a good fart joke is a pleasure most often denied the “fairer sex”!
Luckily, sociologists Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams (two trailblazing researchers from my alma mater of Indiana University—go Hoosiers!) are doing the dirty work—so to speak. In their article “
Fecal Matters: Habitus, Embodiments, and Deviance” (seriously, that title was published by Oxford University Press), the two address not only the embarrassment surrounding passing gas and defecation, but the gendered manifestations of shame itself! Their abstract:“ read more: