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An Outhouse Built for Two -- Invitation to Write #56

For Writers:

One of our culture’s running jokes is the idea that all women go to the bathroom in pairs. Why do they do that? The movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle posits that women like to out-gross each other with the bathroom noises that they can make, but at least in the movie, each woman maintained the privacy of her own respective stall.

But before we visited Robert Frost’s New Hampshire farm, it never dawned on me that outhouses typically had two holes. Did people back in the day really go to the bathroom together? Were standards of bathroom privacy that much different? Personally, I can’t imagine dropping a deuce right next to someone else, no matter how intimately I knew the person.

As it turns out, there’s a fairly simple answer for why outhouses have two holes. One hole is smaller than the other, designed for children so that they don’t fall in. After all, who wants crappy kids?

Write about something you do in private that you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing with other people.

“If I want to be alone, some place I can write, I can read, I can pray, I can cry, I can do whatever I want - I go to the bathroom. “ - Alicia Keys

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