- I once had this funny idea about writing an entire series of little books about shitting. There were a few ideas that I wanted to convey through it.
- The first and most important one is the fact that everybody shits – celebrities shit, dictators shit, peasants shit. People die while shitting. People often shit while they die. People often shit when they give birth. People suffer when they can’t shit, or when they shit uncontrollably. Everyone’s probably had to deal with both scenarios.
- And yet shitting is something that most if not all of us do in private, at least in the modern civilized world. I think in some places in the world people still shit out in the open. Ancient Rome had remarkably sophisticated sewer systems – ways of getting large amounts of shit away from wherever you took the shit.
- There are subreddits where people post photos of their shits. Why? I guess because it’s disgusting, and in intrigues people. There are also people who have sexual fetishes that have to do with shit, which is… disturbing.
- I guess this is now an exploration into bodily functions and fluids, and what people find disgusting. As a general rule it seems that almost everything coming out of the body is basically bad or gross. Spit, piss, shit, blood. When reading up about it, I found that somebody on reddit has a vomitting fetish. She was terrified of vomiting as a child. It’s interesting how fetishes work. Some people derive sexual pleasure from demeaning acts, either demeaning others or by being demeaned themselves. How are we to think about that? Instinctively – if it’s between consensual adults it’s okay. Apparently there’s a distinction between a kink and a fetish, depending on what exactly you enjoy about doing a thing. There are people who like wearing a diaper and then pissing in it – they find it comforting. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24z70t/people_that_are_into_scat_and_urination_sexually/
- There are all kinds of interesting details about how people shit in public. Singapore used to have “night soil men” who would…
- I’m not personally into shit in a sexual sense (ew, lol). Scrolling through pictures of people’s shit triggers a disgust response from me and I get grossed out. But I suppose I find it interesting to contemplate the nature of disgust, and what it means to be a bag of chemicals. And I suppose also it’s interesting from a larger input/output, raw materials -> waste sort of analogy. The same thing that happens around the human body also happens around a lot of other things at a bigger scale – industrial processes, for eg. And landfills and recycling and whatnot.
- I’m also curious about what things like gay, lgbt, kink, bdsm cultures tell us about who we are as a species.