Transcript | Ep. 72: How to Flush the Poop-triarchy

[Stinger]

Cristen: Caroline, I just happen to have with me a copy of the best-selling children’s book called Everyone Poops

Caroline: Of course you do

Cristen: Of course I do. It is highlighted and dog-eared. Could you, though, take a look in there and just tell me who you see pooping

Caroline: OK. Hang on. Flipping some pages. [page turning]

Cristen: Just take a little look

Caroline: OK, ao different animals as a category. Snakes. Like a whale. Oh, here’s — is that a wildebeest?

Cristen: Sure

Caroline: Here’s a little boy. OK, wait a second.

Cristen: Notice anything missing?

Caroline: Fish … Wait - and then it ends with the boy! Where’s the girl?

Cristen: Exactly! There are no girls. It should be called Everyone Poops Except Girls!

[Theme music]

Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike, where we find out what happens when women break the rules — and enjoy a good poop. I’m Caroline

Cristen: I’m Cristen. And Caroline, there is a gender gap in the children’s poop literature aisle AND THAT IS A PROBLEM! Seriously, I did a very unscientific survey of Amazon poop training books for toddlers, and the ONLY poop-specific one I found featuring girls is called — get this — Even Princesses Poop.

Caroline: Oh, come on!

Cristen: Yeah. Mm hmm.

Caroline: Well, Cristen, you’re not alone detecting some poop-triarchy afoot here. We recently heard from a listener named Lacey who wrote: “I was wondering if y’all ever thought of discussing the gendered hang-ups of pooping/farting … It’s one area in which I’ve personally found it most difficult to dismiss the patriarchal bullshit surrounding it, even though it’s literally a natural function of our bodies.”

Cristen: Yeah, listener Lacey was basically reading my mind because, fact about me, I have thought about the gendered politics of pooping for years now —

Caroline: Cool, yeah, cool

Cristen: Cool? Is that cool? So this started years ago when I was working in an office that had a multi-stall women’s bathroom. And there was this unspoken etiquette that you either waited for the bathroom to clear out if you had to poop. Or if you absolutely had to go while someone else was in there, you at least waited for the sink area to clean out just to avoid having to make eye contact with another coworker after pooping like, 4 feet away from them

Caroline: So relatable, so awkward. But also it sounds like so much work.

Cristen: It was! And I’ve just been SO curious to know why those poop standoffs specifically in women’s bathrooms happen. And, no, there aren’t really any experts on that that I could talk to, but we DID find a pair of comedians who love talking shit so much that they co-hosted a live show in New York called Awkward Poop & the City.

Caroline: Well before we get into shits n giggles, Cristen, here’s a mind blowing fact: In the US, women are TWICE as likely to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome. It’s actually the second most common reason behind colds we skip out on school or work.

Cristen: It’s not just our stomachs acting up, either. There’s also a fascinating connection between our anxiety, stress, and mental health and what’s happening — or not — on the toilet.

Caroline: Our other guest today, gastroenterologist Dr. Haley Neef, is gonna shed some light on that and help us understand how our bodies, brains and genders collectively impact our digestive tracts

Dr. Haley Neef: You know, at our dinner table, girls didn't talk about poop. It just wasn't acceptable. So we missed out on the whole lexicon of what is a normal bowel movement. Is it normal to go a week without pooping? Is it normal to go a month without pooping? I honestly have had females in my clinic who think it is normal to poop once a month. This is not normal people!

Cristen: So today, we’re going to learn about what is “normal”, how our guts affect our head-to-toe health, and what it takes to get over our ladylike anxiety and just go already.

Caroline: All to find out: What’s really upsetting our stomachs?

[Stinger]

Natalie Wall: I’ve had this conversation a lot and I think there's two camps. There is pro-poop and then there's the no-poop camp. You either are totally cool with talking about it or you like just like you like shrivel up.

Caroline: This is Natalie Wall. She’s a comedian, and she was pretty much raised in the pro-poop camp

Natalie: We were like very fecal friendly. Like it was always OK to talk about farting. Always talking about pooping. My dad also has IBS. A few people in my family on my dad's side have it. My last name is Wall. And it's called the Wall Stomach. My dad always had toilet paper in the car for - because he would actually get out of the car and just shit in the woods, like he didn’t care.

