"Weaponized Pooping" Is The Latest Critique Moms Online Have For Dads, And It's So Important To Talk About

What are men doing during all that time in the bathroom?

It’s a question that’s often bandied around the internet, especially among moms fed up with husbands who disappear in the bathroom for half-hours on end, leaving them to pick up the slack with the kids.

It’s a play on “weaponized incompetence,” the conscious or unconscious act of pretending to struggle with a task so that someone else will pick up the slack and just do it. The bathroom, Howell wrote, is a perfect way to dodge domestic duties because it comes with “almost unlimited plausible deniability.”

“Its legitimacy is nearly impossible to challenge,” said Howell, a mother of two who split with her husband in 2019. “He really does have to go. That part is true,” she wrote. “What becomes revealing is everything that gets attached to that fact: the phone, the locked door, the extra twenty minutes, the assumption that someone else will handle whatever happens in the meantime.”

Bathroom-provided “me time” is something moms might like, too. Instead, Howell said, when moms do run to the bathroom, they’re at the ready to dip out if there’s a kid issue elsewhere in the house. Sometimes, they’ll even announce they’re going to the bathroom or just leave the door open, knowing that the kids will come in anyway.

In Howell’s experience, her ex “could simply waltz into the bathroom, shut the door, and become temporarily dead to the family.”

Howell, the host of the podcast Divorce Happens, told HuffPost she thinks many men missed the point: Moms, like dads, just want to use the bathroom without having to announce they’re leaving so someone can watch the kids.

“Moms cannot necessarily walk through the bathroom door and become what I call in the essay a ‘private citizen,’ because the responsibility follows her in,” Howell said.

“Someone ― or, more accurately, something ― is stopping her: The children still need supervision. Someone is cooking. The dog needs to go out. Somebody has to be listening for the crash in the other room,” she said. “The household does not stop functioning just because she needs five minutes alone.”

As she argues in the post, “maybe the smallest measure of equality inside a family is whether both people are allowed to close a door and trust that, for a little while, the world on the other side of it will keep turning without them.”

It’s a fair argument, but if we’re being honest, we still want to know: What are men doing in the bathroom when they take that long? And are men who are fathers cognizant that their spouses are sometimes beleaguered and need help when they’re MIA? Here’s what they told us.

Men Share What They’re Doing In There And How They Feel About ‘Weaponized Pooping’

Miguel, a married man without kids in Manila, Philippines, admits the bathroom is one of the few places he can browse his phone in peace. (Like one other man in this story, Miguel asked to use his first name only to protect his poo privacy.)

“I usually just catch up on social media or watch random videos, as I sometimes feel guilty doing this when around my wife, when I should be talking and giving her my full attention,” he said. “It’s a convenient way to temporarily excuse myself from chores or from being bothered when I just want some alone time.”

The longest he’s stayed in there was 45 minutes ― long enough that his legs started feeling like pins and needles ― a good indication he should probably get up, he said. While Miguel gets the concept of weaponized pooping, he doesn’t overextend his time in the bathroom deliberately, and besides, he joked, “I do 80% of the house chores.”

Antonio Breez, a Southern California-based content creator who vlogs about relationships on Attached with Antonio, said he’s heard of people sitting in the bathroom fully dressed, sometimes running the shower or sink, while they decompress, answer texts or just scroll on their phone.

He thinks “weaponized pooping” is a funny term for something that can actually reflect a real, problematic relationship dynamic. “Sometimes a person genuinely needs a few minutes alone, but when bathroom time is repeatedly being used to escape connection, parenting, household responsibilities or quality time with a partner, then I do think it can become a form of avoidance,” Breez said.

Hayden, a 25-year-old from Northern California, is single now, but said his last partner had no problem with his extended bathroom breaks, probably because she spent an equally long time in there.

As for what he’s doing on the toilet, he has quite the list: Sometimes he’s actually pooping and losing time while scrolling on Reddit or Discord. Sometimes he’s playing a game on his phone. Other times, he’s not pooping at all but grooming: Picking at his skin, combing his hair, brushing his teeth while on the phone. And then there are times he’s masturbating.

“I don’t like watching YouTube because it’s either too quiet to hear or loud enough for other people to know what you’re doing,” he said. “The same goes for porn, although sound is not mandatory.”

Hayden thinks the conversation about “weaponized pooping” is a little blown out of proportion and that there are likely just as many women doing it. “Surely there’s things that both genders do to help cope with the stress of raising a family or even simply adulthood,” he said. “It’s a coping mechanism.”

His visits aren’t particularly eventful, and “whatever needs to get done is still getting done when I come out,” he said. “I’ve never viewed the bathroom as a way to escape being a husband or dad,” he said. “Why would I choose not to show up for the people I love most?”

To Gulley, the bigger conversation is less about whether somebody spends 10 minutes or 30 minutes in the bathroom and more about whether both people feel like they have a partner who sees the workload and helps carry it.

That said, he vouches for guys who may not be up on their fiber: A lot of the time, men really are just struggling to poop, without trying to weaponize it.

“Sometimes the very unexciting answer is that I’m legitimately using the bathroom and there are a few minutes between bowel movements while I’m sitting there,” he said.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.