Don't F&^% Someone if You Can't Fart in Front of Them
Bridging between sexual moralism and instrumental self-help culture
It’s August! It’s too hot and lots of people are on vacation.
So I’m interrupting my usual stream of gloomy critical theory hot takes with an intellectualized discussion of farting and sex. (That said, there’s nothing explicit in this piece).
If this is not your thing, don’t worry: I’ll soon be back to your regularly scheduled programming in a week or two, and next up is a discussion of the work of sociologist Robert Putnam…
The best sex advice I ever received was from a sex ed book for teenagers.1 The advice had nothing to do with safer sex, or sexual technique, or even consent (although all of these are valuable of course). No, what it said was:
Don’t have sex with someone if you would be embarrassed to fart during that sex.
It sounds so simple, so blindingly obvious, and also plainly cringe. And yet. If I had to go back and look at my sexual relationships and think about which ones were basically good for me (even if they ended at some point) and which were not (even if they lasted a long time), those two categories would almost entirely, neatly sit on either side of that line, the safe-to-fart and not-safe-to-fart division in sexual relationships. 2
And it’s really even more specific than that. The fart-repressing relationships always ended with a very particular aftertaste: humiliation. Often for me, but sometimes for the other person or even both parties. Indeed, a very good friend says that what’s at stake in all sex, maybe all intimacy: “there’s always the risk of abjection.” That’s because we all carry some level of shame about bodies, desire, rejection and longing. It’s also because there’s something always vulnerable about desiring anything at all, especially the desire or love of another person. The philosopher Gillian Rose puts it this way:
In personal life, people have absolute power over each other... regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. Imagine how a beloved child or dog would respond, if the Lover turned away. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.
This is why, although I endorse people having all the sex they want, I also always regard sex as a risky venture for everyone involved. Even in casual sex, one can come away with this bitter taste of abjection, even if no one has violated anyone’s consent.
My sexual ethics have developed around this more than any of the traditional mores. Lots of things that other people wring their hands about don’t worry me at all: I am not all that fussed about the level of structure or the type of commitment involved in sexual relationships; I have seen beautiful casual things and very harmful hyper-committed things, I have seen deeply happy monogamists and joyful polyamorists, and I couldn’t give fewer, well, f8*&^s about people’s genitals or gender. Kink can be fine, great, terrible, boring. In truth, I think lots of kinds of things can work when it comes to sex and love. But it seems to me whether these things do or don’t work is in large part a function of kindness, which is closely related to Rose’s mercy. And that is because sex and relationships are, as the saying goes, about power, and it is because of that that they can also often be places that leave people feeling humiliated and disempowered, and not a fun kinky way.
It goes almost without saying that making these judgments, even for oneself, is a very delicate matter, and highly subjective. One person’s liberating experience is another person’s degrading nightmare. No two people ever really agree about how things went after the fact. Making these kinds of judgments for other people is likely to be nearly impossible, except perhaps in extreme cases. But I stand by this piece of analysis: if I had to consider the most common variable in unhappy sexual experiences and unhappy relationships, it would be this sense that one or both parties end up feeling somewhat humiliated, that they have been asked to engage and stay in something that is beneath some basic level of dignity, autonomy, and respect. Often this is because one person is simply getting so much more of what they want, and the other person is simply putting up with it. But sometimes both parties are humiliated for different reasons (one feels browbeaten, one abandoned, for example) and that’s bad too. It’s simply a risky business for us all.
This, I think, is why I’ve always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with a lot of the self-help literature around relationships. I tend to think that all of it is secondary to this broader point about kindness. There’s data to back this up, in fact; a lot of the best research on this topic comes from John and Julie Gottman, who ran a huge number of studies on couples and came up with three of my favourite empirical relationship insights:
Firstly, the Gottmans found that a ratio of four positive interactions to one negative interaction is required for a relationship to go well, else relationships usually end.
Secondly, the Gottmans found that one of the best predictors of divorce was whether couples engaged in mean/harmful patterns of communication during conflict, specifically any of the “four horsemen”: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.
Thirdly, the Gottmans found that another excellent predictor was whether people respond to their partner’s bids for connection, even about apparently small things like “what a cool bird!”