Cristen: A while back, Natalie and her Wall stomach met Angela Perrone at improv class where the pair bonded over BMs

Angela Perrone: I probably brought it up because I always have to preface when I'm in groups of people. I have to preface especially when I'm in a high IBS time. I have to tell warn people that I have IBS. So if I leave suddenly or if I start to speak nonsense or look like I'm just distant. Just know that I probably have diarrhea and I'll be walking outside. I probably. Yeah.

Natalie: Like it's not you. It's like you really just have to shit.

Angela: Cause the bathrooms at this place are actually, you know, it's quiet. So we probably had some nerves around that and we probably made eye contact knowing that if one of us was making our way to the bathroom, there, would, you know, there emotional trauma behind it?

Natalie: Yeah. Because there was also singular bathrooms and so there would always be a fucking line.

Cristen: Oh yeah.

Natalie: And that always I don't know about you Angela, but that always gives me more stress when I'm like, oh no, people are going to know that it was me and they're waiting. What if it clogs? And now we have to go do 90 more minutes of shitty improv together.

Angela: With those same people.

Natalie: With the same exact people.

Caroline: Cristen, I think most folks can relate to that kind of bodily embarrassment — you know like whether it’s your improv class knowing you just dropped a load or accidentally farting in a meeting

Cristen: Right, but that anxiety does seem to mess with lady heads in particular. For instance, paruresis, or pee shyness, is more common among boys, which psychologists attribute to the performance pressure of going in an open urinal. Whereas parcopresis — or poop shyness — is more common in girls.

Caroline: Yeah, and when we grow up, things don’t really change. Seventy-one percent of women in this one Canadian survey said they go “to great lengths to avoid defecating — especially in a public washroom.”

Cristen: Now, some of that might be because public bathrooms aren’t exactly the cleanest, coziest spaces to relax and do your bowel biz. But Caroline, one question I really wanted to find the answer to for this episode is how the whole "girls/ladies don't poop" trope got rolling.

Caroline: And?

Cristen: OK, to boil down a lot of research rabbit holes, it basically hearkens back to the dawn of public toilets in the mid 1800s. Now initially, some towns objected to them out of concern that the mere presence of a public bathroom would offend women passers by. But they were commonplace by the turn of the century, but they were almost exclusively reserved for men because women had no business being out n about long enough to need to take care of business if you know what I mean.

Caroline: So what flushed that patriarchy, Cristen?

Cristen: Well, a mix of activism and capitalism? First, as women started tiptoeing into public life, it didn’t take long for them to be like, “Uhh, where are we supposed to pee, y’all?”

Caroline: A question we’re often still asking.

Cristen: Right, so that led to groups like the Ladies Sanitary Association in London lobbying for public lavatories for women in the 1880s. But THEN a few decades later, it was the dawn of department stores that got classy ladies peeing in public.

Caroline: The Buy One Get One Sales make them wet their girdles?

Cristen: Maybe! No those fancy new department stores began installing fancy new ladies restrooms to keep their clientele shopping and spending longer …

Caroline: Shop til you drop … a load!

Cristen: Exactly. And those bathrooms represent like peak toilet privilege, too. Way more often, safe, sanitary bathroom access is been something folks — including people of color, people with disabilities and trans folks today — This is something that’s usually fought for rather than take for granted. Plus, it's not like those ladies who lunched would want to draw attention to such unmentionables

Caroline: Yeah, that feminine etiquette of pretending that bodily functions don’t exist has stuck around — and not only in these public bathroom scenarios. For our guest Angela, growing up, there was pretty much no safe fecal space

Angela: So I grew up in a you know - it wasn't it wasn't a poop-friendly environment. And I don't know what came first: My fear of public restrooms or my fear of - of pooping. But I you know, my earliest memories of being a child - I was an only child. And you know, everybody poops. Not - not us. We weren't those people. And my - anytime I would go, you know - I just remember my mother would always immediately rush into the bathroom after me and just come out screaming, like, who stunk up the place and like, look around and like, I'm the only one there. I'm - I'm an only child. Divorced parents. It was me or the dog. So it was me. And so I was afraid. I was nervous. And and we couldn't I couldn't have gas either. And I was always jealous of like family members because I would go to their house and they would like, you know, sit on each other and fart. And I was I would just feel like be in awe. And I would tell my mom was like, well, how come they can do it? And she'd get mad. She'd be like "do you want to be like them?" And I'm like, absolutely. So I just ended up, you know. Years of of suppressing this. So, you know, 20 something years later, I ended up with IBS, and extreme, extreme anxiety.

