THE PROPER TERMINOLOGY MUST, AT ALL TIMES BE EMPLOYED

 

            My husband does not "fart."  He out-gases. That is his word, as in, "I left the plane quickly because I feared what might be happening to that cat stowed underneath my seat after five hours of my out-gassing."

            Out-gassing may very well be a polite euphemism, as I believed in the early years of our marriage, but I have come to see the particular accuracy of his term.  There is a seismic quality to his flatulence, a loud dark force pushed up from a stewy place, carrying with it the pruney sulfurs of the lower intestine, a foul attar which emanates, then slowly seeps outward  into the far four corners of whatever room he's in: an ill wind traveling north/south/east/west.

            Sometimes shopping in the grocery store, making our slow way through the bright-lit aisles of pickled asparagus and garlic-stuffed olives, past the sanitary napkins and adult diapers, or in the crowded corridors where last winter's coats sag, half- priced, clearanced, on their cheerless plastic hangers, he'll lean in to me and mutter with an embarrassed urgency, "You should move.  Right away."  I give him my most stern look of disgust and roll my eyes, and then I quickly push the carriage on its stubborn rubber casters into another aisle where he will join me in a few minutes, looking sheepish and relieved.  Relieved, that is, until we hear, one aisle over, a woman's anguished voice,

            "Ack!  God in heaven!  What IS that smell?" and after the briefest pause, her snarl of  "Henry, did you fart?"  The way she says that word, in a voice half-hiss and half revulsion, makes my husband suddenly pink up, like an embarrassed schoolboy.  It makes me laugh.  I have to cover my mouth with both hands, sputtering and choking back laughter, trying to shove it down until we are least out of hearing-range of that highly-offended woman and poor falsely-accused Henry. 

            There is no way to say that word, to inflect it or solemnize it, so it isn't funny.

                                        * * * * *

            It takes certain fortitude for a woman to live with a man.  A gassy man.  A man with neither a sensitive nose nor a sense of timing.  Southern women, out of a great and deep, long-suffering love, learn to endure, to persevere.  We have been trained for this by brothers and fathers who seem also to have been born with these devastating defects of the digestive system.  As we grow into young womanhood, we discover to our horror that the polite, comely young men whom we dated, were engaged to, and married, are suddenly little more than fierce bags of gas, men who spend many daylight hours burping into their fists or inventing contests among themselves where they suck in great gulps of air or take in tankards of yeasty beer and then compete to see who can burp out the alphabet. The man who gets farther down the alphabet wins and the victor then thrusts his arms up and runs in tight circles in the yard and is proclaimed, by his fellow apes,  Champion of the Universe or The King of Swill. 

            They'll do this, evening after evening, holiday after holiday, until finally someone unseats the reigning champion.  This is what evolution has led us to.

            By night, these charmers snore and wheeze and grind their teeth.  They snort and mumble in their sleep and their stomachs grumble like great bears at the end of a long hibernation. All these, however, are merely practice, a warm-up for the real show:  the night farts.  These can be loud or silent.  They can lurk a long time under your 600-count Egyptian cotton sheets or the quilt passed down to you by your grandmother. But no matter the quality of the covering, sooner or later the odor seeps outwards from some exit hump and takes over the territory you believed, naively, was yours.  By sunup, a wise woman will have learned to make her escape from the bedroom before his faithful, early-morning's long, low rumble of intestinal thunder banishes the scent of last evening's vanilla-scented candles into some outer early morning darkness elsewhere in the house.  The husband, however, will go on, snoozing right on through it, this foul alarm, oblivious to the toxic fog that hangs now, like a pall, over the marriage bed.

                                         * * * * *

            I cannot attest to the training of girls who have been reared in the North, but Southern girls are taught, in early childhood, that they must master all body noises.  Burps and farts are top of the list.  There are strategies for this, from what NOT to include in your diet to how to not allow any passage from the body into the outer world.  Stomach cramps are a minor by-product of such training.  Strategies.  Accommodations.  This is a girl's training.  This is her life, this mindfulness, this self-control.

            Sneezes are a close third, especially the explosive ones, and a girl will practice many years to master the fine art of the delicate, high-pitched a-chew and its purposeful placement into a tissue or handkerchief.   Snot, at all costs, must be kept inside the nostrils.  Daubing at the nose after sneezing is an effective strategy which will prevent great wads of snot from fouling Grandmother's lace-edged linen handkerchiefs, those practical fabric inheritances which can be laundered and handed down for many generations yet to come in a family for which silver service is not an option.

