My Colon

When Laurie Abraham was diagnosed with colon cancer 14 months ago, she realized just how taboo pooping is as a topic of conversation. In particular, women pooping. As she went through treatment, Abraham navigated an array of awkward conversations and personal revelations, which she details in a witty, illuminating essay for The Cut:

How deep did my own aversion to the scatological run? I think back: When other moms got their toddlers the classic Everyone Poops, I was like, “Do we have to?” (We didn’t.) As an 8-year-old, my younger daughter, Tess, liked to lope around the house yelling, “Poop, poop in your face!” I laughed when, at 3, she’d begun riding her rocking horse full tilt, clad only in a little black cowboy hat. I laughed when, at the same age, Edie, her older sister, told her father to “close the fucking window” during a drive. It’s not like I couldn’t handle taboo subjects. Yet every time poop tripped off Tess’s tongue, I’d exclaim, “Stop! Tess!” My face would contort. It contorts as I’m writing this.

It may be partly a generational difference; my now 21- and 25-year-old daughters still will announce their specific bathroom plans—ladies, please. But the location of my cancer must be part of its befoulment. Susan Sontag is famous for exposing the negative cultural stories that cling to cancer, but what is the lowest of the low? “In the hierarchy of the body’s organs, lung cancer is felt to be less shameful than rectal cancer,” she asserted in Illness As Metaphor. I also felt a shock of recognition at her observation that while tuberculosis, the other focus of her book, is linked to “delicacy, sensitivity … and powerlessness,” cancer represents “whatever seem[s] ruthless, implacable, predatory.”

See, colon cancer is unfeminine! (Yes, she was talking cancer in general, but the point stands.) Even the medical Establishment has spread that message. Two of the younger female patients I interviewed said doctors explicitly told them colon cancer is an “old white man’s disease,” even though it’s only slightly more prevalent in men than in women.

More broadly, colons and what comes out of them are the permitted playground of men. Delightfully, there is a whole body of research that backs this up. Bathroom graffiti is more plentiful and crap-filled in men’s toilet stalls than in women’s, according to a psychology professor named Nick Haslam. The author of Psychology in the Bathroom, he cites a study in which a “female experimenter who excused herself to use the bathroom was evaluated more negatively than one who excused herself to get some paperwork.” When a male experimenter repeated the exercise, the judginess vanished. A college student surveyed for a journal article titled “Fecal Matters: Habitus, Embodiments, and Deviance” summed up the situation: “Women are supposed to be non-poopers.”