However banal it may sound, shit, dung, faeces, poop, excrement, number two, shite, bowel movement, stool, discharge, defecation or crap matters. Without the regular defecation, our bodies die. Discharging waste from our bodies is literally a life-saver.

How to defecate is a matter of acculturation and socialisation we are exposed to. Most Western people use a sitting flush toilet and toilet paper to remove the traces of defecation and pee in an environment that is familiar, cosy and clean. It is quite a different experience to take a dump at the chemical toilet – they are not supposed to be a place where you should or could feel at home, despite engaging in very homely activity. Chemical toilets have no homelike atmosphere; they are a transitional place for masses to relief themselves as quickly as possible. When you must shit in public places (e.g. public toilet in a mall, workplace or a chemical toilet), you must do it so quickly that nobody even notices it. Yes, we are that uncomfortable with our own faeces.

Where does this uneasiness with defecation come from? It is a result of the social processes that sociologist Norbert Elias has discussed in his pivotal work “The Civilizing Process” (1939). A civilizing process of Western culture (i.e. white, middle-class, heteronormative, masculine) did not encourage the celebration of the body, bodily openings and its leakiness. The sealed-up body has become a corporeal standard of a new economic order – capitalism and institutionalized philosophical ethics of Cartesian dichotomy (Mind over Body) helped to constitute general beliefs that body needs to be contained at every level. The containment of the human body means an individualised (i.e. separated from other human bodies, where physical connection with others only happens on purpose), socialized (i.e. natural body functions are transformed into socially accepted modes of how a body should function or behave – no more shitting in our pants when adult) and rationalized (i.e. the dominance of reason and self-control over emotions and body – to control bowel movement and defecate in specific spaces for defecation) entity.

The sealed-up body is now accompanied by emotions of shame and embarrassment – sex life, birth, death, loud laughter, loud talking, defecation, drinking and eating have become “private matters”, done in the privacy of our homes, but when performed in public, they must be necessarily encoded in social customs, e.g. visible sex activity is “normal” only in porn movies, giving birth is placed in specialised departments of a hospital, people speak in moderate volume of voice when conversing etc. All those cultural expectations of social conduct emanate from the white, middle-class, straight, able-bodied, Western, cis-gender and masculine values on how to be a “civilised” person.

One of the most important conditions for a person to enter “civilization” is being potty trained. When we are born, we ooze “dirt” – blood, urine, faeces, placenta etc. and until parents (usually mother or some other woman) teach us how to defecate properly (e.g. using potty and later toilet), we wallow in our own bodily fluids (e.g. shit, pee, food, saliva, vomit) and do not worry about it because we have no concept of borders – everything belongs to us, even our own turd. This is the most sensual time of the human life; nobody is judging you for being covered with excreta until you are potty trained, which means you are now able to separate proper (e.g. civilised) from improper (e.g. savage) defecation. By being potty trained we map our body – where we end and others begin.

Potty training is a person’s transition from her/his/their sensual self or – what Julia Kristeva (1982) has named – semiotic phase (i.e. the phase of dirt, uninhibited fleshiness and improperness) to the socialized one (i.e. proper, clean, disciplined, rational). The socialised self represses the sensual joyous times of childhood, because early childhood is also the state of unity between mother and child, where borders between them are not so clear. Mother represents the quintessential Body – warmth, food, emotions, joy, life, but also dirt, decay, death, power over (child). For Kristeva, defecation is an everyday repetition of man’s separation from his mother, where faeces represent the bodily (e.g. maternal, life-death) aspect of a person’s life.

In a masculine conception of social reality, all that is related to femininity (e.g. body, sexuality, motherhood, emotions and death) is repressed or denied, so taking a dump – a very physiological and bodily phenomenon that occurs randomly – should be carefully premeditated. Shitting becomes a disciplined ritual that needs to be controlled and rationalized to be executed properly, otherwise shit (or maternal/feminine) will take over. It is a sign of another masculine attempt to dominanate Nature (i.e. bowel movement, phantasm of mother), because defecation reminds men that despite endless efforts to control everything and everyone around them, they are still bodies – unstable and uncontrollable entities where shit calls the shots.

Man’s fecal ritual is a predetermined and controlled process – when to defecate, where to defecate and what accompanies the defecation. If the bowels are not moving, they will make them move. “Get this shit working” could be the morning mantra, because morning dump is the most important one; it sets the mood of the day. It should happen after breakfast, no one is allowed to cut the line when a man’s defecation is about to begin and by spending some time sitting aimlessly on the toilet seat, a man will mentally force his bowels to start moving. To disassociate from his own defecation (because of the connection with Nature, e.g. maternal), he occupies his mind while shitting. To sit in silence doing “nothing” (well, shitting is not nothing, but nevertheless) is incomprehensible to a man. If he would defecate as women do – quickly, without any thought, when you must go, you go, you don’t hang around in a bathroom – he would have had to listen to himself (e.g. his thoughts) and sounds that surround defecation – the growling of bowels, farting, the moment when turd hits the water surface of a toilet bowl.

