You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (10 page)
Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
The main barrier to wet wiping for Americans is the psychological one of touching feces with the hands. Fortunately there is a wet wiping alternative that came on the market in 2001—Kimberly-Clark’s flushable pre-moistened Rollwipes. The same company that introduced the tissue is attempting another hygienic transformation, but has already had difficulty advertising a taboo topic. The initial campaign flopped.
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Ads showed people from behind splashing in water with the slogan “sometimes wetter is better.” It was so vague that consumers did not understand what it was.
The excrement taboo has also forced people to hold in their excrement. Everyone has felt the discomfort from holding in gas around other people, and from holding in bowel movements for lack of an available restroom. However, there are also those who hold in feces because they do not like others to even be aware that they are defecating. For most people this embarrassment is avoided by simply avoiding specifics, for example by saying, “I must use the restroom,” and by using euphemisms such as “Excuse me, I must go powder my nose.” For the more self-conscious these semantics are not enough cover.
This fear of public excretion has ramifications. School children may be the most at-risk group. Due to their immaturity, the general treatment of their facilities is often cruder, leading to uncleanliness, and the social ramifications
of having a loud or malodorous evacuation are worse. Because students are not allowed to leave school premises, they have no alternative. A Swedish study found that thirty-five percent of older students never used the school bathrooms and eighty percent never used them for defecation.
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In addition to the torment of holding it, this repeated behavior can lead to urinary tract infections, bladder inflammation, constipation, and incontinence. In poorer regions education suffers because some kids solve the problem by not attending at all. In Tanzania, India, and Bangladesh, when schools installed “decent latrines” school enrollment rose by as much as fifteen percent.
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Urination is a more frequent necessity than defecation, and for some the anxiety created by the taboo is substantial. The technical term for the affliction is
avoidant paruresis
or “bashful bladder.”
Avoidant paruresis
is a psychological disorder in which people fear urinating with other people around. Their fear is so strong that they are physically incapable of peeing. Studies have shown that roughly seven percent of the population, or seventeen million Americans, suffer from paruresis.
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Most paruretics only have the problem when they are in view of others, such as in crowded urinals, but more severe cases fear any bathroom where there is a possibility of others seeing, hearing, or merely knowing they are urinating.
The intuitive solution of just holding it can be extremely painful. One sufferer explained it thus, “I felt like I was either going to die or I would pass out because the pain was so intense that even if you put a gun to my head, I would not be able to go.”
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Severe paruresis can be life-altering, binding people to their homes. One man dropped out of high school in ninth grade, went to a local college so he could live at home, and stayed in a lousy job for years, all to accommodate his disorder.
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Therapy programs, complete with a “pee buddy,” pee practice, and relaxation training, have been successful as a cure. The elation of conquering this phobia is clear in Don from California’s posting at
ShyBladder.org
:
I [now] LOVE to pee—as much as I possibly can. I MADE MYSELF love to pee by loving myself, forgiving the past, living in NOW, and NEVER giving up until I felt in my heart and soul that I was CURED—PERMANENTLY! AND I AM.
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At the individual level, the health problems caused by holding one’s bladder and bowels are not severe. Perhaps the gravest repercussion of the excrement taboo is that people avoid seeing a doctor for symptoms that involve excrement and the orifices involved. This hesitance costs lives. Britain’s stricter excrement taboo is thought to be a reason for the slower diagnosis of gastrointestinal disease and colorectal cancer than mainland Europe, and the correspondingly higher death rate.
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One British doctor wrote in London’s
The Times
:
I cannot bear to think of the patients I have seen who have kept some intimate symptom secret until they had the opportunity of telling me in the course of their annual medical check of some seemingly embarrassing problem, too distressing to discuss elsewhere. Too often it was rectal bleeding, change in bowel habits, mucus discharge from some orifice or another, blood in the urine, lump in the breast, vaginal discharge and sometimes . . . the shame of no longer being able to control their belching or farting.
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In addition to damaging our health, the excrement taboo has also damaged the health of the environment. Excrement is an important part of the life cycle. For the latter history of life on this planet, water and land have had separate cycles. Land ecosystems are nutrient-rich and land animals’ excrement played a major part in keeping it this way. Animals dropped their nutrient-rich detritus on the ground, where it was assimilated back into the soil to fertilize the plants, thus renewing the process. In contrast, water ecosystems are pure, that is, they are relatively free of nutrients. Aquatic life has evolved in a nutrient-poor environment.
The Western taboo on excrement has destroyed this balance. Whereas East Asian cultures valued their feces and were diligent about returning it to their farmland, Western cultures preferred to dump it in waterways to get rid of it. While Asian farming’s productiveness per acre became a wonder and was credited with supporting their immense populations, Western farmland was quickly depleted and needed artificial fertilizers to maintain meager crops.
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In the late 1800s sanitary engineers in Europe and America were split between adopting the Asian practice of using human excreta as fertilizer and those who believed it should be dumped into waterways. Western politicians, like the members of New York City Council,
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could not overcome their disdain for turning human waste into plant fertilizer, and the recyclers lost.
Instead of recycling excreta, expensive sewer systems were developed. Water was piped in and out of houses. Whereas before people used five gallons of water per day, water use shot up and now an individual uses roughly ninety gallons of water a day.
