Why Aren’t We Talking About Our Poop Literally All of the Time?

We asked a psychologist to explain some crap.

For something we’ve agreed to call "#2", excrement doesn’t get much play during dinner table discussions. It’s not usually brought up as an icebreaker at parties. And woe betide anyone who dares uses it in their Tinder introduction.

In fact, on a list of acceptable subjects for casual conversation, poop wouldn’t come anywhere near the #2 position. It’d probably be ranked in the low 5000s, between "how much money everyone has in their pocket right now" and "the 2016 US presidential election". Bringing it up will just make everyone squirm.

But why? As a book famously put it, everyone poops. And as Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, tells Student Edge, understanding our bowel movements goes a long way to untangling our innermost feelings, not to mention society's longest-held beliefs.

"Excretion tells us a lot about gender, a lot about emotions," he explains.

Case in point: he directs me to a journal article entitled "Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread". Damn, this s*** is serious.

Professor Haslam authored Psychology in the Bathroom as a diversion from his work studying "serious things like prejudice and dehumanisation and objectification and the ways in which human beings are nasty to one another."

Now, he’s known as one of Australia’s leading experts on poop, and a champion for bringing the topic out of the toilet and into the spotlight for discussion.

"Yeah, it’s not something to be proud of, is it?" he says.

One reason why it’s worth interrogating your tummy is it could help us get to, ahem, the bottom of our most confounding psychological issues.

"There’s very clear relationships between mood and depression and anxiety—a lot of those psychiatric conditions having to do with being miserable—and gut health," Professor Haslam says, citing constipation, diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome as the main offenders.

"People who have irritable bowel syndrome, for instance, tend to have elevated levels of all sorts of negative emotional states," he says.

"It’s not necessarily that their challenging guts make them miserable [and] it’s not that their depression makes them have trouble with motility. It all goes together."

"There’s large proportions of humanity who suffer from serious inhibitions about urinating or defecating in public," he also adds.

That means many people are limited in their physical movement because of their fear of public facilities: they just won’t go too far from home in case nature calls.

"A fear of being observed or a fear of contracting some sort of infection is having a very real effect on a form of anxiety."

So, if this is all the case, why don’t we discuss poo more often?

"I think it’s one of these things where it’s just considered to be in extremely bad taste," Professor Haslam says.

"It’s not just that we’re all hung-up and neurotic. There are very good reasons to be bothered by poo. Faecally transmitted infections kill millions of people every year. This stuff is contaminating. It’s a prototypical object of disgust."

But there’s no denying that one gender, in particular, gets a kick out of their excrement.

"On average, men are a lot less prone to experience disgust than woman; they’re less bothered by poo and pee and things like this," Professor Haslam says.

He even says "men are more likely to celebrate" their poop, which would be a sight to see.

However, Professor Haslam says women are "held to a higher standard of hygiene and their bodies are seen to be things that need to be optimised and deodorised and cleansed to a higher level than men." And that takes its toll too.

As the New York Times writes, girls are more likely than boys to develop parcopresis, which is a fear of pooping in public, perhaps because of the gendered discrimination that causes them to hold it in or flee to far-away toilets. (However, boys are more likely to grow up with paruresis, or pee-shyness, because of the gauntlet that is men’s bathroom urinals.)

"Men are often thought to be coarse warthogs and women are thought to be these pure angels; there’s something incompatible between excreting and being feminine," he says.

"Regardless of whether it’s just greater policing of women’s bodies, and the greater expectations of purity and cleanness, it’s a widely held [double-standard]."

Professor Haslam will be discussing all of this and more at Quantum Words Writing Festival in Perth, during a panel cheekily titled "All About Poo".

Still, even though he thinks it’s better to understand and appreciate what’s going on in our digestive system, he suspects there’s a different kind of denial that occurs when we focus our academic attention on bowel movements.

"[All those studies] tells us something about humanity and the way in which we shield ourselves from the reality: that we are basically animals."

You can learn All About Poo at Quantum Words Perth on 10 November at the State Theatre Centre.

Header Image: iStock.com/Katya_Havok