Caroline: Angela is basically a cautionary tale of what happens when we really think that girls shouldn’t poop!

Cristen: Right?! Her story also reminds of a little side fact I learned: Girls tend to toilet train a few months earlier than boys. Buuut researchers aren’t entirely sure how much of that is nature vs. nurture. Like, it could be that girls are developing faster. OR it could be that parents nudge girls to quit pooping their diapers faster because gender codes girls as clean n tidy and boys as dirty n grubby.

Caroline: That’s shitty.

Cristen: I've got a Southern mother and she wears her pearls. So like I totally get the kind of ladylike, we're not going to - we're not going to talk about poop, you know, we're not gonna make a show of it. But did you ever find out from your mom? Like, why? Like even to the point of her, like sniffing out the bathroom — which just sounds like you're torturing yourself, like, you know what you're gonna find — why - why it was so, so triggering?

Angela: No. I never asked. I really should. Even now, I don't you know, I have to tiptoe around. I don't know. I just think she really wanted to have that perfect, where nothing is dirty, nothing is smelly and nothing is. Nothing is. Just porcelain, you know, kind of. Let I guess it's a porcelain throne, but let it be like a clean por - like not used. This is a show. This is show ready. Anyone could come in at any moment and, it has to be ready for - for them to be, you know, perfection. So I don't know.

Cristen: When did you start noticing that your health was maybe being affected by all the poop repression?

Angela: I was in college, and it was my sophomore year, and it was at a summer I was living up at school and I got like I just didn't really want to use public restrooms because I didn't want anyone to hear or see or smell or know. So it was part of that time period. And I had roommates in a small, quiet house, so I held it in. I was working actually on Capitol Hill. And so those bathrooms were probably there's a lot of, you know, suits people going in. So it's holding it in there. And I think I went like a month without going until finally I just started throwing up.

Cristen: Wait, wait, wait. Literally a month of not pooping at all?

Angela: It was it a long time. I was like, con- Oh, but back then it was glorious. I was constipated. Yeah. So this is good because you don't go, right. So I think it was a couple of weeks. But then I went on this road trip with my boyfriend at the time and I just we had to pull the car over. I just finally think that, you know, it was full. The engine was full. Yes. And it came out another way, and I thought maybe something's wrong. Maybe.

Caroline: After two years of wondering, Angela finally got a colonoscopy.

Cristen: Were you, especially as someone who was kind of poop phobic initially, were you nervous at all about the prospect of a colonoscopy?

Angela: I think if you've been to the gynecologist, someone's fingers in your butt really doesn't make a difference. It's actually less intrusive. And it was a safe place, I think, for me, because it's a person I could go to and have these poop conversations with at an academic level and get answers instead of being judged by like an odor, you know. So, yeah, it was a safe place.

Caroline: After she got her colonoscopy, Angela was diagnosed with IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome

Cristen: We’re going to get more into the science of IBS a little later. But all you really need to know now is that it’s a common chronic disorder that affects between 10 and 15 percent of folks worldwide, and in the US and Canada, women make up the majority of IBS patients.

Caroline: And the “bowels” in Irritable Bowel Syndrome are our large intestines, and the irritability includes symptoms like cramping, bloating, diarrhea and constipation.

Cristen: I’m just imagining like Oscar the Grouch like inside your tummy, and whenever you feed him food, stress or hormones he’s like “Arrrrgh.”

Caroline: Accurate.

Angela: It manifests in different ways. When I originally was getting it and not knowing trigger foods and not paying attention, it would start with what seemed like maybe I was having panic attacks. And then your body starts to percolate, you get really hot and you start to sweat. And then that starts triggering the colon even more. It's an emergency, you know that - that the latch on that the anus has been just busted. And you just need - it's urgent.

Cristen: Yeah. Angela learned the hard way that farting — it can be a real crapshoot sometimes.

Angela: The first situation where I really felt like something was going on was when I had what one would call a shart. And I didn't - I thought I was just having gas and I was going to, you know, secretly get it, get it out and no one would notice. But it turns out was not that, and then ever since that moment in two thousand, we'll say 10, any time I felt I had gas, I thought I was having another one of those. And so like the IBS is kind of a mental thing, you know, it just messes with your head. For three or four years every time I had gas I thought, this is gonna be - I carry an extra pair of pants with me and a wee pad still because I don't know if something's going to happen. You know, I need backup because it's a psychological thing too.

