Is it an established fact of physiology that men and women fart with about the same volume/frequency? Or are things really as they seem to the casual observer, i.e. women fart less than men?
If women do in fact fart less/less often than men, what is the reason for the difference?
Mythbusters actually did this. They tested the myth that “pretty girls don’t fart.” Even though Discovery allowed them to film the episode, they later refused to air it. You can however find it on youtube.
I recall a column in a Toronto paper about the eternal questions of why men and women are different. The female columnist pointed out that the difference between men and women is that “…men revel in their flatulence.”
All things being equal the volume of gas is dependent on the volume of food eaten. Since men eat more I’d expect they also fart more.
Exercise also increases flatulence by forcing food through the gut faster. So if men exercise more that might also play a role.
I imagine there are also deliberate factors at play, such as women avoiding foods that give them gas, whereas men don’t avoid them, or even go out of their way to eat them.
You, sir, have not met my wife. She farts a lot, and she’s good at volume, distance and odoriferousness. She’s been know to bring grown me to their knees. All this, and she’s a mere wisp of a thing, five foot nothing and about 100 lbs. Pound for pound, I think she could be the world champion.
This said, she’s pretty sneaky about it when not at home. She’ll wander off somewhere and then come back with a satisfied grin. Most strangers think she’s a perfect little angel. Sometimes she’ll forget and unintentionally “crop dust”, though. Then everyone looks around for someone to blame. It could be the big guy in the room, or the dog, or the nearby waste management plant, but never her, oh no.
Physiologically, there’s no reason whatsoever why women should fart differently than men, all things being equal. The all things include volume and type of food, body and intestinal size, colonic flora and anything else that a specialist might think of. That means that the within groups differences would be far larger than the between groups differences.
Women have been trained from birth how to swallow farts. They must appear as ladies in public and have to get a husband. But they are all saved up. Once they get married it all breaks loose. After the honeymoon, you can expect to get up 3 times a night to peel the covers off the ceiling. A fuel years later they settle down to dock worker status.
But we know that all those things are not equal, never were equal and never will be equal. Men are larger than woman, they do eat more than women, they do eat different diets, they do have different shaped abdominal cavities, the do have different gut flora and so on and so forth.
All true. But I stand behind the important part of my quote, the past you didn’t repeat, that the range of differences among all women and the range of differences among all men are much larger than the average difference between the average man and the average woman.
The book is light and aimed at a popular audience, but Dr. Boyle is a serious researcher in gastroenterology and cites his own research projects in the book. Dr. Stanton’s no slouch, either.
That whole quote has a lot of similarity to what I said, listing why differences would appear, even though I didn’t hunt down the book until after that earlier post. The conclusion also holds: Seven is much closer to twelve than three is to 32 or to 38.