"While the American attended to nature, the soldier stood guard, observing with some interest how a foreigner did it."
- Herman Wouk, Winds of War
There is a social drama that goes on daily in almost every public john across the country, which we take so much for granted that it isn't even recognized as a phenomenon. A man picks a urinal far away from one in use, and if a man is next to him, it is forbidden to look at him. He can talk, but he must stare directly ahead at the graffiti or peeled plaster in front of him. Above all, he can't stare down at the other man's running spout.
You can fill in the other elements of the "sociology" of the john. My point is to introduce the way our emotions affect the processes of elimination. Our emotional state is wired into our lower body autonomically and quite intimately. The rules are fairly simple. The more confident, on-top-of-the-situation you are the better control and discipline you have over waste disposal. As you become anxious, you feel you must eliminate. With sustained tension or immediate pressure the process grinds to a halt. But with terrifying experiences one "lets go" or "craps out," as it were. How do we account for this wiring system?
One of the most vivid experiences of inability to urinate comes from run-ins with nurses. For many people, hospitals and clinics are houses of emotional horror, anyway, and one is usually there because of some health worry. But it's always a big put-down to be examined like a lab animal, denuded of your protection of social paraphernalia and told by someone, "Fill this bottle up to here - you can use the little room". We fear, "I know I can't squeeze anything out - I just know it."
Tremendous fear of a terrific emotional upset can cause the urethral sphincters to let fly and one ends up with wet pants. This is a familiar enough pattern, especially during wartime or in earthquake-prone areas.
One could run through the same set of principles about defecation. It is difficult to crap communally - that's what put the two-holer garden castle out of business. Why the privacy of locked-door stalls around public bathroom stools (note that euphemism)? These half-walls don't keep out the stink. They are designed for visual privacy. Some cultures are more private than others about these rituals, but there is still a general theme of privacy.
Having to defecate in the face of mild immediate tension isn't uncommon. Anxiety provokes the peristaltic action of the bowel tract - and blatt, the quick anxiety morning crap. But sustained tension can also be responsible for constipation. (Remember Old Man Portnoy in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint). And like urinating under extreme terror, filling one's pants is so widely known that it has become part of the vernacular of expressing great upset: "Oh, he'll shit his pants."
Few things are as taboo as the references to and uses of body excretions. Even "dirty" jokes at the adult level are usually about sexual taboos and not urine and feces. And not even blood and visceral gore are a match for feces when it comes to turning stomachs. Both blood and urine are usually sterile of pathogens - more so than most spring waters. Yet if one had to choose under penalty of death whether to drink blood or urine, people would usually not choose urine. The idea that we have evolved our repugnance of elimination products for reasons of sanitation doesn't hold up entirely, because of the sterile nature of urine. Many other mammals, by the way, have these same emotions toward body wastes; birds, however, do not, except in regard to the physical soiling of feathers. How do we and other mammals come by these social sensitivities to elimination products?
Unlike birds, early mammals saw the world through their noses. Comfort was the smell of home - the smells of good food and of a familiar path or social setting. Discomfort was the smell of a stranger or of a strange place. A person's smell told others something and their smells told him something about them - perhaps their age, sex, where they come from, etc.
But most important, smells were extensions - far extensions - of the self, your smells could be where you weren't. We mammals weren't very social to begin with and running across a turd in the trail meant somebody had been there. If it was fresh it meant he had just been there. Life among fairly asocial creatures isn't relaxed and easy-going. He may be able to encroach into your food resource, take your potential mate, or even kill you.
So it was likewise to your advantage to leave marks behind indicating that you were around, possibly avoiding confrontations which could do you no good. The urine and feces that were left behind in the normal functions were taken over as communication media.
In addition to the natural urine and feces smells, special musk glands evolved in these areas to add further effect. Glands and tufts arose on the penis foreskin or prepuce and special musk glands on many animals developed near the anus to anoint each fecal pellet with their odor.
One late winter day, I walked along an old berm pile on the lower side of our homestead clearing. Natural barriers make good territorial boundaries, and a male fox (I could tell by the position of the urine where he had lifted his leg) had urine-marked every thirty yards or so - every time a little prominence like a stick protruded above the snow. He must have eaten a lot of snow to get enough water to do all that marking: however, I imagine it was just a few squirts at each post. Even with my poor human nose in below-zero weather I could catch the musky odor which had accumulated there from repeated sprinklings. Another fox wandering into the area could gather all sorts of information about the fox living there, but the main signal was a repellent: Better get the hell out of here.
