Anti-Dumping Agreement
Greg Piper
On the one hand, we have entire civilizations built upon the blood of victims, the trampling of lives to further empire, and the raping of the land to enable mankind's industrial and technological dreams. And on the other, we're afraid of taking a shit in a stranger's house.
Nobody objects to urine, provided it’s disposed of quickly. “I gotta pee” has earned hearty guffaws from St. Francis to Forrest Gump because it causes social awkwardness that’s only slightly dirty, like the art of Nyotaimori or naked sushi. We only get mad at urine in an alley, on the toilet seat or in a beer bottle that we foolishly drink after pulling over a dim-witted duo.
But pee’s alliterative sibling is no laughing matter anywhere it’s dumped. Especially if you’re hosting the dumper. Make this the first in The Rules franchise for men: Thou Shalt Cinch the Sphinc in a Stranger’s Shack.
Not that women can’t show bad form. Imagine my complex facial contortions upon hearing two attractive women describe how one christened the other’s new home with a giant, er, relief. And I think my landlord’s grade-school daughter left an unflushed present during a visit. If you catch the first Harold & Kumar on basic cable, be glad the girls’ bathroom scene is missing.
But clearly men are less self-conscious about sh*tiquette. And forehead-slappingly oblivious to the very real distinctions between tinkling and sphincling.
Drink a beer on an empty stomach at my house and you’ll have to go or risk your health - all men remember the Simpsons episode where Grandpa’s kidneys blew in the car. It will be quick and leave no traces, unless you ate asparagus that day (whose aroma is exotic, like Marrakesh). But if your bowels are yowling, surely you could have planned a more considerate evacuation route, perhaps halting new sh*ttlements while the vice president is visiting instead of crapping all over the president’s piss initiative. The spirit of solid waste lingers like a freshman with no social cues after a “date,” rendering the facilities uninhabitable for upwards of an hour and presenting a Hobson’s Choice: an open-door policy that unleashes a weakened form of crapitalism on the house, or a commode-grown nationalism whose insularity repels the world.
The World Tinkling Organization is ill-equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude. That’s why I propose new exemptions on bathroom protocol, the Generalized System of Pooping, that apply specifically to the homes of people you just met, but should also be observed even between good friends.
1. Restricted hours. No movements when people are awake and about the house. This can be overcome by following an evacuation with a shower so as to neutralize the otherwise unstoppable rebel force.
2. Candles and matches. Do your business only if the bathroom has this winning combination of tastefulness and subtlety. And light up first. It’s also appropriate to smoke in the bathroom, a stigmatization far more bearable than accompanies detected dumping. Ignore spray cans, the bathroom equivalent of the scarlet A.
3. Big parties. Anything goes when people are inebriated and anonymous. Just try to find the bathroom with the least conscious people loitering around it.
4. Borat. Bring a bag with you.
Free Trade Defecation
Jeremiah Lewis
Poop. It's one of those things that no one talks about because it's gross, it smells nasty, and it comes from a private place on your body that is equally disgusting. Do we as a culture want to confront the questions surrounding our various bodily functions and their effect on our environment, and the determinations our natural needs force upon our behavior? If you're in the woods and you need to relieve your bladder, do you mince off like a coward and try to make it back to the safety of your home, or do you stand like a man, face the tree of urinary indifference, and paint it with your own water?
With the issue of evacuating one's bowels in the confines of a stranger's home, the core of the debate has been laid open like a hot sucking wound, a blistering sore upon the face of polite society. It is as if the Civil War were fought, not on the grounds of free trade, states rights, and slavery, but on the necessities of conducting ourselves with decorum when faced with the unsettling requirement to expunge our excrement under the very noses of some strange host to whom we owe some apparently large and substantial debt of politeness.
So let's just get it out of our system right now: all the Pilgrimatic modesties, the Quaker qualities of shame and embarrassment, and the social mores that have ruled uncontested for thousands of years due to humankind's seemingly delicate sensibilities. On the one hand, we have entire civilizations built upon the blood of victims, the trampling of lives to further empire, and the raping of the land to enable mankind's industrial and technological dreams. And on the other, we're afraid of taking a shit in a stranger's house. Or even in a friend's house. At a party, at a sleepover, at a wake, at a tractor pull--I crapitulate!, as the French say when waving the white while browning their trousers, is now taboo everywhere but the sanctity of one's own home? How foolish is that?
Anyone with a degree of honesty and the courage to own their biology knows the danger a no-dumping policy carries for the legislator. Like Charles Rangel after an ethics inquiry, one may find that one cannot avoid the surging requirements of the lower intestines after a meal of questionable origin. Suppose you are caught at a reporter's dinner at the luxurious house of the editor of a paper you have denigrated or lauded at some point in the past, and while the owner is known to you, he is not a friend--Do you bow out gracefully like many Democrats after an unpopular health care reform package is rammed down your constituents' throats, or do you act like a man, judiciously, and retire to the powder room where you can freely release the hounds, braying and blowing, and lighting a match or pressing the button on the Glade freshener sitting above the sink?
I have no doubt that readers of delicate sensibilities will find this odorous. Sorry, but just when did we decide that our biological needs of the moment should be subjected to some arbitrary custom of the frigid and the fecally-challenged?
Waiting until you're in more private environs may seem more politic, but for me, there's no greater freedom or self-expression than following the dictates of your digestion, even if the domicile is not your own.
