Although it may be too easy to make an analogy between Baldwin's observation and the time-honored male preoccupation with penis size, my own experience is that boys and men frequently do engage in discussions and competitions not only about the size of their turds, but about the stink and even about the effort it took to conjure them up from the depths of their bowels.

My own college dorm provided me with three suitemates sharing a small bathroom with a single shower, an open toilet, and two sinks; so everything was always a tight squeeze, so to speak. One particular roomie, Milt, seemed to thrive on providing all of us with a blow-by-blow of his bowel bouts -- both after the fact and during, if we were within shouting distance, which we frequently were because of the small size of our suite. An awesome grunt was generally followed by his assessment of the size of the brown boy he had just produced, although hyperbole was his specialty.

"That sumbitch musta been three feet long," he once shouted from his porcelain perch. Of course, he conveniently forgot to allow for any visual documentation, having thrown out the baby with the bathwater after a convenient flush of the handle.

It was not at all unusual for any one of us in that suite to report to the others on our fecal activities, as if we were engaged in some sort of contest. And to be truthful, I believe we subconsciously were. For starters, we did not care for the food in the school cafeteria; we knew that if we ate too much of that pedestrian stuff, we would have to contend with some gnarly creatures crawling out of our colon caves. And it wasn't just us -- it was typical to find other guys throughout the dorm engaged in convos about the size of their turds and what havoc the cafeteria hath wrought.

A similar behavioral phenomenon has been noted by observers of submarine crews. In close quarters, eating monotonous food, and with long periods of unrelieved boredom during their tour of duty, the men on such vessels have been known to initiate turd-size contests that are taken very seriously indeed. And from what I have read, visual documentation by other crewmen is essential in the spirit of fair play.

I recall a particular piece of graffiti on a men's room wall at grad school that I find particularly revealing. The bathroom in question was frequented by jocks because it was right next to the athletic training table (this was back when such things were still allowed by the NCAA). I'm not sure if the author created a rhyme in spite of his athletic education, but it read, "We do bigger turds all day than all those loser teams we play."

Maybe it's a Good Ole Boy thing. Maybe it's a testosterone-induced mine-is-bigger-than-yours thing. Either way, I think guys start early in life with this obsession, because I also recall long, involved conversations with my summer camp cabin mates about who had taken the biggest crap so far during the session. In this case we took each other's word for it, but I remember that a guy named Joel won the title of Cabin Crapper because he was always grunting very loudly whenever any of us walked past him in the open-stalled head; and he would always give us an estimate of the length of his offal offspring, albeit after he had flushed his troubles away.

I guess the further question I have after all of this is whether or not this same phenomenon of comparing or discussing turd-size is at all prevalent among women. Perhaps our good female poopers will care to enlighten us -- is this well-documented male oneupsmanshit gender exclusive?