All right, it’s time for some hard-hitting journalism. It’s observational reporting at its finest, and nobody else is talking about it. What I’m referring to is the phenomenon of passing gas.
This ailment is a social malady, affecting physical and emotional bonds between people. I went into sleuth mode to uncover who cuts the cheese and what we tend to do to hide our dirty little secrets.
Now there are many ways for someone to break wind, each with their own set of rules and reactions depending on the time and place of the occurrence. Foremost is the infamous classroom fart. The usual culprit for one of these is almost always a guy. People our age have the tendency to always blame the male, especially in environments with people packed tightly together. Even when a female is the guilty person, she is most likely going to find a guy scapegoat in her near vicinity. (Some guys don’t even believe in the existence of the female poot. It’s as if there is a gas gene that only resides in the Y-chromosome.)
What happens once someone releases one of these stink bombs is a battle between sheer willpower and the gas cloud residing underneath their derriere. The person immediately forces all their weight downward to trap the vagrant vapor as if gravity will somehow focus itself tenfold on that one individual for this one brief moment in hopes to squash it out of existence.
Once 10 minutes have passed, the person will lighten up his load, whether shifting his weight or spreading their legs slightly; he lets down his guard. This is when the classroom stink will strike. At first it shoots straight upward so that its creator will smell it first. Panicky, the person prays that it will continue upward over his classmates’ heads, so that an invisible mushroom cloud looms above while a column of stench exists only in the person’s seat.
Soon, his neighbors sniff it, and a look of extreme discomfort takes over as they squirm in their seats, searching out the perpetrator. To the horror of the farter, he immediately mimics the actions of his victims. With the same look of disgust, he glances around as if suddenly hit by the odor. What this person is really looking for is the one individual who isn’t reacting, showing visibly that they don’t smell anything. This is the culprit’s scapegoat. He immediately points out this individual to his neighbors, shifting the blame, saving himself for social exile.
The next kind of beef is one of infamous design. This mischievous gas is found at parties and is harder to keep hidden than its classroom cousin. What happens is once the person lets one fly he instantly realizes that there is no way to hide it. He must act fast to control the damage to the atmosphere, both in a literal and metaphorical sense.
A spectator will notice the smelly offender circling the room, making two to three laps before stopping. This is in order to escape the noxious cloud he left behind. What occurs is this person leaves a reeking trail as he moves through the mass. The stench quickly blankets the crowd and soon everyone smells it. Unbeknownst to the culprit, he has left a long, rank finger pointing to him as the miscreant. Since everyone there has seen the person walk by and they soon smell the odor, they quickly figure out who the guilty person is. So if you ever find yourself in this position, quickly run outside, it’s your only hope.
This brings us to the bedroom fart. This strikes individuals as soon as they slip under the covers, especially when it’s with someone else. This gas is of the classic silent-but-deadly genre since once the individual gets into a comfortable state, like in a bed, their muscles relax, allowing unwanted aromas to escape. What one hopes for when this happens is that they smell it before their mate does. The person will tightly hold the edge of the blanket down, trapping the air underneath, creating the equivalent of a hot air balloon.
Hoping that the gas will sift through the sheets, he snuggles up to his mate, and with arms around his or her waist, pushes them higher on the pillow and away from the opening in the blanket. Then selflessly, he creates an opening on his side of the bed, allowing the gas to escape, sparing the expense of embarrassment.
When not in a mixed setting or crowded environment, people play farting games, mostly at the expense of the perpetrator. Principal among these is the Doorknob game. When someone audibly rips one, they must immediately yell “safety.” If not, anyone in hearing distance yells “doorknob” and punches the offender until they touch a doorknob. This game probably originated on long car trips where a doorknob was obviously not accessible, leaving the culprit sore and bruised for smelling up the car’s cabin.
Besides, beans being the magical fruit, there are a lot of subconscious cultural codes we abide by when committing this normal, but foul crime. Even though we all pass gas, there’s a game we play with rules depending on where we are, who we are with, and how it happened. Hopefully after reading this, we will have compassion for fart culprits. For it can happen to any of us at anytime, and remember the golden rule: “Ye who smelt it, dealt it.”
Ben Feder is a Collegian columnist.
