Read what she said.
When it came time for us to enter, the bouncer ranked us by our 'hotness'
no love in this club
A classic tale of being directed to smile
I was waiting in line with friends at a club in Boston. When it came time for us to enter, the bouncer ranked us by our “hotness,” letting the “hot” ones in first.
When it was finally my turn, he wouldn't let me enter until I “smiled." I asked why, and he said that I was only pretty when I smiled. I told him I didn’t feel like smiling, told him that he shouldn’t tell women to smile.
He didn't let me in the club.
no. 32
In walked a young woman all bundled up. She stopped and said, 'Gosh, I didn’t realize there would be so many ladies here!'
state bar sets low bar
A classic tale of strippers and standardized testing
I was sitting in a large room in Denver with many fellow law school grads. We’d been asked to assemble there just before we were to begin taking the bar exam that morning. It was about 35 years ago, but I believe at least one-third of us were women. Possibly even more. After making some introductory remarks about the exam, the speaker said that the State Bar had a special treat for us. In walked a young woman all bundled up. She stopped and said, “Gosh, I didn’t realize there would be so many ladies here!”
Apparently neither did the State Bar folks. She was a stripper who’d been hired to perform for us prospective attorneys. She did her routine and left to less than unanimous applause. I felt like standing up and saying something, or at least walking out while this was going on, but I was sufficiently freaked out by the impending exam that I just sat there and gritted my teeth.
no. 17
Third flush completed, and this one single poop will not go down. I curse the stars. I curse 1960s plumbing. I curse this world we inhabit...
to poop or not to poop
A classic tale of how women have never pooped
I went on a run and I don't know if you've ever heard of the running shits, but they're a real thing. A very real thing. I was really adamant that I didn't want to do that in a port a potty, however, and I was pretty certain I could make it home. Well by the time I got home, I somehow didn't have to poop anymore. I was home for an hour and a half. I showered. I fiddled around on the computer. Still nothing.
But I have to leave because I have plans. I'm going to lunch with my boyfriend. The minute I get there, then – then! – I have to poop. We get to the restaurant, and it's so hole in the wall I can't see a bathroom anywhere. I tell myself I can conquer this. People have overcome much more dire circumstances. Plus, as the gnarliest of poops often are, I don't know if I'm going to shit myself one minute or walk off poop free into the sunset the next.
We get back to his house and I have some time to kill before I go to this school where I volunteer, so I go inside and then, then it hits. But I don't have to poop. I just have to pee because I ordered Thai medium-plus and this caused me to drink four glasses of water and a Thai tea. I go immediately for the bathroom, confident because who cares if someone pees?
I sit down and, man, this isn't just a pee. This is a poop that I can't clench away if my life depended on it. I nearly hyperventilate, but then I think, fuck you patriarchy! Women poop too!
I try—I mean I really, really try—to poop in peace and pride. Maybe not pride, but at least not embarrassment. Eventually, I stand up and flush the toilet. I wash my hands. The confidence I felt fifteen seconds prior is dissipating -- probably suffocated by the fumes of this stanky shit I just took. I look back down at the toilet before leaving the bathroom, and the water is just circulating, my poops like little boats being sucked into a whirlpool.
Do I deserve this? I wait for the whirling to stop and flush again. There it goes. This is going to be fine, I think to myself, but then the whirling stops for the second time and one poop remains. I realize I really have no other option but to flush a THIRD time. I wonder if he can hear these flushes from the living room.
I have flashbacks to being a kid and my brother running out of a restaurant bathroom, announcing to my parents' that he just had to double flush his poop. I remember the way people stared and the way my dad made fun of him.
Third flush completed, and this one single poop will NOT go down. I curse the stars. I curse 1960s plumbing. I curse this world we inhabit in which I’m best friends with my boyfriend but not in the way that it’s OK for me to tell him about this massive, shitty problem I’ve got in here.
And then I do what I would like to have believed I could make it through an entire life NEVER doing: I take some toilet paper, reach into the toilet, and pull my own feces from my boyfriend's toilet. I continue wrapping it in more and more toilet paper, trying to conspire some exit strategy for myself and this single shit. I look in the mirror, breathe in deeply, suck my stomach in, and stuff this slightly-wet, TP-wrapped turd down my own pants.
I b-line for the front door, and it appears that he's not in the living room after all. Sweet, sweet grace! I will explain leaving without saying goodbye to him later, and I will spend the afternoon praying he doesn't go in his bathroom anytime in the next twenty minutes.
My hand is on the doorknob when I hear him say, "No kiss?" I turn and he's walking toward me. Then, before I can emend this situation, my boyfriend is kissing me—kissing me while I have my own wet turd, slowly soaking through half a roll of his toilet paper, and into my jeans. I pull back and blurt, "Don't go in the bathroom!"
He looks at me oddly, and I bolt out the front door. My feces now lie, unraveling from soggy toilet paper, somewhere in the 1200 block of S Ingalls. My pride? Probably somewhere around there too.
no. 2