All this led to one journalist reporting that “the secret to love is just kindness.”
Kindness. As in, showing up every day in nice ways for your partner, even as the years drag on. Kindness, as in not resorting to small “papercuts” or withdrawing during conflict. Kindness, as in showing you care and leaning in to solving problems. Kindness, as in, the little small pieces of affection and interest every day.
That’s the secret to love, according to their research, or rather, that is love. (And it’s platonic love too).
In the utopia, all these things should come together by default. Vulnerability and kindness should always come together, even though they so often do not. Those who want to have sex should have logically signed up for farts, just as those who sign up to know someone should have signed up for other kinds of awkwardness and mess, but, of course, some people are better at handling these inevitable combinations than others.
We should collectively, culturally, maybe even structurally factor this vulnerability and awkwardness into our understanding of sex, but in truth I think very little is truly said about it, even in the most sex-positive places, especially compared to discussions of technique and consent and lube and foreplay and how to “get” sex in the first place. Indeed, that’s part of why there’s so much self-help literature around relationships: because people go in to seeking sex and love knowing that many other people are going to be very ruthless to them precisely when they have to be vulnerable. Whether you end up with kindness in a sexual equation can be a bit of a terrifying lottery, especially now that people meet online.
I have always found this line of love-is-kindness psychology research persuasive, and as a result I have found not just self help but being asked for advice about relationships a little weird. When people ask me how I sustain my two long term live-in relationships at the same time, I honestly feel that the best answer is just “date people that are nicer than you (and who really like each other.)” Only over time, I’ve come to realise I don’t just mean “nicer” than you. Nice can be superficial, even people-pleasing: they should be deeply kind, deeply good. Good to you. Good to you when you’re vulnerable, when you’re annoying, when you’re sick, when you’re grumpy, good when you’re distracted from them, good when you’re sad. Good to people who can do nothing for them. All I really want to say when I’m asked for advice is: pick someone kind, who will be kind even if you fart, who won’t make you feel small for being vulnerable and a little dirty and entirely human, who isn’t so wounded that they’ll end up doing that even if they don’t mean to.
This is not to dismiss all the valuable stuff in relationship and self-help literature: there’s plenty of interesting and important work people do around their attachment styles or their trauma therapy or their communication skills.3 But I do think it benefits us all to step back and see if all that therapeutic work is really in the service of a larger principle, and if so which one. If I had to choose one value to pursue in self help, it would be kindness. I don’t need to dictate how relationships will go in terms of their length or depth, but I would really like them to be kind.
Other self-help literature is, however, organised along other lines. One of the reasons this seems worth writing about (and I do know this piece is a little outside my usual cultural-critique wheelhouse) is that we’re living through a peak era of self-help literature, especially online, and that a lot of this literature does not seem focused on kindness at all. Sometimes it focuses on how to essentially manipulate people into doing what you want in obviously sinister ways, like pulling away strategically, presenting yourself as “high value”, or doing whatever “Alpha” people are supposed to be doing (it seems to involve a lot of sunglasses). This is the exact opposite of looking for people you can fart in front of; it’s about trying to create sexual and romantic situations where the other person are on edge and intimidated by you, where you have more power.
But there are also more subtle versions of self-help that are still not, at their base, about kindness: self-help materials that I think of as “optimizing” literature, because they tend to be there to try to make your relationships less difficult and annoying day to day, perhaps easier to “manage.” There is something about these types of literatures that seeks to remove not just unnecessary suffering, but ordinary misery, to reverse the Freud quote. Or, as Kai Cheng Thom put it recently, “a fundamental truth of human existence is that suffering and incompleteness are an inextricable aspect of relating to ourselves and one another; and the unrelenting pursuit of healing, fixing, and self-efficacy can itself become a form of spiritual clinging that suffocates aliveness.”
It’s not that any individual instance of this sort of “optimising” self help is problematic, exactly. It’s that the whole of it leaves a lingering sense that a lot of people would really just like their relationships to not be stressful or take up so much time and emotional space; so many people also want to box and simplify the mess and avoid uncertainty.
