We have already seen how age greatly affects how we view poop and the importance of what happens when poop becomes a major aspect of our lives, and how we determine how the day is going. It is perhaps unsurprising that it is during our least productive parts of life at the beginning and at the end that poop, the sign that we are indeed alive and digesting food, takes on such a large importance because there are comparably fewer other means of determining how it is that life is going. If my gut is working, I have something to discuss when it comes to what is working properly, even if I may no longer be in the position to work as productively as I did before. The importance of poop as a signifier of one’s health and well-being is a reminder that human beings are often valued for being rather than doing, and poop is one of the obvious signs that we are still existing and that our existence is going at least reasonably well at the moment.
At least in my own personal experience, women seem to be far more willing to talk about the messiness of their existence than men are. I do not know to what extent there have been quantitative experiments on the matter, or whether my own anecdotal experience is simply being part of an unusual and unsentimental part of humanity. I must own that as I come from a farming background (itself a rather rare background in the contemporary west, especially the contemporary United States), I spring from a very unsentimental tribe of humanity as a whole. One cannot afford to be sentimental about aspects of vital importance. Those who spend their time shoveling poop (more on that shortly) cannot think that the subject is inappropriate to discuss if it as appropriate to do. My own personal thoughts on the matter, with the awareness that I view the ways of women as an outsider, from an unabashedly male perspective, are that women have to deal with the messiness of life in a far more frequent and far more close fashion than many men do, and just as the elegant life of a cultured person in the West allows us to have a great degree of distance from the messiness of what we eat and what it takes for us to live, so too the distance that men have from the messiness of life typically gives them a sense of squeamishness about dealing with that inelegance.
One of the marked areas where men and women have an obvious inequality is in our role in the encouragement of new life. A man’s role is rather simple and straightforward, providing sperm cells to combine with the egg cells of the fertile woman. Once that task is accomplished, and we must admit that on the average it probably does not take very long to accomplish, the man’s role in the messiness of human experience is often largely over. We still have responsibilities for that life and will for decades. We have to protect that life, help instruct it, provide for its maintenance and well-being, but we do not deal with the messiness of it. That job most men are (quite rightly, I think) generally willing to delegate to women. Women usually (admittedly not always) are the ones who are changing diapers the most, dealing with the spittle from babies, sensitive to the way that a baby responds to changes in diet, and the like. And later on, women are usually the ones who have to tell their daughters about how to deal with their time of the month. This is not an experience we have as men and so it is to be expected that womenfolk deal with these matters of great importance for the well-being of the human race as a whole. Just as the intimacy of farmers with the real processes of animals prevents a sentimental and squeamish attitude about those processes, so too the intimate experience of women, with the day-to-day poopiness of babies or the workings of their own bodies while they are capable of bearing children, prevents them from having a squeamishness about that reality.
In contrast to women, who must live in the flow of bodily fluids as part of their regular life, men are encouraged to be far more self-contained. In many standards of manhood that one finds throughout the world as well as throughout history, men are praised for being self-contained, or expected to be so when they are no longer praised for it, as is the case in the contemporary West. There may be some natural inclination in these directions–as we have seen, women have more bodily fluids to deal with that must be faced up to and reflected about then men do–the cultivation of an openness towards bodily processes or the goal of being as self-contained as possible is nurtured in a very selective fashion. For many men, even the shedding of tears is viewed as being too feminine, as if the bodily processes that form tears in the tear ducts and then allow them to move along the face is failing in the male responsibility of not showing the outside world what may be going on inside. It is easy for people to be too hard on men for often cultivating a stoic ideal that pretends to be unaffected by the problems and difficulties of this existence, but since we have already discussed that life itself requires that inside and outside be kept apart, by violence if necessary, those who cultivate such an attitude are themselves acting in a way that serves to preserve existence. We cannot survive if everything on the inside is escaping to the outside world without restraint, nor can we survive if the outside world is not held at bay from the inside world. Neither can we live unless the messiness of life is addressed and dealt with. At least ideally, men and women are served to perform both of those tasks which are necessary for life to go on, and should be celebrated when these necessary tasks, which are easiest to accomplish by separate hands, are done well.
When we see that both the behavior of men and women, speaking in the general sense, are natural and appropriate when it comes to life, we can be better equipped to appreciate the complexities of poop insofar as it relates to human experience. Poop, viewed both in the narrow sense as well as in the broad sense of bodily fluids in general, is a natural phenomenon and is not something that we need to be ashamed about. As our digestive processes are not entirely efficient, what we eat produces waste, and if we are to live that waste must be gotten rid of in an appropriate fashion. On the other hand, getting rid of that waste is an externality that affects the world and people around us, and therefore if we are to live in harmony with our earth and with other people, that waste must be channeled in a way that does not hinder life for ourselves or others. Our poop cannot be allowed to just circulate anywhere, but it must have a proper place to exist, to be deposited, to be restrained. Poop is natural but cannot be allowed to be unrestrained. Indeed, one of the first tasks of the baby that must be accomplished in life is obtaining some degree of control over the expulsion of bodily wastes so as to be able to do in a properly restrained fashion. Once this task is done a baby has made considerable steps in being able to function within the larger community and society of which we are a part, and is not merely a passive and helpless being who must be taken care of by others. When we lose control over these processes, we again return to a state of helplessness and require the care of more able people, even if we happen to be the President of the United States. Both men and women tend to exhibit a part of what is the right and proper attitude towards the messiness and poopiness of our existence. Women are there to provide an acceptance of the messiness of life as a part of the reality we have to deal with, and men are hopefully there to provide counsel and suitable examples of how to channel and restrain that messiness in ways that serve for the preservation of the well-being of humanity itself. We must live and work within both aspects of that reality, not pitting them against each other but recognizing both as principles that must be adhered to for our own well-being and that of others.
