You never quite know what you will hear on BBC Radio 4. Just last week, after my shower , I listened to an item about personal noises. It made me chuckle.
We all make noises - especially as we grow older - farting, belching, coughing to clear our throats and some of us make involuntary noises when we get up from sitting positions or when we are straining to complete physical tasks - umphing and ahhing.
Mind you the central premise of the item was that in general men make more personal noises than women. Men sneeze more wholeheartedly and if a man wants to fart he just lets go but a woman muffles the fart so much so that you don't know she's dropped one. And when was the last time you heard a woman emit an unrestrained belch?
The item pushed the notion that in a paternalistic society where men still seem to rule the roost in a world built on sexist division, a man considers it is his God-given right to produce loud personal noises without apology. In contrast, women are rather repressed and weighed down by long-standing cultural assumptions about how they should behave - quieter, more discreet and less drawn to self-announcement through personal noises.
There are exceptions to every rule of course but I think that the item got it pretty right. Men simply are more noisy. Take my Shirley for example. In all the years I have known her, I have never once heard her fart - apart from when she farts unknowingly while asleep. That always sounds like air whining from a balloon. On the other hand, she is used to hearing me trumpeting like a bull elephant or the foghorn at the mouth of The River Humber. I refuse to constrain my gas emissions. Let 'em rip is my philosophy.
With regard to personal noises and gender differences, what is the best way forward? Men working to quieten and control their noises or women letting go and being less self-conscious, less restrained in their noise making?
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Before I climb the stairs to bed at the very end of another hot summer's day, I just want to leave you with this picture I snapped on Monday when I walked through Endcliffe Park. Through a gap in the trees I spotted Queen Victoria's head. Her statue sits close to the Hunters Bar entrance to the park...
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/wmxXptj
