Herstory

Sociologists Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams wanted to know. They and their team interviewed 172 college students about their habits and concerns about farting and pooping. They published their results in an article called Fecal Matters. They discovered that everybody farts and everybody cares, but not everyone cares all the time or equally.

They separated their results by gender and sexual orientation. When they asked people if they were worried that the hearer would “feel disgust,” heterosexual women were most likely to agree and heterosexual men the least, with non-heterosexual men and women in the middle, but flipped such that men were more worried than women.

Bertha, Dolly, Fay and Hanna could be on the way now that the Atlantic hurricane season started Sunday. And recent research suggests it’s time to give the storms with feminine names a bit more respect.

...According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names -- not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.