Cristen: And what is a wee pad?

Angela: A wee pad is what you use for house trained dogs and - and children. I don't know. I don't have kids. But so if you train your dog to use the restroom indoors, they have a wee pad. It’s great.

Cristen: And so it's an it's an emergency. I guess in case of cleanups?

Angela: Say I'm in the car and or someone else's car and it's like I'm out line and there's no bathroom in sight, I could just slip one under, you know, or if I'm on a bus or if you know, who knows? I don't know. I don't know, but I know I will need it one day, and it's gonna be the greatest save.

Caroline: It's time for us to take a bathroom break, y’all. We'll be back later with more from Angela + Natalie, but next up we're going to check in with an expert who can help us understand what's up with our guts and how they interact with our headspace, too.

Cristen: Stay with us.

Caroline: Don’t flush away.

[MUX “Girls Poop Too” by Reformed Whores]

[Midroll ad 1]

[Stinger]

Caroline: Is there a normal when it comes to pooping, like how often should you be pooping? What what is normal?

Dr. Haley Neef: Yes. So I would say normal would be at least every other day or daily with bowel movements. No firmer than a sausage with cracks. If you're pooping rabbit pellets, if you're pooping soda cans, if you're pooping once a month. This, my friend, is not normal. And you need to come see me.

Cristen: We’re back shootin the shit with Dr. Haley Neef, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of Michigan.

Caroline: So, I've also heard stool in the toilet should look like a cigar. Do you feel like that's accurate? I mean, I know you said sausage with cracks.

Dr. Neef: No, no, that's really interesting. That's very specific. Like weirdly specific. I mean, what kind of cigar? Like a Swisher Sweet or like - or like what? I don't know. So, I would refer you to the Bristol Stool chart. Have you ever heard of this?

Caroline: No.

Cristen: Caroline, I hadn’t heard of it either and immediately had to Google

Caroline: Yeah, OK, so what is this chart?

Cristen: OK, so the Bristol Stool chart is basically an illustrated classification of seven types of poop organized by shape and texture.

Caroline: Seven types of poop!

Cristen: YES. Seven. So basically it’s a scale from type 1 super solid. It’s described as separate, hard lumps — like nuts! Hard to pass. Nut poop. So those are your nut poops. … All the way to type 7, which means

Caroline: Oh god

Cristen: you’re basically peeing out your b. It just describes - it just says in all caps, ENTIRELY LIQUID.

Dr. Neef: So I would say the ideal poop if I were to choose a poop, would be a type 4 or type 5. So a smooth snake or a soft blob. That's really what I'm going for. That should be your aspirations in life.

Caroline: So many days I feel like a soft blob.

Cristen: Caroline, me too. So this whole not knowing what normal is — and feeling nervous to even ask — means a lot of women don’t know when something is actually wrong with them or just assume something really bad is wrong when it’s not. Take ME for example, Caroline!

Caroline: OK

Cristen: Yeah so in my mid 20s, I started getting these really just stabbing stomach pains immediately after eating, and I internet diagnosed myself with Crohn's disease.

Caroline: Naturally.

Cristen. Mhmm. I ended up seeing a gastroenterologist named, I kid you not, Dr. Fox, and yes he was handsome. And I got a colonoscopy — and apparently nothing was wrong with me.

Caroline: Good!

Cristen: Good, but like in a weird way I was just kind of embarrassed about the whole thing

Caroline: Why?

Cristen: Well, it was just this weeks-long kind of demoralizing process that started with giving a fecal sample and ended in the post-colonoscopy fart room.

Caroline: A fart room?

Cristen: Uh huh. No lie — you have to pass gas before they’ll let you go home. And so they wheel you out into a recovery room and everyone is just releasing these incredible farts. Like, it is an experience, Caroline.

Caroline: Yeah, well, OK. I mean, your sort of embarrassing experience and women’s general paranoia about poop aside, Dr. Neef says that cis women DO tend to report more gastrointestinal issues thanks to a few anatomical and hormonal quirks

Dr. Neef: Number one, a woman's colon, so the large intestine, is proportionally longer to their body compared to a man's colon. So in general, it just takes longer for stuff to go through us.

