The Benefit of Farting

This isn’t my first history post dealing with farting, and it probably won’t be my last, but it’s going to be a good one. Ripe for the times, one might say . . . .

The famed satirical writer Jonathan Swift (d 1745), most known today for his essay “A Modest Proposal”, also penned an essay featured here, “The Benefit of Farting, Explained” in 1722. In it, he takes on a pseudonym “Don Fart-Inhando Puff-Indorst Professor of Bumbast in the University of Craccow” (c’mon, it’s *funny*) and professes to declaim the practice of holding in one’s gutteral gasses, writing that doing so is bad because what happens is that “there is as much wind as water being sucked in, which . . . Recoils up into the bowels, stomach, and head, and there occasions all those dreadful symptoms . . . Which one seasonable fart might have prevented”.

While Swift might have merely been aiming to crack a pungent fart joke, his satire also took aim at his British culture’s treatment of women, limiting their roles in society by confining them to fruitless stereotypical endeavors. As Amanda Mannen writes on the subject, Swift wrote in a satirical expression “to explain why the women’s mental health crisis of the 18th century could be solved by unrestricted ass-blasting.” (Remember this was the time when all sorts of female maladies were ascribed to the unscientific feminine disease “hysterea”.).

Women were, according to Swift, drinking endless cups of tea and coffee because this was the main way they would pass the hours, their talents being otherwise unemployed. And then, since it was considered disgusting for women to fart, they were subject to “frequent fits of laughing and crying without any sensible cause,” and held-in gas “vents itself entirely in talkativeness, hence we have a reason why women are more talkative than men”.

Swift’s scientific-sounding explanation of the mechanics of this disorder are, well, hysterical: “the windy vapor (gets) into the muscles that assist in laughing inflates them . . . . But if this vapor, when raised to the head, is there condensed by a cold melancholy constitution, it distills through the eyes in the form of tears”.

Lesson learned, ladies?