When the snow is deep around Fairbanks, one can see which houses have dogs. There are yellow splats (known locally as Alaskan sunflowers) at the entrance to each driveway. The main road is a mixture of community scents, but each driveway is territorially marked and any new dog traveling along the road is forewarned.
The use of urine among dogs (as among many other social creatures) is often accompanied by other signals. It communicates stature, low as well as high. Puppies have a way of urine squirting when petted, or chased by an older dog; it is weak puppy urine without the odors of the adult and hence says, "I'm just a nothing; don't fool with me"; it is submissive urine. Since elimination is a gesture of social meaning, social animals also have special urination and defecation postures. In the dog it is dramatized by a raised leg; but among a pack, only the dominant ones urinate this way - the very subordinate males crouch down and pee like females. Mature dogs will urinate over fresh human urine in their "area," as will many other species.
I propose that our autonomic wiring connecting psyche with bladder and urethral muscles came from our early mammal origins. Tension causes urination because we want to mark - just like a dog when he smells new odors in his yard. When one has a trying day at the office he or she makes more frequent trips to the washroom (not to wash). In situations where we are blatantly in another's area (smelly hospital), it is difficult to urinate because marking foreign turf goes against our ancestral grain.
Despite the fact that we have all the old wiring, it is vestigial for the most part, or tied up with visceral syndromes that relate to other functions. But we still sometimes see these as outward expressions of psychological behavior and even psychological pathologies, as in anal-compulsives. We don't scent our feces or urine with special glands (though the foreskin gland is still there), but we still react to the smell of rancid urea and the bacterial products of feces with an unreasoning nausea. A fart is almost as disgusting as pure feces, yet these bowel gases contain no harmful pathogens.
Like wolves and deer, human beings also have different urinating postures. Postures relate somewhat to anatomy, but interestingly enough, baby boys learn to urinate in the same posture as girls, a defecation posture. After they can do it "standing up," it is exaggerated all out of proportion to the avoidance of urine on the toes. The legs are bowed back, the stomach and sacrum stuck out, shoulders thrown back, and head arched downward to watch the show.
The mara, a South American rodent, even goes so far as to urinate in threat - but on subordinates. So do many rabbit species. Urination on another human is the extreme form of indignation. Spitting on someone seems to be a ritualized form of pissing on them - a ritualization accomplished by males and females alike. And the remark "piss on you, fella," or "shit on you" carries with it unmistakable connotations of rejection, to say the least.
Cultures have contorted and modified the general repugnance humans have for urine and feces. Some cultures tend to build up rigid taboos and others tend to treat it rather lightly. I'm not sure there are any general rules. In our own culture people from rural areas seem to make less of it than urbanites. Maybe we tend to build up stricter taboos as our relationships become more intimate and our populations more dense. Rural blacks and sharecropper whites moving to the city have trouble at times in adapting to the organic aspects of urban ways. Many ghetto tenements (which can more correctly be called first-generation-off-the-farm tenements) reek of urine in the dark foyers, and there are feces piled along the shadows in the back alleys - something which worked on the farm but does not in the heart of Chicago.
But the rural-urban principle doesn't hold up entirely. France, for example, is noted for its forthrightness about bodily functions, yet Paris at least has had one of the longest histories of high density in the Western world. In its pissoirs, a man may leak behind a thin enclosure covering the middle part of his body while he chats with his girl at the same time. Yet all of these are just different subtitles on a theme of the same taboo, for even in France there are couth and uncouth procedures for body elimination that have nothing to do with sanitation.
Though we in the Western world are becoming more and more open about sex and skin exposure, we are becoming more closed about discussing elimination. Some may find this chapter offensive, just because I've had to use some taboo concepts and words in exploring our behavior.
One of the best illustrations of how we are becoming a more closed society is in the evolution of the urinal. First, urinals were simply long troughs. Then in the '40's and '50's separate urinals were used for each person. In the late 50's and early 60's flanges were installed between urinals to separate your privates so the person next door couldn't see if he tried. The next stage, I'll guess, will be complete enclosures.
How does one explain all this? I would guess it's just a sexual facade; we'll really be getting to know each other intimately when a fart is a mild social slip, not a major faux pas. We've come a long way from the two holer outhouse. Now we feel our privacy encroached upon if a lock on a stall doesn't work. We build several bathrooms for just one family. Not that I would want to go back, necessarily; it's just that our attitudes and physical facilities are probably a clue to our real intimacy, and much of the business about letting it all hang out is just poppycock.
Though it does not have the unmentionable taboo quality of excrement, our next subject, the gross differences among human races, is a tension point in the web of human values - and probably has always been - and may always be.