Believe me, I sympathise. But on the other hand, let’s be honest: relationships are always going to be inconvenient. People take up our time, our energy, our brainspace. They require work. They shouldn’t require a toxic level of work, but it’s worth accepting that especially in the very big relationships, there will always be some real inconvenience involved. As Lauren Berlant put it in their last book,
We cannot know each other without being inconvenient to each other. We cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other. This is to say: to know and be known requires experience and exerting pressure to be acknowledge and taken in… Acknowledgment requires a disturbance of attention and boundaries. Sustained acknowledgement requires self-reorganization.
Often, I suspect, we become unkind precisely because the inconvenience is troubling us, not only the low key inconveniences but that larger one Berlant is pointing to: the need to re-arrange and re-understand ourselves. If there is something we are really holding off when we’re avoiding intimacy, it’s not so much the other as what the other is inevitably going to learn about us, require of ourselves, reveal to us, however unintentionally, about ourselves.
I see this in my own work all the time; one of the apps I work for has a lot of parents who join it because, faced with the challenge of parenting, they discover their own unhealed wounds and greater tendency towards anger. Those in romantic relationships often join for the same reason; they’ve discovered that the other person is inconvenient and worse that they are too. Other people that inconvenience our sense that we’re fine actually. Other people make us realise we might have to change. (And those who cannot handle all this often push people away.)
Parenting in particular will always be “inconvenient.” On the one hand, I am of course absolutely in favour of a return to greater communal childrearing, more support for parents, flexible working hours, free childcare, and less pressure on mothers in particular. I don’t think we should make parenthood burdensome in unnecessary ways, as our individualistic current society and family-form frequently does.
On the other hand, let’s be honest: there’s no convenient way to have a baby. Babies are by nature inconveniences to pretty much everything else we might wish to pursue. And that’s ok, because they’re so important in their own right. Relationships, to a degree and in a very different way, have this quality also. Lots of very important and lovely things are by their nature inconvenient. As a result, you cannot optimise past a certain point.
It’s possible that we’ve lost the sense that other people are inconvenient because, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin suggested, over the last half-century we’ve begun to see romantic relationships as no longer merely companionate but also part of our personal self-development:
A new style of marriage was emerging in which both the wife and the husband were expected to develop a separate sense of self… They asked themselves questions such as: Am I getting the personal satisfaction I want from my marriage? And Am I growing as a person? The result was a transition from the companionate marriage to what we might call the individualized marriage.
When I look at these example questions, of course I feel broadly “pro.” I want people to have happy relationships, partners that help them grow.. But I think it’s important not to let this desire for our relationships to fulfill and develop us become yet another instrumental usage of another person. Our partners are not on earth, or in our lives, to serve our personal betterment. If we take this logic too far, it can become just another way to objectify them, rather than a broadly helpful selection criteria or mutual orientation.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how truly kind someone is right off the bat, since our brains trick us and also someone we’re dating often wants to impress us at first. So we have to look for proxy measurements of someone’s true kindness: are they nice to the waitstaff? Are they respected by at least a chunk of their exes? Do they have a few real deep friendships? These tests aren’t perfect either but, like the fart test, they’re pretty good in my experience. And I have always gone wrong when the answers were no.
Is there a point to this post or is it simply saccharine moralising and self-help? I think the answer is that I am moralising, but I am trying to moralise more wisely here than our culture usually does. Which is to say that we should only optimise so far when it comes to relationships; we must allow for the farting and the inconvenience of other people, and treat it and them with kindness, just as we secretly long for someone who will treat us kindly even when we are vulnerable, farty and inconvenient.
PS: for cool anthropology of farting in relationships and more data on the matter, check out this post.
I cannot find this book, which is one I had as a teenager! Any idea what this was called?
I am not suggesting by the way that you must like people farting around you to be a fart-safe person; no, I am just saying you must be a nice and comfortable enough person that it is ok for everyone if that happens, and no one feels too embarrassed, that you can laugh and move on because of the kind of relationship, however casual, that has been formed. I think it’s no wonder people post about “fart-positive relationships” these days. It might be as important as being sex-positive.
I get so much of this content filtered to me on social media because of my work that I think I might lose my mind; but I acknowledge that we should probably all go to therapy at various points in our lives and need to learn this stuff.
Love love love this piece!!! You write so well I wanted MORE.