Even at the very bottom of the social ladder, in Skid Rows and slums where people dress in rags, sleep in the street, spit, wash or vomit in public, one will almost never find a homeless person who will do his or her excretory functions in full view of the public. When I attended a few Rainbow Gatherings in the 80's, I discovered a point of view which considered these prohibitions against public shitting and pissing as immoral and mentally unhealthy. Exposed latrines were set up in all the camps of the Rainbow Gatherings; however I myself went off far into the woods to do my business in private. It should come as no surprise that, after attending a Rainbow Gathering in Mark Twain National Park in Missouri in '87, I picked up a very painful case of hives from the drinking water.
Most of the other taboos against public exposure not involving overt sexual acts are always being challenged in different times and places. (It is said that Diogenes and the Cynics challenged even these!) When I was living in Berkeley in the 80's, there was a UC Berkeley student know as the ''Naked Guy''. He walked about the campus and city, and sat in classes totally in the nude. He had a few disciples, both men and women, whom one occasionally met in the streets partially or totally naked. He finally gave up in the face of relentless police harassment.
Millions of paintings since Biblical times depict the bodies of naked women; less frequently men. Even sexual intercourse and orgies have been depicted in great classical art. Penises appear to be more prevalent on statuary, although I've never seen the portrayal of a strong erection of a male figure on a public monument.
As for urination, there is a pissing boy statue in Brussels, as well as in drawings and paintings of the masters, notably Rembrandt. Yet, even on the austere heights of pure art, where one would imagine that absolutely anything is allowed, it must be rare indeed to encounters the raw depiction of shitting.
The taboo against public defecation is indeed the most absolute of all non-sexual prohibitions in all countries influenced by European traditions. At the same time this taboo is of the greatest importance in terms of its effects on the routines of daily living. Ideally one tries to accomplish one's excretion at home, in a room locked even to one's own family. Otherwise one does it at work, or school, or in public buildings like town halls or, if so compelled, in restaurants.
The latter is beset with great difficulties. Normally anyone who enters a restaurant for the sole purpose of using the lavatory runs the risk of having to pass under a bastinado of abuse, harassment, ridicule, and other indignities as one hurries across to the rest room. One cannot avoid the suspicion that there is a strong sadistic sexual component to these rituals of humiliation; for , given that the prohibition against defecating in public is absolute, situations arise regularly in which one is forced, even to the point of creating a nasty scene, to invade a restaurant and use its bathroom. One can be excused afterwards for not really feeling a strong obligation to buy some unwanted item of food after being treated so abusively, just because one was obliged to relieve a form of misery common to the whole human race!
Yet the wish to avoid acute embarrassment of this sort can actually determine the way one sets up one's daily routine, the places where one arranges to be at certain times of the day, the panic that arises through making the wrong judgment about one's current state of physiology. For it happens to everyone that one's intestines may be full to bursting with toxic waste without any signal going to the nerves of the stomach until it is too late. When the signal does hit, one may just have walked or driven away from a building in which it would have been possible to relieve oneself, only to find oneself in a warren of deserted streets where one finds no restaurants, stores, institutions or public facilities of any kind to handle one's acute state of need.
This happened to me in Chicago last January. I'd gone to Union Station to pick up a train ticket to St Louis. I left the building and walked down Jackson Street towards the Loop. 3 blocks along I was suddenly stunned by a desperate surge in the bowels. I had to relieve myself immediately; but as I could see there was no place to go to do it. Less than 15 minutes earlier I'd been in a building where there were dozens of stalls in which I could have dealt with the emergency.
Luckily, on the next block I encountered an outlet of the Corner Bakery concession chain. The managers of the restaurant had the humanity and good business sense to place the bathrooms in a corridor adjacent to the front door. This meant that one could use them without having to walk the length the restaurant. I pushed open the door to the Men'sÊRoom, entered a stall, loosened my belt and lowered my pants. Then I sat on the seat and relaxed the sphincter muscles. Solid and liquid waste came pouring out in torrents! Apart from an appreciative nod towards the counter personnel on the way out, I wasn't obliged to buy anything.
Could I have maintained control all the way to the Loop? I don't know; I didn't know the Loop very well, nor where to look for restaurants, friendly or hostile.
In most places one finds that the MacDonald's concession has the good sense, (for whatever one thinks of their food the corporation has a fiendishly good head for business and public relations) to make their restrooms available to people coming in from the streets.
Given that:
(1) The prohibition against public defecation is so absolute;
(2) There are times when the urgency to relieve oneself is ungovernable;
(3) A crisis can arise without warning at any moment;
(4) Restaurants should not be obliged to carry the whole burden alone for relieving the general public:
Is it not the plain responsibility of good government to do everything possible, using the best modern technologies, to set up free restrooms in stalls or buildings on every city block? Shouldn't there be strong, enforceable laws which, as a public health measure, compel restaurants to open their restrooms to anyone in urgent and genuine need? Perhaps there needs to be a relaxation in our mores. What about open ditches set away from the main thoroughfares but easily accessible on foot, in which excretion and elimination are permitted? What about disposable underwear based, say, on the suits used by astronauts to store their wastes in sealed containers to be disposed of at a later time?
Or is there some instinctual, perhaps even barbaric moral code that has instilled in the public the opinion that it is beneficial to society as a whole, that its entire populace be compelled to live under a dark cloud, due to the constant threat of public humiliation through being caught in flagrante delecti with a load of toxic waste in one's trousers? Perhaps this has a political function, as a way of instilling conformity in the masses. It does have the potentially beneficial social effect of forcing everyone to arrange their daily routines of walking, shopping, dining, travel, visiting and so forth . Is there perhaps even some atavistic idea in the collective unconscious, that being forced to keep one's shit in, even under impossible conditions, is of the highest importance in the development of moral character?!
Laughable, ridiculous? Agreed. Yet , in examining one's own daily routine, consider how severely one's freedom of motion is restricted by the need, delayed or sudden, to go to the bathroom. Consider the long list of precautions one automatically develops in the standard situations that break up the day: waking up in the morning ; before breakfast; after breakfast; out in the city; at work; in the homes of friends or strangers; walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods; after eating certain foods; before or after lunch, dinner; going to sleep; waking up in the middle of the night; traveling to new locales, other countries, other environments such as parks, wilderness, farms, small towns; standing on a street corner waiting for a bus, performing on-stage; sitting in an audience, (where it may be considered extremely bad manners to get up and leave in the middle of a performance É )
The list of potentially critical situations is endless, but the prohibition against public defecation is more absolute than prohibitions against bare-breasted women, spitting on sidewalks, exhaling cigarette smoke in someone's face, parallel fifths in music, or double negatives in grammar! Only Newton's universal law of gravitation is more unbreakable. Indeed, the consequences of breaking the taboo against public defecation can be as serious as those of free-fall!