Welcome back friends to a brand new Friendly Friday featuring a very talented writer who I went to school with -- Ms. Katarina O'Dette.
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| Oh my, ain't that just a name and a half? |
She's a parkour-doing, skydiving, Joss Whedon-y son-of-a-gun who also happens to be a badass.
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| She's sitting on the ground... but in the sky. |
Sorry, I'm not taking it seriously enough. I promise to be an adult about this from now on.
Now, without further...
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| A Doo Doo! |
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On Feminism and Constipation
When stereotypes and sexism play on the
playground, they end up having awkward premarital sex and birthing ideas like
“to be feminine is to be delicate.” There’s this thought floating around the ether
that to be a true lady, one has to be ladylike. Being a woman means being
classy.
But that is complete horseshit, as anyone who
has ever met human beings knows. I’m proud to say that my female friends are
the most spectacular farters I have ever met, executing their butt bombs with a
grace, pride, and work ethic that is otherwise completely absent from a college
campus.
Once a month, biological women are subjected to
intense pain. (To male readers, please imagine that someone lit a match and
tossed it up into your urethra, and then sent a very tiny blind owl up after it
to attempt to catch said match with its bare, spear-like claws. That’s a vague
idea of what we mean when we say cramps.) In addition to this, some women get
back pain, because your hips spread slightly while you’re on your period,
mimicking an extremely mild form of childbirth. It feels sort of like having a brick
wall rest on the back of your pelvis. Also, your period can make your poop
kinda funky. So one part of the female body is being attacked from quite
literally all sides for three to seven days a month, for an average of 48 collective
days a year. What do we do about all this? We shove a piece of cotton up after
that pain, sometimes down a couple pills, and then go about our business of attempting
to dominate the world while simultaneously looking fabulous.
Men, on very rare occasions, get kicked in the
balls. What do they do? Immediately crumple to the ground and cease all
activity. There are often tears involved.
So, no, I don’t think being a woman has anything
to do with being delicate. But then, what does it mean?
I was on a date once. (It happened. I swear. That
one time.) Because we had a relationship where I could say these kinds of
things to him, I asked him if he wanted to hear a successful poop story. He
said yes, and I proceeded to tell him the following (ancedote-ception):
One
time, I had really bad constipation. Like, the poop that wanted to come out of
my butthole was larger than my butthole. It just was. So this wasn’t just a bit
of unpleasant constipation. This was “lock the bathroom door and apologize to your
roommates because this land is my land for the next hour” kind of constipation.
I
would push a little, yelp in pain, close my eyes, and beg for God to prove his
existence to me by just evaporating this poop. Begging for it to ease its way
out without continuing to make my butthole feel like it was going to rip open
if this thing tried to free itself from my body.
I
was pitying myself, convincing myself that no one had ever suffered as much
pain as this because how could anyone ever suffer as much pain as this (also
how I feel about paper cuts). Then I remembered the group of people who always
get to win that argument about who has suffered the most pain in their
lifetime.
Mother-fucking
mothers.
I’d
never seen childbirth in person, but I’d watched TV. I knew
what it looked like, the doctor explaining to the woman that she needed to push
(but not too much), no matter how hard it was. And as the inspirational music
swelled, she would push and scream and yell and cry and then something
beautiful would happen. The pain would be over.
I
put in my headphones and selected the appropriately inspirational music
(Macklemore’s "Thrift Shop”). I took a last breath, the last breath in my
life that was innocent of the kind of pain that was about to greet me. I
steeled myself. And then I ripped the band-aid off.
It’s
impossible to express the kind of determination and bravery it takes to push,
to try to will a large object out of your body through a hole that is simply too
small. To be honest, like women after childbirth, I can’t remember those
minutes anymore.
What
I do remember is what it felt like when that giant poop finally squeezed free,
and my butthole was free to feel like a butthole again. It was bleeding a
little (I was not exaggerating about the size!), but there in the toilet was my
little bundle of joy. There has possibly been no prouder moment in my life than
the moment when I finally, finally flushed.
At the conclusion of my story, there was a long
silence as my date stared at me with an expression that perfectly matched that
of the Scream mask.
“I thought you asked if I wanted to hear a
successful boob story.”
…
Well.
Um.
Whoops?
Whatever.
He got over it eventually, and slowly learned
to be proud of me. (He probably didn’t.)
So what is woman?
I birthed a shit out of my ass, told the person
I was seeing about it, and got sex. That’s what it means to be a goddamn lady.
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If you would like to read more by Katarina, a tell-all traveler, you can read her blog: http://joyflecked.tumblr.com/.
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