Cristen: Caroline, I came up with a little ditty about that anatomical difference in our guts — do you wanna hear it?

Caroline: Oh. Yeah. Yup, I do.

Cristen: OK, goes a little something like this: Do your colons hang low, are they 4 inches longer or so? // Are your abs slightly softer, with a belly more like dough? // Is is harder to make that stool because biology’s sometimes cruel? // Do your colons hang low? That’s my new single called “Lady Colons”

Caroline: Great. Great, that’s gonna make us a lot of money. So, you’ve got the anatomical reason for women’s GI issues down ...

Dr. Neef: The second reason is that we have higher levels of the hormones, estrogen and progesterone for obvious reasons. Those two hormones, however, estrogen and progesterone, also have effects on the GI tract. Estrogen and progesterone both inhibit smooth muscle contractions. So not only does stuff have longer to go in our GI tract, it just moves slower. When the gut’s moving things through more slowly, it can lead to bloating, constipation, gas and tummy rumbling. So you know, we like to use fancy words to make our G.I. profession more glamorous than it actually is, which is talking about shit. We have a fancy word for rumbling, which is called borborygmi. It's got y's and g's and i's in there. Borborygmi is basically that rumbley low sound your belly makes when you're hungry or when you're about to make out with your partner or when you're in a quiet room about to ask for a raise. Really pleasant stuff.

Caroline: Inevitably

Dr. Neef: The other thing to estrogen and progesterone do is that they stimulate our central nervous system. In other words, they may actually decrease our threshold for pain. So stuff takes longer to get through us and it hurts more. So we're just built with a GI tract that causes us a little bit more problems.

Caroline: That doesn't seem fair.

Dr. Neef: No. It's totally not fair.

Caroline: Transgender folks undergoing hormone therapy may also experience changes in stomach pain perception. Unfortunately, there's not a ton of research, but what we could find suggests that estrogen therapy might decrease trans women’s pain tolerance, while testosterone therapy tends to improve chronic pain in trans men

Cristen: Right. Although those findings aren’t specific to gastrointestinal issues

Caroline: Now when any patient shows up at Dr. Neef’s office concerned that they might have IBS, her job as a gastroenterologist is to assess what she calls a “constellation of symptoms” to figure out what’s going on. So with IBS, she’s determining whether the passage of food or stool through the tube of the gut is triggering pain when it shouldn't be.

Cristen: Yeah, she describes it as fire alarms going off, when there is no fire. Basically, you’re feeling pain when everything is actually just fine.

Caroline: Yeah, so we’ve established, women have a longer colon, which means our poop sits around longer to set off those fire alarms ... our sex hormones are slowing things down and make us feel pain more acutely. … But our personal poop experiences are also linked to our brains and mental health.

Cristen: This connection between what’s happening in our headspace and our bowel space is called the gut-brain axis.

Dr. Neef: The gut. It has its own nervous system. It's called the enteric nervous system. And us G.I. docs like to call it the second brain of the body.

Caroline: Yeah, so basically you have your BRAINbrain, which controls automatic functions like breathing, heart beat, telling you to not leave your hand on the stove again. That kind of thing.

Cristen: And what blows my BRAINbrain, Caroline, is just how much chemical signaling is also coming to and from our GUTS, aka our second brain.

Dr. Neef: Nintey-five percent of your body's serotonin is actually found in the bowels. You know, we think about serotonin as this hormone that's regulating mood in our brain. Well, ninety-five percent of it is down in the bowels. So if our life is under stress, if we're taking care of too many people, but not ourselves, if we're dealing with periods that are turning down our pain tolerance, all of that has a direct effect on how we're experiencing the normal movement of stuff through our guts.

Caroline: Dr. Neef says she sees a lot of younger women coming in with stress-induced stomach problems. Sometimes, it's big life changes like going to college, first jobs, or difficult relationships that can trigger them.

Dr. Neef: So, like I said, we have a ton of serotonin in our gut and even if you think about neurons, which are nerve cells, there are over 500 million neurons in our intestinal tract, which is more than five times that found in our spinal cord - It’s the second biggest concentration of nerve cells in the body after the brain. So although we don't really think about our GI tract and we certainly don't like to talk about our G.I. tract, it's there. And the stresses we’re under are directly affecting how it's working and how we're feeling.

Cristen: Caroline, hearing Dr. Neef talk about this makes me wonder whether my mental health was the source of my mysterious stomach pains years ago.