So, to separate himself from this “mundane” everyday need, he distracts his mind with reading papers or clicking through his smart phone while defecating. It is unthinkable for a man to be alone in a room with his turd (e.g. the symbolic separation from mother and in the presence of Nature), so occupying his mind with meaningful/less information (i.e. rational thought) helps him survive this horrendous experience of filth and corporealness.

To recognize something as a “shit ritual”, however unconsciously it is done by their “ritualists”, this sends a message of men’s uneasiness with anything feminine or maternal in their bodies (not even a piece of shit) or in their identity.

On the other hand, taking a phone with you to the toilet, regardless of your gender, also accentuates the internalized capitalistic expectation to rationalize your time – use every spare minute for everything and everyone else (e.g. work-related obligations) except yourself .

Shit in piece.

P.S. This text would have been different if different types of men had been observed – non-heterosexual, non-middle class, non-western, non-white, disabled or aged men.

The abject can be experienced in three different ways: (1) as dirt (i.e. corporeal changes and their climax – death, (2) in sexual difference (i.e. the female/feminine body and incest) and (3) by food taboos or repulsion. All those pillars of abjection represent the border or ritualised beginning of culture (i.e. order, civilisation, system, logic, masculinity) from nature (i.e. chaos, darkness, devouring, maternal, emotions).

The ultimate bearer of dirt is the human body and by keeping it clean (e.g. showering, bathing, using deodorants and perfumes, wearing clean clothes), the body becomes civilised (disciplined, moderated, composed). Mary Douglas has compared (hu)man body with the (male) society; both of them strive to the stability, unchangeability, rigidity, orderliness and cleanliness. If body would remain permanently clean (i.e. the same), it would not age and die. Yet everybody dies and every system is vulnerable and permeable at its margins. Body margins are its caveats and openings (mouth, eyes, ears, nose, belly button, rectum, genitalia, urethra) that render body as inescapably leaky and dirty – everybody must shit, piss, sweat. Some cry, ejaculate, menstruate and produce milk. The more are body openings and their fluids are postulated as dirty, the more the society aims to be homogenic, pure and close-minded – to distant itself from dirt. And it is the female body that is branded as inherently dirty due to its unpredictable leakage and production of body-specific fluids (menstruation, breast milk, vaginal mucus), accompanied by extra openings (vulva, urethra). Because more fluids exit a female body, the more ‘dirt’ can enter it.

The sexual difference (female – male) is another basis to experience abjection where male body is understood as universal and female as deviant or Other. The cause for a man’s attraction and repulsion against the female body is its difference – breasts and vagina at most. Yet that’s not all. Childbirth is defined as an ultimate abjection and the grotesqueness per ce that embodies a duality of personhood (Self plus Other or mother and child). The process of giving birth is the climax of abjection; a state of in/out, Self/Other, life/death, horror/beauty, of liminality and no self-control. An image of a woman giving birth resembles to the borderless flesh explosion that reiterates man’s somatophobia and fear for losing his (body) control.
The third aspect of abjection is food loathing – what is edible (healthy, nutritious or necessary) is culturally imposed. Food becomes abject when the boundary between nature and culture is crossed. For example, overripe fruits/vegetables (resembling to decay), unwashed food (possibility of the contagion), food that falls on the floor, food pulled out of a garbage can (close to the litter makes it impure), body excrement (eating boogers, scabs, blisters, drinking urine or covering yourself with menstrual blood). The ultimate taboo that combines all three abjections (food-dirt-desire) is mother’s milk. Mother’s milk gives life, is infant’s first food that is literally forced on her/him/they and she/he/they is the only person, allowed to drink it.

Food represents a constant repetition of a need to survive or live and at the same time a chance to rebel against the authority (i.e. parents: primary mother and/or secondary father), who has in the past decided for us what, when, how and where to eat. Without food, the body withers away and becomes the climax of an abjection – a corpse.

Here are some randomly chosen examples from contemporary western cultures that can be described as abjection illustrations:

• horror movies, filled with corpses, bodily waste, reproductive (i.e. maternal) bodies allow viewers to take pleasure & displeasure while watching them,
• ban of nipples, pubic hair and menstruation in social media sends us a message that particulars and fluids of female body are taboo,
• storm chasing as premeditated (cultured) pursuit of the weather condition (nature); its unpredictability arouses contradictory emotions (fear and excitement, esprit and paralysis) in a storm chaser,
• veganism as a dietary and ethical abstaining from eating animal products can be understood as rebellion against meat-eating patriarchal order that fuels on aggression and bloodshed and by not eating animal corpses, a person refuses to eat the abject.