Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
The Washington Post Has a Headline for You
The Washington Post has covered the fall of presidents, printed the Pentagon Papers, and broken Watergate. On Sunday, it deployed those same formidable journalistic resources toward a question humanity has been asking since we first gathered around a fire and blamed the mammoth. The headline, which appeared in the wellness section like a gift from a universe that still gives a damn about us, was this: “Do men or women have worse farts? Science has the answer.”
No hedging. No “scientists wonder.” Just the question, hanging there in clean Washington Post typography, fully committed.
I clicked immediately. I am a man of culture, and I live on a farm.
What followed was legitimate science journalism written by an actual physician covering decades of peer reviewed research, which I will now summarize in a way that would get me fired from any reputable publication: your gut is running a composting operation and you are the building. You’re welcome.
Enter the King of Farts
Dr. Michael Levitt joined the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital in 1978 as a gastroenterologist. He did not set out to become the world’s foremost scientific authority on flatulence. One day his adviser called him into an office, introduced him to a gas chromatograph, a tool typically used to analyze soil samples and crime scenes, and said, in so many words, someone should use this on farts.
That meeting determined the rest of his life. Levitt went on to publish over three hundred original scientific works, received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Gastroenterological Association, and earned the nickname “King of Farts” from his colleagues. Whether that nickname destroyed him or completed him, history suggests the latter.
Then NASA called. Turns out astronauts sealed inside spacesuits were being subjected to their own flatus with no means of escape, which, sure, let’s add that to the list of things nobody told us about space travel. Levitt consulted on the development of suits filtered with activated charcoal so that the people we sent to represent humanity in the cosmos would not have to hotbox themselves. Activated charcoal. In the spacesuits. Because we thought of everything except that.
This is peer reviewed. This is in the Washington Post. We did this.
The Methodology Deserves a Statue
To settle the gender debate once and for all, Levitt recruited sixteen healthy men and women, fed them pinto beans and a synthetic sugar called lactulose, and had them report to his laboratory.
Where a rectal tube was inserted.
The tube made a gastight seal with participants’ derrieres, connected to a gas impermeable collection bag. Participants farted into the bag. The contents were then analyzed by chromatography. And then, because science is a team effort and some members of the team are carrying more than others, the collected samples were sniffed and rated by two independent judges on a scale of zero to eight. Zero was “no odor.” Eight was “very offensive.”
In 2003, Popular Science named “flatus odor judge” the worst job in science. I would like to buy those two judges a very nice dinner. At a restaurant with excellent ventilation. They earned it.
The Verdict: A Tie. Kind Of. Not Really.
Women’s flatus rated significantly higher in odor intensity. More hydrogen sulfide per unit, more concentrated, more immediately identifiable as a geological event. Men, meanwhile, produced a larger volume per instance, roughly half a cup per toot, a unit of measurement that I was absolutely not prepared for on a Sunday morning.
Levitt concluded that because the nose responds more to volume than concentration, the genders basically balance out. A tie. Equal in impact, different in character.
Then the study noted that many women have perfected what the science calls a slow and steady release technique that dampens the sound. Men, particularly teenagers, the paper observed, choose not to exercise this option.
Choose. Not. To. Exercise.
That’s in the peer reviewed literature. The King of Farts looked at the data and concluded that the disparity in public perception is partly due to men making a deliberate choice, and he put it in the journal, and it sat there for decades until a Washington Post wellness columnist found it on a Sunday, and now it’s here, on a farm blog in Virginia, because that is exactly how knowledge is supposed to travel and I will die on this hill.
The Social Contract Is Holding By a Thread
Humans built an elaborate and completely unspoken agreement over thousands of years of civilization. It was never voted on. It appears in no legal document. And yet it governs billions of people every single day. The agreement is: we are not doing this.
We invented elevator music. We designed forced air ventilation in open office plans. The People created the phrase “silent but deadly” as a pressure valve for something too true to address directly. Every scented candle in every bathroom on earth is a philosophical position. Yankee Candle is basically a think tank.
And we built the whole thing on incomplete data. The slow and steady release technique. The volume versus concentration question. The rectal tube study sitting in the gastroenterological literature for thirty years before anyone brought it to the wellness section. We deserved to know sooner. We simply were not ready.
The Farm Weighs In
I walked outside after reading all of this and immediately saw Trouble McFussbucket, my pig, operating without any awareness that any of it was a problem. Trouble has a mud patch and opinions about feeding time. The social contract has not reached her, and she is thriving.
Vinny Van Meow does not care. Remmi, my blind dog, cannot locate the source of the smell and has made peace with its omnipresence. Professor Archibald Pickles is doing his best. These animals looked at ten thousand years of human civilization and said no thank you.
None of them have ever blamed each other. The King of Farts would have a field day out here.
Señor Hector Queso Suarez DDS
Eleven pounds. Currently on a diet. The smallest organism on this property.
The reigning champion.
He arrived as a foster and refused to leave, which is the most chihuahua thing that has ever happened. The diet is technically working in the caloric sense. In the olfactory sense it appears to have unlocked something previously dormant in him, as if the body, denied one form of excess, simply rerouted.
I have been in an enclosed vehicle with this dog. The odor judges would have marked him an eight immediately and then requested hazard pay. He is operating entirely outside the parameters of the Levitt study and I believe he deserves his own research funding.
He is also on a diet. Which means his full unregulated output remains, mercifully, a hypothetical. I choose not to think about it. That is a choice I am exercising.
What the Pig Already Knows
We are composting mammals. We have been composting mammals for two hundred thousand years. We built cathedrals and symphonies and sent people to the moon in activated charcoal spacesuits specifically because of all this, and we did it while continuously running the facility, every single day, and pretending otherwise.
The pig knew. The pig has always known. The pig looked at the whole arrangement and decided: fine. Fine. This is what we are, the mud is warm, and dinner is at four.
Queso has a different take. Someone in this house is responsible and it is probably whoever invented the diet food.
He is not wrong either.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
- The King Is Leaving Now. The Deer Is Not Doing Well. - April 15, 2026
- The Nobody Gets Away Café - April 13, 2026