Caroline: Oh yeah?

Cristen: Yeah, because during that time, I was dealing with a lot of family stuff that was definitely weighing on my mind and could very well have been playing tricks on my tum tum

Caroline: That makes sense.

Dr. Neef: I find that it doesn't necessarily have to be that a patient has severe anxiety or diagnosed major depressive disorder. It could be that all the little things in life that we're dealing with pile up. They make it harder for us to eat well, to exercise, to get good rest. We don't talk about the symptoms we're having, and then we're afraid of what might be going on. And it turns into this absolute shit storm. Another interesting thing I see is that it doesn't actually have to be negative stress that triggers IBS. So let's say you're really excited about an upcoming wedding or maybe you have family coming over for the holidays. Those situations where you're not complaining or you don't feel down, depressed or anxious, but you're amped up. Those can be really common triggers for an IBS flare, too. So helping a patient to recognize when their stress levels are changing either positive or negative can really help them manage their symptoms.

Caroline: Yeah, I definitely used to have issues before first dates.

Dr. Neef: Yeah. If you do surveys of men and women who have an IBS diagnosis, women are much more likely to avoid social events or sexual intercourse when they have symptoms than men. So it's not only that we have more symptoms of IBS, it's that it's affecting our lives more too.

Caroline: OK. I'm going to set this up just - we're gonna pretend this is just a hypothetical scenario. So let's say, you know, you've been holding it for too long. And - and maybe you're like, you know, over at a date's house and you really have to go, but you hold it because God help me, I'm not pooping at his house. What does that do to a person?

Dr. Neef: What does that do to a person? Makes you — I would say it makes you really uncomfortable and predisposes you to constipation. So the longer poop sits up in there and the large intestine or colon, the more uncomfortable you get. Couple of reasons for that. Number one, when you eat, it's your guts’ job to move everything through. And if you're if you swallow food and it goes in your stomach and there's no room for it to go, you're going to feel burpy and uncomfortable and awful. Second, all those - all those bacteria that live in your intestine, in the large bowel, they're just feasting on whatever is leftover in your poop. I know this is just so pleasant, but they're just feasting on the leftover sugars and fats, and they're producing more gas as a byproduct. So if you're holding it and holding it and holding it and waiting till the fourth date to poop, you're gonna be bloated, uncomfortable, farty and miserable. So for God's sake, just poop at his house.

Caroline: Just just pack some of that poop spray and turn on a fan, right?

Dr. Neef: Oh, absolutely. Please do it.

Caroline: Well, what are the emotional and actual physical side effects that women experience because of that poop shame and poop silence?

Dr. Neef: I think one of the main side effects is - I get a lot of women coming to see me who are really, really scared there's something very, very wrong with them because they don't have the language to explain what's going on, and they're afraid to ask the questions to those around them. So I'll have young women come to see me sure that they have colon cancer like their dad did. And really, they just have irritable bowel syndrome because they've never asked what's normal and what's not normal. It's so tangled up sometimes by the time women come to see me between discomfort, fear, symptoms from the fear that I think having the time just to spend with them, to let them talk and to give them a language to talk about it. Usually they feel better just leaving the office — without a medication. You know, one reason I really love my job is that in general, there is more male than female doctors. And it's really, I think, a privilege for me to be able to reach out to other young women and help them with the problems. We're not allowed to talk about pooping and farting. I'm their safe haven to have that conversation at length.

Caroline: Their safe harbor in a poop storm

Cristen: Caroline, I’m feeling so validated by Dr. Neef that even us breaking the defecating silence (get it??) is good for our guts.

Caroline: Also good our guts? Poop-positive friendships like the one our guests Natalie and Angela have. And when we get back, they tell us how they created a safe poop harbor for others.

Cristen: Doo doo stick with us.

[MUX - “Coffee Makes Me Poo” - Taryn Southern ]

[Midroll ad 2]

[Stinger]

[Broad City Clip]

Ilana: Abbi, I’m gonna take care of this for you

Abbi: There’s no way

Ilana: I am a doo doo ninja

Abbi: What does that even mean? You do?...

Ilana: Do you grant me permission to use any means necessary to make this go away?

Abbi: Sure. Fine.

Ilana: Look me in the eyes and tell me I have your permission.

Abbi: You have my permission

Ilana: Any means necessary

Abbi: Any means necessary.