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All of this excreta-laced water was sent back into the water streams. River ecosystems were destroyed as nutrient-rich water created algae infestations that choked out all other life.
The tragedy does not end there. Factories dumping chemicals into sewers lobbied for more. Sewers allowed them to push the cost of their toxic waste onto the public. Industry demand for sewers produced massive public sewer construction projects. Massive public sewer systems were attractive to engineering and construction firms, who supported even more projects. The valuable nutrients of excreta were now hopelessly mixed in sewage with the thousands of man-made chemicals dumped from factories and other household products.
Currently sewage is treated to keep harmful elements out of the waterways. This is expensive, but has been done successfully where local communities are environmentally alert and politically organized. The problem is now what to do with the filtered pollution called sludge. Sludge has been put in landfills, causing ground pollution, incinerated, causing air pollution, and dumped in the ocean. No one knew exactly what its effects were at the bottom of the ocean, but ocean dumping became unacceptable in the 1980s when hypodermic needles and other unsavory items began washing up on recreational beaches.
At present the sludge problem is handled by giving it away as free fertilizer to farmers. While appearing to be a wonderful solution that saves both municipalities and farmers money, it could have grave consequences. It is indeed recycling, but the valued nutrients from human excreta are now being put back into the food chain along with an unknown potpourri of chemicals that includes industrial waste.
The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed treated sludge fertilizer safe, even though its own scientists have testified before Congress that the
supporting science is lacking, even “fraudulent.”
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Despite anecdotal evidence that exposure to sludge fertilizer has caused health problems and even death, the dangers of sludge fertilizer remain under-researched.
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As a result, scientists are still uncertain what effects these chemicals have in the chain of life, which goes from plants to animals to us.
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While developed nations grapple with sludge, impoverished nations still grapple with unprocessed excrement. Just like in medieval European cities, in slums and villages around the globe crap is everywhere. Of the world’s seven billion people, 2.6 still have no sanitation whatsoever and defecate on the ground. Ubiquitous feces contaminate drinking water, causing diarrhea—a deadly affliction for children in the absence of health care.
Feces-contaminated water kills a staggering 1.8 million children annually. This number dwarfs the number of people killed by violent conflict, and one dollar invested in sanitation returns seven in saved health care costs and productivity gains. Yet, sanitation “barely registers on the international agenda.”
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As Rose George explains in
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
, politicians and celebrities do not want to talk about sanitation, much less champion it.
As with nasal mucus, one of the most fascinating effects of the excrement taboo is how history is presented. Artists of past ages had no qualms about representing excretion, but this artwork is rarely seen because curators, editors, and collectors have operated under modern taboos in selecting the art worthy of preservation and presentation.
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Sometimes art has been modified, as in the case of the Rembrandt painting now entitled “A Woman Bathing in a Stream.” The original allegedly portrayed a woman urinating but in a later time period someone painted out the falling stream.
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When excretion is presented historically, it’s often not treated in the manner befitting its time. An example is the 1984 Oscar-award-winning film
Amadeus
, about
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In it Mozart is portrayed as an abnormal adult with a strange obsession with flatus. This treatment is echoed in a critic’s article:
There is also something disturbing about Mozart. Even into his twenties he was still very adolescent. Some of the letters he wrote, including those to his sister, are vulgar and immature. Lavatory humor for eight-year-olds may be understood but not for someone who is 21-plus. He wrote about intimate bodily functions and both his parents talked openly about defecation.
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YE GODS!
Mozart’s Muck
Examples of the scatology in Mozart’s letters can be found in these passages from a missive he wrote to his cousin, Maria Mozart, while in his early twenties (November 5, 1777):
I shit on your nose and it will run down your chin. À propos.
Oh, my arse is burning like fire! What on earth does it mean!—Perhaps some muck wants to come out? Why yes, muck, I know, see and smell you . . . and . . . what is that? —Is it possible . . . Ye gods!—can I believe those ears of mine? Yes indeed, it is so—what a long melancholy note!
He concluded his letter with this story:
I must tell you of a sad thing which has happened just this very moment. As I was doing my best to write this letter, I heard something on the street. I stopped writing—I got up—went to the window . . . and . . . the sound ceased, I sat down again, started off again to write—but I had hardly written ten words when again I heard something. I got up again—As I did, I again heard a sound, this time quite faint—but I seemed to smell something slightly burnt—and wherever I went, it smelt. When I looked out of the window, the smell disappeared. When I looked back into the room, I again noticed it.
In the end Mamma said to me: “I bet you have let off one.” “I don’t think so, Mamma,” I replied. “Well, I am certain that you have,” she insisted. Well, I thought “Let’s see,” put my finger to my arse and then to my nose and—Ecce, provatum est. Mamma was right after all.
—Jim Dawson,
Who Cut the Cheese
(1999), p. 112; Wolfgang Mieder, “Now I Sit Like a Rabbit in the Pepper,”
J. Folklore Res
., Jan.–Apr. 2003, pp. 51–52; and William Stafford,
Mozart Myths
(1993), p. 92.
During Mozart’s life (1756–1791), the excrement taboo was in its infancy. As has been mentioned, during this time period the French royal court was having fart contests. Coupled with the fact that Mozart came from a poor background, a social class in which excremental activity was even less concealed, his bluntness in regard to things scatological is not disturbing.