             Waste not; want not.

            The sinus-demolishing silent sneeze is altogether another art and few of us ever master it, despite our best attempts.  The sheer force of it almost pushes the eyeballs from their orbital sockets.  Even more difficult to carry off with a full bladder.  Something somewhere has to give, after all.

                                           * * * * *

            Somewhere along the way, in the socialization instruction, ten-year-old girls are taught to use the proper terminology for seismic body events instead of the "boy-words" commonly used by our brothers and close male cousins.  Burping and farting give way, respectively, to belching and flatulence.  In an odd turn of manners, sneezing remains the same, but one learns rather quickly to never, ever use the word snot.  The proper term is mucus or sinus drainage.  And boogers are what your grandfather extracts from his great hairy nostrils and not to be mentioned at all.

            I do not believe belching sounds any more respectable than burping, and flatulence sounds absurd.  It is impossible to say, over tea with friends at the Garden Club, "I am a bit flatulent today," and be taken for anything but a yokel or imbecile.

            Among the proper terms for body parts themselves are bosoms not titties or tatas, and penis instead of wiener or wee-wee.  Likewise, vagina is the anatomical term, not hoo-hoo, though I cannot, to this day, imagine any circumstance under which the word vagina should be used publicly.  Imagine a woman's horror – her feet mid-air, heels propped awkwardly in the cold steel stirrups, toes-up, her body barely covered by a scant paper sheet – should her gynecologist suddenly up and announce as he squeezes the cold, gooey lubricant onto two gloved forefingers, "I am now going to examine your vagina."  

            And never should there be an occasion in which the word, vagina, would come up in the confessional between you and your priest, as in "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned with my vagina."  It is even less likely that your husband will find an occasion in which it will be necessary to mention the word by name when he is in the throes of passion or in any way otherwise engaged in the vicinity.

                                         * * * * *

            In 1963, as most of my friends and I were entering fifth grade and some of us were deemed to be already approaching the years of menstruation and fertility, the Jacksonville Board of Education mandated that "Sex Education" would now be a formal part of our schooling.  Fifth-grade boys were whisked off to the gym to receive instruction from their coaches – in retrospect, not a wise choice for those boys – as we girls were lined up and marched off, single-file, to the cafeteria where we came under the fierce instruction of the school nurse, Miss Bettina Murske, a robust woman with fine dark hair on her upper lip and a deep, man-like voice, a spinster who had dedicated her life to elementary school nursing and who, now, reluctantly would assume the task of properly educating the 11-year-old girls at Hyde Park Elementary in regards to puberty and menstruation and copulation and gestation and child birth.

            We watched the filmstrip on the school's only working projector which was narrated by someone who sounded suspiciously like Walter Cronkite who, in a happy, isn't-this-great kind of voice claimed that we were about to embark upon the most exciting adventure of our lives:  puberty.   The filmstrip itself consisted only of pen-and-ink outline drawings of the female body from the neck to the knees.  The illustrator had given her well-developed, symmetrical breasts, including larger-than-life nipples, and a tiny pear-shaped womb with each fallopian tube – one on the right and one on the left side – curling under into a lazy "C" and culminating in ovaries which were filled with little black dots.  The womb trickled off, at the base, into a thin tunnel-like opening whose terminus was obscured by what appeared to be a mass of tiny curly hairs penned in: pubic hair, the narrator instructed in his cheery voice.  Likewise, a curly mass of hair seemed to be growing in both her underarms.  He never really addressed the underarm hair so we all assumed, which seemed logical, that pubic hair also would grow under our arms.  Once we learned what the pubis was, it seemed rather horrifying.

            We looked dumbly from the screen to each other. This was the equipment we would need for this "great adventure" we were embarking upon?  Maybe we could just stay home with our smooth, hairless bodies and continue on with our unadventurous lives. . . .

            The film cut away to a close-up of the womb and the little dots in the ovaries suddenly became small round circles:  "…ovum, from the Latin, for eggs."  That part I got right away because I had gathered eggs before at my grandfather's place in Arkansas and understood that we were like hens in that way: we would produce eggs from that opening, eggs slick with blood and mucus.   We would put them into a bucket once a month, take them to the hose outside to rinse the crud from them, and then carry them indoors to the refrigerator. But then what would become of them? Surely we would not scramble them up for breakfast or make a soufflé of them. 