Caroline: We’re back, and that was a clip from Broad City when Ilana is demonstrating her diehard friendship for Abbi by retrieving her clogged poop from the toilet to save Abbi the humiliation of her crush seeing the giant shit that won’t flush.

Cristen: And that’s something that our guests Natalie and Angela would call true poop friendship

Cristen: What is a poop friend? Who can a poop friend be?

Natalie: I guess is that you're going to really define it as just friend that you trust to help you out of like a literal shitty situation, like not to blow up Angela's spot. But she is getting married on Saturday.

Cristen: Oh, my God. Congrats!

Natalie: And I've been told to be the one to help her out of her dress if she gets diarrhea. And like no hesitation, like, of course, there for you.

Angela: I trust no one else. She's the only one.

Natalie: Yeah. That that is a poop friend, I feel like.

Cristen: So I do want to know a little bit more about this, about being the poop helper for the wedding and how that conversation goes. You know, like typically you might get a like, will you be my bridesmaid? Like, take us, take us through that.

Natalie: That's all you, Angela.

Angela: So step one. So recently a friend of mine got married. Tis the season. And she was giving me all this stuff that she used or didn't get to use. And one thing was this thing that goes under your dress, that if you have to go to the bathroom without having to get out of your dress, you just wear this thing underneath and you pull it up like and a reverse umbrella. I don't really know how it works.

Natalie: Oh, my God.

Angela: I have a tool. Right? Just like I can't do that alone. And who - who. I was thinking like, I'm going to need assistance and a safe word. And it's going to be Natalie, not the safe word, the person.

Natalie: Yeah. What is the safe word?

Angela: We have to figure that out. I was thinking like haggis or something.

Natalie: I'm into that. I'm into that, yeah. But we haven't really talked specifics. Maybe we should talk specifics later.

Angela: We should probably practice.

Cristen: Do a dry run?

Caroline: OK, I’m not putting on a wedding gown anytime soon, but I do want a poop friend.

Cristen: Yeah, I mean, we’re gonna want some poop friends in our lives once we start getting older and our buttholes start getting looser and FECAL INCONTINENCE (actual term) comes a-knockin.

Caroline: Wow! Yeah, true.

Cristen: Right??

Caroline: Yeah, well, so … uh, in 2014 Natalie recognized that everyone needs a poop friend — and that’s one reason she started a live storytelling show in Brooklyn called Awkward Poop & the City.

Cristen: Yeah, it was basically like The Moth of poop stories. And Angela came on as her co-host. The stories were hilarious, but the purpose was really to give people — especially women and non-binary folks — a safe space to be honest and vulnerable about some of their shittiest experiences.

Angela: It's cathartic for the audience because they can relate. And for the performers as well, because you once you say it out loud, once you allow yourself to tell the story - Anything's possible. Like, it really just frees you. A friend of mine did the show and told a story about having the D on Long Island Railroad. And so for me, that hit home because she was coming from the beach and back. And I take Metro North, which is like the Long Island Railroad of New England. And and my fear is having the D on the train, even though they have bathrooms. I have - I'm from Connecticut, and I have gone 35 years without using the bathrooms in Metro North. I used to cry getting on Metro North when my IBS was really bad, like because I was afraid I would have diarrhea on it. So when she told that story, I just felt really just - just - it's OK. Anything - the worst that could happen to you? Your worst fear. Someone else has experienced it. And it's OK.

Caroline: And sometimes you learn about a poop situation you didn’t even know to be afraid of...

Natalie: We also have heard like multiple stories of people catching their poop.

Cristen: Come again?

Natalie: Right? Well.

Angela: Guilty.

Natalie: Well, I didn’t want to say. I was like, I’m giving you that option if you want to.

Angela: No. Because you don’t want it to make noise and drop in. So like you'll - you'll - you’ll catch it with paper. It's the extremes that the society makes us go to. Maybe it wasn't my mother. Maybe it was society all along.

Natalie: I mean, it definitely was part of it for sure. But there was also someone else that caught their poop, too. But you got it with toilet paper, right? Yeah. I think they caught it with their bare hand and they might have hep C.

Cristen: Could you break down - could you break down the technique of like what the what the poop catching entails?

Angela: Just kind of like cup and with the paper hold, and then you feel like slowly like maybe like in some cases drop it in like a little raindrop like in the paper because - right? So you catch and then like somehow get to the top of it and rain drop it in, and then you exhale because it's you're holding your breath the whole time for - you don’t want people to think that can hear you breathe it like you're human.

