You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (7 page)

Several months later I was doing a deep wipe of my bum and I felt a bump. After some clever use of mirrors it was confirmed. I had a mole on my asshole. The mole chart was incomplete.

I figured the asshole mole was a good candidate for cancer since it has shit on it every day. Despite this, I could not imagine myself bent over with my anus hanging out while Dr. Kim measured my mole with his little ruler. I never told him. I guess I would still rather risk cancer than make somebody examine my dirty place.

Excrement includes any waste matter expelled from the body, but this chapter will center on feces, urine, and flatus.
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Unlike nasal mucus, excrement is too important to the human body to be ignored by biology teachers, so most people have a rudimentary understanding of it. However, because of its taboo nature, teachers still do not give it the coverage that it deserves. For example, most people were taught fecal matter is mainly undigested food. This is false. This section will correct errors like these and delve into the more interesting aspects of excrement.

Feces
—Contrary to popular belief, only a third of dry feces is undigested food. Another third of it is dead bacteria from the digestive system and the rest is a potpourri of live bacteria, dead body cells, mucus, etc.
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The average adult produces seven pounds of feces a day, and a ton of feces a year.
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All of this detritus must be handled carefully because the ingestion of feces, even indirectly through unwashed hands or tainted water, is a major source of disease.

Feces-contaminated water turned the dreaded cholera into the first global epidemic in the early 1800s. Lightning-quick, cholera can transform a strong, healthy person into a shriveled, blue, dehydrated carcass in mere hours. It is likely that Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death” was based on reports of cholera turning joyful parties into a mixture of silent corpses and hysterical people before the evening was through.

Humans are unique in their biological aversion to fecal matter. Most one-stomached animals, such as gorillas and dogs, regularly eat their bowel movements. The vitamins and nutrients that they don’t digest the first time around make it worth their while to eat again. Rats are prolific feces-eaters. They eat roughly half of their once-passed-through feces. When rats have been fitted with “tail cups” to prevent them from coprophagy (feces-eating) they suffer from severe malnutrition. As with our one-stomached brethren, many nutrients escape in our stool as well. For example, humans defecate a quarter of the protein in digested potatoes and rice. Since we cannot eat our stool, this protein is wasted.

Urine
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—Urine, unlike our bowel movements, is sterile and can be consumed by animals and humans without problems.
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A person’s urine is actually cleaner than the saliva or the skin on her face.
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In other words, drinking the pee of a stranger is more sanitary than kissing a stranger.

Some South American native tribes drink urine as a refreshment, and urine therapy—ingesting or applying urine for its health benefits—is an ancient Eastern tradition practiced all over the world. The former prime minister of India, Morarji Desai (1896–1995), lived to be ninety-nine years old and credited his longevity to his practice of drinking a liter of his own urine a day.

Urine therapy has a surprisingly solid foundation. Urine is ninety-five percent water, two-and-a-half percent urea, and the remaining two-and-a-half percent is a mixture of minerals, salt, hormones, and enzymes. Urine is derived from blood that is taken out of circulation by the kidney. The kidney balances blood content. Just because something must be removed from the blood does not mean that it is unhealthy, it simply means that the blood had too much of it at that moment. This is how so many nutrients end up in urine.

Urine therapy advocates point to several facts when asserting that urine is our body’s self-produced health drink. First, we all started out as urine drinkers. Fetuses develop in urine. Amniotic fluid is largely the fetus’ urine and the developing fetus drinks and inhales it.
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Second, many animals drink urine, for example, goats sometimes pee into their own mouths. Third, several cosmetic products and medicines, such as
Murine
eye drops, uric acid, and Urokinase, are already taken from urine.

Urine therapy is not urine’s only use. Fresh urine is also a mild disinfectant that was used on the front during World War II to clean surgical instruments. As urine ages, the urea decomposes into ammonia, giving it a pungent odor and making it a powerful cleaner. Ancient Romans collected urine for use as a detergent or dye, with buyers walking the streets hollering, “Urine. Sell your urine.”
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As such a valued commodity, it was even taxed. Urine traders thought the tax was unfair because they had to work with the powerful stench of stale urine, but the emperor Vespasian rebuffed them by reportedly coining the phrase “money does not stink.”
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Flatus
—In contrast to feces and urine, flatus is not covered in most biology classes. As with nasal mucus, if a teacher were to cover farts she would risk being
seen as infantile by her peers. The taboo nature of farts would bring her chagrin and embarrassment, so children are forced to learn about farts from second-rate comedy bits and their own experimentation.