            I had stopped paying close attention to the film by then, trying to visualize the experience so I missed whatever instruction was given between when the ovum was defined and how the baby starts forming inside the woman's body.  That, apparently, was the critical information.

            I vaguely recall words like penis, which I already knew, and ejaculation and fetus,  which I did not know before the instruction, but I had nothing to attach to the words' significance in regards to the female body and could not, on my own, imagine what role a penis or its ejaculation - whatever that was - had to do with the creation of a fetus inside the body. And when the narrator said this was the "miracle of procreation," I told myself it was irrelevant at the moment and I would figure it all out when the time came, meaning when I decided one day far, far off, that I wanted to have my own children.  What I did register, at that moment, was the look of horror and disgust that had settled on my classmates' faces. 

            The illustrations were bad enough, particularly the one that showed the baby, head-down inside the area where the pubic hair used to be, "being pushed into the world."  Pushed?  Since I knew a doctor had to be present at the birth, I assumed he would be pushing on me to get the baby out, but the illustration didn't show this.  Nevertheless, in that moment, I decided I would push him right back if he put his pushy mitts on me.  Adoption was looking like a viable option.

            At last, the filmstrip ran down to its conclusion and the happy, annoying music and exuberant voice of the narrator trickled off again to the sound of the end of the filmstrip thwapping against the full spool.  Miss Murske had stepped out shortly after the film had begun, so we sat there in the still-darkened cafeteria, smelling the cafeteria odors of cleaning solvent and hot lunches, while the film slapped the spool over and over.  Not a one of us could move.  Not a one of us could speak. 

            Finally, she returned, flipping on the too-bright lights, and she wound the film backwards again onto the empty spool.  When it finished, all ready to go again for all the fifth grade girls who would follow us in years to come, we lined up and walked back to our classrooms, to sit again among the boys who were looking very satisfied, who eyed us suddenly as if we were a prank they wanted to play.  We went in with our heads down, flushed and confused, back to our assigned seats and we did not look again at the boys that day or for many days to come.  Nor did we speak to them of what had happened in the dark cafeteria among girls nor ask them, ever, what had transpired in the gymnasium.  But it was clear to me that they were going to get the better deal of whatever happened in puberty and in life and that sex had something to do with it, and childbirth.  All that afternoon, with the slapping sound of the filmstrip still ghosting in my head, I resolved  never to have anything to do with boys or sex or childbirth.  And I believe, looking back now, that was the actual lesson we were being taught.

 

 

 

 photo courtesy of photos.com

Comments

[Toni M. Todd]

So true I could almost smell it, Anne. You had me snickering into my napkin in the coffee shop this morning. I think I may even have spewed a drop or two of mucus. But don't tell anyone. Hilarious!

[Anne Caston]

Toni, I wish I'd been there to see you snickering and spewing. I live for moments like that, you know! Thanks for being such a loyal reader.

xoxo Anne

[Sandy]

OMG. There you are over-the-top as I have come to expect. Esp. funny because I know the flatulator. I especially liked "stewy" and "pruney" as (too vivid!) descriptors. I speak as a mother of boys. In all, you inspire me again not to hold anything back - except the fluids and gasses. Sandy

[Anne Caston]

Sandy, over-the-top? Moi? HA! I do love that I got an "OMG" finally for something I'd written. That pleases me to no end.

Thanks for reading!

xoxo Anne

[Ken-san]

Male AND female pass wind on average 21 times per day. ;>((

[Anne Caston]

Ken-san! How are you feeling? It's good to see your note here. . .though I must say that those statistical women are surely, SURELY not Southern! Or maybe the times have changed so much since I was a girl that they no longer are trained to have a sense of proper comportment! Ah well. I suppose it was just a matter of time.

xoxo Annie

[RLee]

Well, I declare, the South will surely send up a few OMGs.It's so true & such a hoot! lol.Your secret follower.

[Megan]

I adore you, at all times!

[Anne Caston]

Megan! Hey woman. How in the heck are you doing? Thanks for writing so I could get the link again to your blog. Eager to see what you've been up to.

XO Anne

[Laura]

Why am I not surprised that Ken had that statistic at the ready?

Hysterical. Homerun.

[Anne Caston]

Hey, Laura, I know what you mean about that statistic: I had no less than four people tell me something similar. What I want to know is this: who the heck created that poll/survey anyway and WHY????? What kind of people poll complete strangers about their body noises?

HA HA!

xoxo Anne

[Vivian]

I forgot to comment on this post but I read it a while ago. Funny! Funny!