Cristen: So you so you would would rather catch - catch your poop in your own hand than possibly have someone hear the plunk of your - of your poop?

Angela: Absolutely. Yeah. I would do it again.

Caroline: Wow. Wow, Cristen.

Cristen: Yeah. All I can say is I hope that was some thick toilet paper. And even after co-hosting Awkward Poop & the City together for a couple years, Angela is still unlearning the poop-phobia she was raised with …

Angela: The show gave me a platform to be - to say, oh, it's OK, it's OK. And if if I have a poop situation, I think to myself, oh, this is great. I could talk about it. I could tell it.

Natalie: Yeah, it's OK.

Angela: It's fine.

Natalie: Someone's experiencing diarrhea right now. It's OK.

Angela: Someone's running to a toilet that's a hole in the floor.

Natalie: Someone most likely is listening to this podcast right now on the toilet

Angela: Probably. I hope so.

Cristen: Oh, Definitely.

Natalie: Yeah, for sure.

Angela: I really hope so.

Cristen: I would be disappointed if someone wasn't.

Natalie: Yeah.

Cristen: You know.

Natalie: Yeah.

Caroline: So, I want to thank everyone listening to this episode, but I particularly want to dedicate this to the people out there who are sitting on their toilets right now.

Cristen: Yes, toilet listeners, we metaphorically see you, we metaphorically hear you and we wish you nothing but satisfying bowel movements. And, for the record, we did get an update from Angela after she got married, and she didn’t have to call on Natalie to assist her at her wedding after all!

Angela: I don’t know, I was expecting more from my colon, but, surprisingly, that was the shit-uation.

[Music]

Cristen: OK, y’all, this is the very LAST EPISODE of season 6! Caroline, wow, what a way - what a way to end a season.

Caroline: Yeah - going out on a real high note.

Cristen: Yeah, or, I don’t want to say brown note, Caroline, but I feel like that’s the joke that’s sitting there

Caroline: It’s just dangling!

Cristen: It is just dangling. Um. And in the meantime, listeners, share your poop stories with us. Please - maybe not pictures, but stories …

Caroline: Nothing too graphic

Cristen: Yeah, stories are welcome. And we do wanna know whether you have had to flush some pooptriarchy in your own life. Hit us up on social @unladylikemedia, you can email us at hello@unladylike.co or comment on the thread in our private facebook group. Which, I will say, is also a very fecal friendly space.

Caroline: It really is. You can also head over to our website, unladylike.co, to find the sources and the transcript for this episode. That is also where you can sign up for the Unladylike newsletter to get a dose of actually good news about women in the world every Wednesday.

Cristen: And y’all, we’re recording this right before the holidays and if you want to treat yourself or some loved ones to some Unladylike gifts, pick yourself up a tie-dye Unladylike sweatshirt or keychain or koozie over at unladylike.co/shop.

Caroline: Unladylike is produced by Sam Lee and Nora Ritchie. Abigail Keel is our senior producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Additional editing help this week from Tracey Samuelson. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin.

Cristen: On the ad breaks you heard “Girls Poop Too” by Reformed Whores and “Coffee Makes Me Poo” by Taryn Southern.

Caroline: Mixing, sound design, and additional music is by Casey Holford. Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Daisy Rosario.

Cristen: Special thanks to Andi Kristinsdottir at Stitcher.

Caroline: We are your hosts, Caroline Ervin

Cristen: and Cristen Conger. We’ll be back in January with season 7 of Unladylike - and in the meantime, we're gonna be sharing a few of our favorite episodes you might have missed throughout the month of December

Caroline: Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss us in 2020! Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now.

Cristen: And remember, got a problem?

Caroline: Get unladylike.

[Music]

Cristen: Could you all give listeners your best approximation of of what that rumble sounds like?

Angela: *imitates sound*

Cristen: Whoa

Natalie: What was yours?!

Cristen: I like that!

Angela: or it's like. It's louder. I feel like it's like a little like this is just imagine if a lava lamp went real fast. *imitates sound*

Cristen: Hmm.

Natalie: Mine's almost like a gunshot noise.

Cristen: Oh!

Natalie: It's a loud like people have heard it. It's not like a pow. But it's like. Like that. But with more like intestine.