While we were at the Feast of Tabernacles in South Africa, towards the end of our trip, my mother made my stepfather a humorous impossible challenge not to mention bodily functions like bladder issues and bowel movements for 72 hours straight. Why is this such an impossible challenge? Like many men of a certain age, my stepfather finds it necessary to continually repeat, as if others do not already know, the workings of his body’s digestive processes and the speed or frequency or amount of what his body eliminates. Because the workings of one’s bladder or bowels is a fitting measure of how well one’s body is at taking in one’s food and drink and processing it, its health or problems are a fitting measure of how comfortable one’s existence is as an elderly person. Many people–including quite a few people like myself who are not particularly old–do not always have bodies that work particularly well in these areas, and so monitoring these functions is an important part of our information about the condition of our bodies.

For a variety of reasons, I have as long as I can remember been fascinated with the workings of my own body. I have always sought to understand what irritates my bowels, what my body digests well or poorly, how dehydrated I am at any given moment, and so on. I do not think that it is in any way a bad thing for people to investigate and seek to understand the workings of their own bodies. Information, even the rather qualitative sort of information we can gather from an informal personal stool analysis, is still information that can help us know whether we are eating or drinking the right things in the right amounts, and our body will tell us when we are not doing well by its sensitivities and that there is a price to pay for ignoring what our bodies can or cannot handle very well. When we age, it is to be expected that our bodily functions will not work as well as they did before. Many people find that in order to keep themselves regular they need to deliberately provoke the bowels to move, either by eating spicy foods that irritate the bowels into action (and that allow food to have a flavor to those whose taste buds are not functioning well) or by eating large amounts of insoluble fiber that the body must simply pass and cannot digest. This is not bad to know about oneself, if it happens to be the case.

The issue is that no one else wants to know about it. There are a great many people who find bodily functions in general to be indelicate matters that are not worth prying into too much and are certainly not an object of curiosity in others. Even those of us who are greatly interested in how our own body functions well or poorly do not have a great deal of curiosity or desire to know about other people. A healthy desire to protect our own privacy and not have people in our business trying to give us unwanted advice about what we should and should not eat to suit their own philosophy of life or the workings of their own bodily systems is often accompanied by a distinct lack of curiosity about the inner workings of the bodies of others. Nevertheless, old men in particular seem to find it particularly fascinating to talk about their own bodies even though no one else wants to know about it, nor wants to hear what they have to say about the sort of unpleasant and irritating spices and bad-tasting food additives that they want to recommend to everyone else to consume for their health.

I also tend to find, much to my amusement, that there is a clear gender divide on this particular subject. Women may often be more interested in the workings of their bodies than men are, but are less inclined to talk about it with most people. Whereas an old man will blithely and incorrectly assume that the whole world wants or needs to know about the detailed workings of their piping and sewage systems, young women learn early that this sort of discussion should be limited only to those who genuinely care and reciprocate in kind. There is often a sort of sisterhood of women who share these matters with others and who can bond over their sincerity in discussing such matters openly and honestly without any sort of sentimentality or restraint, but the vast majority of men do not want to share in this fellowship with either them or each other. Indeed, while one can often find women engaging in reciprocal conversation about bodily functions, with men there is always the concern that those who want to tell others about their own bodies are either trying to explain what they see as embarrassing but which others see as a simple matter of aging and the decline of all fleshly and mortal bodies or are seeking some sort of control over the bodies of others by using their own bodies and how they deal with them as a one-size-fits-all model of how others should live under their direction and rule. This increases the offense of their communication by compounding unwanted discussion with equally unwanted claims of authority.

For all of these reasons, and no doubt still others, it is impossible for many old men in particular to avoid talking about their bodily functions to anyone who will listen or feels constrained not to run away fleeing from such conversations. We are all perhaps naturally inclined to be interested in ourselves, and to the extent that our self-regard and interest in ourselves leads us to seek information from the workings of our bodies as to whether we are doing things well or poorly, this can be helpful to us in maintaining our health for a long time. If we know what we digest well or poorly, know how much water we need, know how we handle sugar or alcohol in drinks, or know what foods we have a hard time chewing or that are bad on our teeth or on our guts, we can maintain the workings of our body’s systems as well as possible for the time that we have been allotted on this earth. Yet it seems that we are disinclined to know about the workings of others’ bodies or to inform them of the workings of our own unless we know that they genuinely care about us and seek to understand us rather than to order us around and command us. Neither do we care to know about others if we have already granted them the good grace of accepting the brokenness of their own bodies as a result of a long life spent in such an evil world as this that, in the end, breaks us all down completely.