born to shit, forced to wipe
anal syndrome
Nothing is more painful than hearing the stomach of the person sitting next to you cry out growls of hunger. The discomfort affects everybody. The growling torso moves ever so slightly, in an attempt to curb the noise. You pretend you didn’t hear it, sometimes it’s so loud you have to blurt out some shit like “someone’s hungry”. They laugh, but they’re in pain, and you both cringe at the mutual inability to fix that stomach. You can hide a bad breath, a sleepless night, or a stinky armpit, but you can’t control your bowel movements. And that’s frustrating, to the insecure high school student, the underfed worker, and the young man developing gastritis in class. To suppress one’s appetite for the sake of work is seldom met with the passivity of the intestines. We can’t control our shit and it pains us.
Incontinence is a testament to our fear of loss of control over our bodies, and the thought of which pains us seeps into our nightmares. Visions of a disemboweled self, desperately trying to regain agency, shoving the tubes, bowels, pipes, organs, and wires back into the torso. I’m losing my body, I’m shitting all over. The nicotine patches did nothing to stop the disintegration of my tethered self, my embodied shell of hunger. I’m gonna shit myself for all to watch. It often feels like nobody knows that everybody poops. We are terrified of losing our shit.
We can’t control our shit
and it pains us
If you beat your kids they’ll shit their pants
Victims of domestic violence are forcefully taught at a young age to shut off their bodies, turn off sensation, and give up control over their organs. As the hand is about the hit the face or ass, the child shuts off contact, decouples their self from future corpse. The potty-trained child, whose stool was once celebrated, is now stuck in an inability to control the body that hurts, while expected not to make a mess.
Our city is clean, but the gutters are smelly. Our schools are perfect institutions, but everyone gets hungry by lunchtime, and the deodorant, the mint gum, the vape, the soda, none of it can satisfy a flesh about to shit and starve. She smells so good but her stomach is making fucked up noises. I feel bad for her. Not for the noise, but because nobody cares except her.
Freud says if you shit well, you become too clean. If you don’t succeed in potty training, you’re gonna be as messy as that roommate you had. If you shit well, you’ll be stingy. If you don’t, only money will satisfy those around you. When you first learn to control your bowel movement (and thus move on from the oral stage to the anal stage) your parents get excited to watch you shit. “No more diapers, no more shit on our hands!” they jubilate. You get confused, because you think they’re proud of the smell, the form, the color, texture and taste your body just produced. “What the fuck? I made this and they’re proud?”. And yes, they are. Everyone is. So you learn that the things you produce with your body make the people around you happy. So maybe, if I make commodities with my body, and exchange those for money, everyone will be happy again. We shouldn’t take Freud too seriously. But we should believe him when he says money and shit is the same thing in the unconscious. My body made this, everyone’s proud, I’m happy, I win.
everyone is sexually incontinent.
Describing the way in which incontinence turns into socialized self-control, Winnicott holds that control over one’s excretions is one among many instances of the phenomenon. Sphincter morality, oral sadism and the fantasy of incontinence, fear of disintegration, all that in a bag of shit.
We fear the loss of the mother’s breast after sucking, the loss of feces after a bowel movement, and the separation from the mother at the time of birth. Deep down, you all know what I mean, right?
After all, in psychoanalysis, as Adorno reminds us, nothing is true except its exaggerations. I read things that make me wanna shit my pants, wet the bed, spit on the floor, sneeze at a stranger, cough blood unto my elbow, throw up in the mirror, feed my stomach sloppy grease, and cry myself to sleep. And in those moments, I recognize the many bodily functions I’ve always tried to suppress. The body keeps the score, but nobody is counting, I pretend they do, so I hide my body everywhere I can. Under my clothes, words, and the foul stench of my fart-like ideas. Philosophy is losing its smell. And my snarling stomach is about to blow. Will they like it when it does? ‘sphincter morality’ has been used to describe the
It’s nothing short of a pure anal body horror show, the dismantling of the self, the desperate, yet always stunted attempt at regaining human integrity. In the disembodied meatspace, the human-machine system exudes bile for those who see it. Anxiety over our inevitable bodily mechanization reconfigures the digitized organic into an assemblage of inside/outside food/shit. Let the guttural puppet theatre commence! Now excuse me, I must use the bathroom.
Speaking of toilets
None have managed to include as much shit in their philosophy and vice versa as Zizek, who bravely produces a national taxonomy of shitting:
““In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected.”
