"Weaponized Pooping" Is the Internet's Fight of the Week. Your Hemorrhoids Lose Either Way.

The internet found a new thing to fight about this week, and for once it's squarely in our lane.

Olivia Howell, author of Divorce Happens, published a Substack essay in late September accusing some husbands of what she calls "weaponized pooping" — disappearing into the bathroom with a phone for half an hour or more while their partner handles dinner, dishes, and bedtime. "'I have to go to the bathroom' is one of the most powerful sentences available to a person who lives with other people," she wrote. The essay jumped to X, then to Vice, LADbible, the New York Post, and a Fox News panel segment, with the predictable split: half the internet says it's a real dodge, the other half says a man can't even poop in peace anymore.

We are not going to referee your marriage. But there's a third party in this fight that nobody's defending, and it's the one we exist for: the cluster of cushioned veins at the bottom of whoever is doing the hiding.

The toilet doesn't care why you're sitting there

Here's the part of the story that's true no matter whose side you're on. A toilet seat is an unusually bad place to park for long stretches, for a reason that has nothing to do with chores: it's a ring with a hole in it. A chair supports your pelvic floor; an open seat lets everything sag through the middle. Sit there long enough and blood pools in the anal cushions — the spongy, vein-rich tissue that helps seal the anal canal. Pooling means swelling. Swelling, repeated daily, is how hemorrhoids get started and how existing ones get worse.

The phone is what turned a five-minute errand into a residency. Time moves differently in there when the scroll is going, and the research has caught up to the habit: a 2025 study of adults undergoing colonoscopy found that people who used their smartphones on the toilet had 46% higher odds of having hemorrhoids than people who didn't — and the Vice piece covering this week's debate cited exactly that figure. Phone users also sat dramatically longer, which researchers think is most of the story. Temple Health made the same point in coverage of the trend, in plainer words: prolonged sitting on the toilet is a known hemorrhoid risk.

So the honest medical read on "weaponized pooping" is this: whoever's winning the argument upstairs, the person on the toilet is losing downstairs.

The ten-minute rule

If any of this sounds familiar — and our analytics suggest it will — here's the fix, and it doesn't require couples counseling:

• Go when you need to go, and leave when you're done. Ten minutes is a generous ceiling. The bowel movement itself rarely needs more than a few.
• Leave the phone outside. This is the single highest-value change. No phone, no time warp.
• Don't strain to force a finish. If nothing's happening, get up and come back later. Bearing down on an unready bowel is pure pressure on those veins for zero return.
• Feet up helps. A small footstool puts you closer to a squat, straightens the anorectal angle, and shortens the whole transaction.
• If what you actually need is twenty minutes of peace — and that's a legitimate human need — take it somewhere with real seat support. Lid down, or better yet, a chair behind a different locked door. The escape isn't the medical problem. The open ring is.

If the damage is already done

For the long-sitters whose hemorrhoids have already filed their complaint, the care plan is the same one we give runners and new parents. A warm sitz bath for 10–15 minutes once or twice a day relaxes the area and takes the throb down. A cream like our Advanced Hemorrhoid Cream — 5% lidocaine to temporarily numb the pain and itch, phenylephrine to help temporarily shrink swollen tissue — covers you during the hours you can't spend in a bathtub. And since irritated skin hates dry-paper scrubbing, swap the aggressive wiping for a gentle cleansing lotion and a pat-dry. That's temporary symptom relief while the real fix — shorter sits, more fiber, more water — does the structural work.

One flag we always raise: if you're seeing bleeding beyond streaks on the paper, a hard and intensely painful lump, or a flare that's still going after two weeks, that's a doctor visit, not a longer scroll in the bathroom.

The marriage debate will burn itself out by next week, the way these things do. The physiology is permanent. However you divide the chores, divide your toilet time by four — everyone in the house comes out ahead, including the part of you that's been quietly absorbing the cost of every "long meeting" behind the locked door.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Talk to a healthcare provider about any persistent or concerning symptoms.