Hold Your Nose, Here's an Unpleasant Subject!

Here's a subject you don't see discussed every day—poop. That's poo, doo-doo, shit, crap, good old feces. (Yes, I'm really blogging about it!) No doubt it's discussed by doctors with their patients, but it's a subject we're not completely comfortable with.

Of course it's an essential and inevitable part of everyday life. (And if it's not literally every day, we say we're constipated. Sorry for the little joke, couldn't resist.) There was a book for children called Everybody Poops. (Along somewhat the same lines, there was also a children's book—and I love this one—called The Gas We Pass.) Yet I bet we are uncomfortable with it.

I wonder how many people wish they didn't have to poop. My late mother was, shall we say, very fastidious, and I bet she wished she didn't have to poop.

(And speaking of the fastidious--a year ago I spent some time with a very old (in both senses) boyfriend of mine and found out he's really quite obsessive about cleaning his "B-hole," as he called it, after going to the bathroom. I put him on to those wet wipes which work very well for that purpose. Now he'll think of me every time he wipes his ass. Sweet.)

Think about people who are hospitalized and have to use a bed pan, have to call for someone to bring the bed pan and then take it away. I bet the patient hates having to do that, both having to have the help and having to make someone else carry away his or her poop.

Worse, the ill or infirm person who (as we say, rather euphemistically) "soils himself."

We are uncomfortable with bodily products—secretions, discharges, and so forth: feces, urine, nasal discharge, vomit. But presumably not tears and not (for most people) blood. Maybe not earwax. One could probably think of some others.

An interesting theory was proposed by an anthropologist to explain this. He said that we are made uncomfortable by any ambiguity between the "me" and the "not-me." That's interesting, and perhaps plausible considering that an infant has to learn the boundaries between the "me" and the "not-me," and in the course of doing so will put his toe in his mouth.

But this theory might not hold up. As I mentioned, probably most people don't strongly dislike blood. Nor nail clippings, shorn hair, maybe not earwax and some others. If these are possible problems with that anthropologist's clever idea, then we still need an explanation as to why we are uncomfortable with poop, etc. Of course--and I have to add this before someone else points this out--with poop and vomit also, part of our aversion may be due to the smell.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein