The Big Necessity Read Free Page A

defeats me. My neighbor’s elderly mother reminisced about the outdoor privy she had as a child, and about the man who called to collect the urine, which he then sold to tanners, and she sounded as if she misses both. Pub conversations regularly took a toilet turn: a regular greeted me one day by saying that he only urinated sitting down. An expression of relief crossed his face, before he turned back to his pint.
    To research
The Bathroom
, an exhaustive exploration of human toilet habits, the architect Alexander Kira surveyed 1,000 Californians. In an article he wrote for
Time
headlined “Examining the Unmentionables,” Kira said, “Once people got talking about bathrooms they couldn’t stop.”
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    The toilet is a physical barrier that takes care of the physical dangers of excrement. Language takes care of the social ones. In
The Civilizing Process
, the anthropologist Norbert Elias charted the progression of human defecation from a public, unremarkable activity—it was considered an honor to attend monarchs seated on their commodes—to a private, shameful one, done behind closed doors and, except in China, never in company. Newspapers are fond of anointing last taboos, but in modern civilized times the defecatory practice of humans is undeniably a candidate. Sex can be talked about, probably because it usually requires company. Death has once again become conversational, enough to begiven starring roles in smart, prime-time TV dramas. Yet defecation remains closed behind the words, all chosen for their clean association, that we now use to keep the most animal aspect of our bodies in the backyards of our discourse, where modernity has decided it belongs. Water closet. Bathroom. Restroom. Lavatory. Sometimes, we add more barriers by borrowing from other people’s languages. The English took the French
toilette
(a cloth), and used it first to describe a cover for a dressing table, then a dressing room, then the articles used in the dressing room, and finally, but only in the nineteenth century, a place where washing and dressing was done, and then neither washing nor dressing. (They also borrowed
gardez l’eau
, commonly shouted before throwing the contents of chamber pots into the streets, and turned it into “loo.”) The French, in return, began by calling their places of defecation “English places” (
lieux à l’anglaise
) and then took the English acronym WC (water closet) instead. The Japanese have dozens of native words for a place of defecation but prefer the Japanese-English
toiretto
. You have to go back to the Middle Ages to find places of defecation given more accurate and poetic names: Many a monk used a “necessary house.” Henry VIII installed a House of Easement at his Hampton Court Palace. The easiest modern shorthand for the disposal of the disposal of human excreta—sanitation—is a euphemism for defecation which is a euphemism for excretion which is a euphemism for shitting. This is why the young boy hero of Dr. Seuss’s
It’s Grinch Night
can ask for permission “to go to the euphemism.” This is why the only safe place for modern humans to talk about defecation is in the unthreatening embrace of humor, and why the ordinary, basic activity of excretion has been invested with an emotional power that has turned a natural function into one of our strongest taboo words.
    Our disgust with shit seems deep and sure, as potent as the swear words that get their power from it. There are good biological reasons for this. Feces are unpleasant. Outside the sexual fetish world of coprophagy, no one wants to smell, feel, or touch them (including me). But the power of our taboo words is modern. Church words used to hurt much more. The diminished power of “damn” explains why the climax of
Gone With the Wind
is always a bit of a puzzle. When churchinfluence weakened, the products of the body—which Puritan