In a quest for triadic certainty, our king sniffer neglects the Japanese washlet, the chinese squat hole, the outhouse, the portapotty, the mediterranean bidet. His base-superstructure model warrants more investigation into newer, more alternative outlooks on waste management. Still, he identifies three different attitudes towards excremental excess:
“an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
”
I have nothing to add to that. What’s your shitting zodiac? Sure, not all cultures shit the same, but why do we love talking about Mexican food, but not Japanese toilets? If we are what we eat, what does this mean for what we ate? Where does it go? After all, even the pedantic German idealist fails to squat, always settling for abstraction over bodily function, remaining 35 degrees short of pissing beer out of their ass.
It comes to no surprise that South Park, the beacon of toilet humour, takes our refusal to talk about toilets and shit to the next level in their episode on Japanese toilets. The episode poses the question as to why Japanese automatic toilets have not caught on in the United States, given their luxurious benefits. The answer is the Marxist answer to the Freudian question we’ve been asking: Why do we wipe for infection as if it were our purification? Pockets run deeper than our assholes. In a quasi-conspiratorial tone, Jimmy warns Stan of the dangers of digging too deep down the drain pipe:
“Jimmy: Have you ever asked yourself why we use toilet paper? We’re told to wash our hands... wear masks in crowds... but for some reason when it comes to wiping our ass, we’re told to do it with this little piece of paper. We are all — all of us — walking around right now with a little bit of shit smeared on our buttholes. Did you know that 70% of people in the world don’t even use it at all?
Stan: 70% of the world doesn’t use toilet paper?
Jimmy: Look it up. Most people in the world still use good ‘ol soap and water (...) The average American uses 140 rolls of toilet paper per year. Can you even begin to imagine how many trees that is? To supply the United States its toilet paper, it takes 31.1 million trees per year. A million acres per year of precious Canadian Boreal forest alone, releasing upwards of 25 metric tons of CO2 and leveling 90% of the land barren.
Stan: You’re talking about the toilet paper companies.
Jimmy: Who has the most to lose? It’s all toilet paper, Stan! Follow the money! 140 rolls per American per year. Factories pushing out roll after roll while razing Earth’s resources. All of this for an unsanitary product that has been proven to contribute to anal fissures.
Don’t you get it, man? Paper doesn’t clean bacteria. It can’t kill viruses. With all that information, you’d think the world health organization would do studies to find alternatives. So why don’t they? Because toilet paper is an industry worth billions and b-billions of dollars. Kimberly-Clark, Georgia-Pacific, Procter & Gamble. They don’t want Japanese toilets in America and they have the power to stop them, and to stop you.”
We need to talk about shit. If not for the environment, or our own anal tissue, then for the many that go without clean sanitation. November 19th has become World Toilet Day, an awareness campaign that reminds us that every day we refuse to talk about refuse, a thousand children die of diarrhoeal disease. These issues, as one can intuit, fall short of attention, as dying animals, melting glaciers and our burning forests tend to steal the show of our subconscious guilt.
sphincter morality
As the global proletariat finds resistance in apps that track our bathroom time (and show us how much MONEY we are making taking SHITS), corporate strategies have long implemented measures to reduce our quality time away from work. If pissing in a bottle wasn’t enough, businesses have started tilting their toilets by a slight 13 degrees to strain our legs after 5 minutes. The grand promise of waterboarding our assholes in jet stream bliss have been superseded by technological advances we didn’t ask for, like this patent to a anal print technology that reads my rectum like a qr code:
This smart toilet can read your anus like a fingerprint (I wish this was a joke, but it’s a headline from business insider)
A vulgar reading of this patent gives me all the anxieties I never though of having. Will it register my fart smells in the cloud-based health portal? Will it tell the wife I’ve been cheating on my diet? Will it soothe me with the voice of a young Patrick Stewart? Will my shits affect my credit score? Surely, they’ll promise nothing but the most responsible health monitoring. And that’s what I worry about the most. I’ve been terrible at shitting, since the day I ate.
Can’t have shit at the job, literally. Handicapped stalls must be shaking right now.
I wish they let us shit in peace and wipe the way we wish to. But the best we can hope from corporate-mandated bathroom break reduction is direct moral conditioning, from the head of office straight to our sphincters. May we clench our fists and buttholes, as our potty breaks grow shorter; bathroom reading is reduced to watching ads on the loo.
when the corporate toilet hits you with the 13 degree angle, you fight back with 35! Bring your stool to work and take ownership of your shit. Get your shit together, inside, outside and at the border.
garbage in, garbage out
you are what you eat.
you shit where you eat
you reap what you sow
you are the company you keep
you are the sum of your habits
when you gotta go you gotta go
do you give a shit?
it’s not that deep but you’re knee-deep in it.