Farts are a gaseous discharge from one’s anus. This gaseous discharge comes primarily from the micro-farts of
E. coli
bacteria that live in our guts. The pungent fart smell actually comes from only one percent of the chemical makeup of a fart. Part of this one percent is sulfur and another part is skatole. A fart’s flammability comes from hydrogen and methane. Although the volume, frequency, and smell of them vary greatly according to one’s diet, everyone farts. An average person expels roughly a pint of gas through a dozen daily farts.
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Women fart less frequently than men.
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Gaseous discharges have large environmental ramifications. The billions of massive dinosaur herbivores who existed during the hundred-million-year-long Jurassic period were prodigious farters. It is believed that this made our climate warmer and helped usher in mammals like ourselves.
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But the same global warming that made it possible for us to exist may eventually drive us out. As during the Jurassic period, methane is still a significant contributor to global warming. Fifteen percent of annual methane emissions comes from ruminant animals, mainly cows, through their belching and farting. Another five percent comes from animal feces, and another four percent of annual methane emissions comes from termite farts.
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The most taboo excreta is feces. The taboos of urine and flatus likely derived from their close relationships to it. From a young age people are taught to be ashamed of their detritus. At an early point they are toilet-trained and then put in solitary confinement when defecating. Parents who once wanted to constantly watch their children suddenly not only want to be away from them, but want the door closed so the child cannot be seen or heard during this act.

Shortly after potty training, it becomes improper to talk about bowel movements. It is only acceptable to mention them in a serious and urgent manner, for example, saying in a hushed voice “Excuse me, mother, I just had a bloody stool and I am concerned.” If a child does have the gall to talk casually about excrement, her behavior is “inappropriate” for talking about “disgusting” things. If the child uses it in humor she is “immature” and into “potty humor.”

This fecal shame follows people throughout life in a variety of ways. There can be awkwardness when one first uses a bathroom with strangers nearby, or first uses a restroom when a person of authority is using it, for example, a teacher. The fear of defecating around a new target of romantic affection is alluded to in the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) adage, “If you come for the kisses, you must stay for the farts.”
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For some people these initial feelings of discomfort do not go away and remain as minor neuroses.

In his humorous essay “The Doubler,” Raymond Abruzzi discusses the problems created by a person at work who is oblivious to the excrement taboo and transgresses its unspoken rules, for example, using the stall adjacent to the one Abruzzi is using, talking with Abruzzi during the act, making loud defecation noises, etc. In the following excerpt Abruzzi describes his own behavior when he is on the commode and someone enters the restroom:

This shame and the widespread availability of bathrooms in America is enough to keep defecation and its kin out of the public eye.
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Passing wind is more difficult to restrain to private situations for some, but like nasal mucus, mild social enforcement is enough to keep farts out of most social situations.

Unlike nasal mucus, however, the excrement taboo has extended to our legal
system. Public defecation is illegal in most municipalities. For example, in Miami, it is punishable by up to a $500 fine and sixty days in jail. This creates a problem for homeless people, many of whom have no choice but to go in public, and are thus legally barred from performing a necessary life function.

Excrement also must be sensitively discussed over the airwaves from six a.m. to ten p.m. Indecent discussion of excretory organs or activities during these hours on broadcast radio or television can result in the federal government imposing a fine or even revoking a station’s license.
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The federal government tried to restrict indecent discussion of excretion from the Internet as well with the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which was passed overwhelmingly by Congress. This law criminalized any transmission of indecent communications about excrement that could be seen by minors. In other words, anybody who posted on Internet message boards or made a web site would be susceptible to punishment. However, the Supreme Court unanimously declared the Communications Decency Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, rendering it void.
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Excrement censorship by the federal government is done with the stated purpose of protecting children from hearing or viewing “harmful” material. How excretory references are harmful has not been explained. Despite the fact that excrement is included in the government’s definition of indecent material, it is overlooked in most government censorship debates, which instead revolve around sex.

If evidence of the harmfulness of excretory references to minors was ever requested, it is likely the government would respond much like a federal court did when the harmfulness of sexual references was challenged in 1995: “Congress does not need the testimony of psychiatrists and social scientists in order to take note of the coarsening of impressionable minds . . .”
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Excrement was not always shameful in Western culture. Ancient religions that predated the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) had a close affinity with nature. They believed in animism—the idea that animals, natural objects, and natural phenomena have their own guardian spirits. Unlike the Christian worldview, in which the physical world is separate from the spiritual world, they saw the physical world as being deeply spiritual, and excrement linked humans to this world through the natural cycle.

Humans defecate and the feces return to nature, fertilizing the crops. Humans harvest the crops and eat them, continuing the cycle. (This cycle was easier to observe for peoples whose excrement was not immediately whisked away down pipes, never to be seen again.) In this way excrement symbolizes decay and rebirth, and ancient creation myths all over the world have explained land, oceans, and people as coming from the urine and feces of gods.

Like the animist religions, the ancient Roman religion recognized excrement. They had a god for feces, Stercutius, who was revered by farmers who fertilized their fields with manure, and an alleged god for flatulence, Crepitus, who was invoked by those suffering from diarrhea or constipation. In addition, rain was thought to be the gods urinating.

This benign attitude was extended to the act of excreting as well. Wealthy Romans used to have their chamber pots brought to them at their feasts and would defecate in front of everybody without pausing their frolic.
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In public, the commoners would go anywhere.
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While feces were not shameful, it was still not appreciated in roads and stairwells. To keep these areas clean, the Roman government built public latrines. In these classical restrooms dozens of people would sit next to each other, male and female, defecating into troughs with no dividers. Each public latrine had community sponge sticks soaking in buckets of salt water, which the Romans would use to clean their hindquarters.