While talking with a Village Voice reporter a couple weeks ago, I apparently said, "We [at Hooksexup] have an interest in the humanity of the sexual experience, whether it's embarrassing, beautiful, peculiar, ugly, sad, what have you. It's the same kind of curiosity that causes people to look at their feces before flushing." This wasn't exactly a shining moment of spin control reading it later, it seemed that the metaphorical proximity between Hooksexup content and shit was a little tight. Nonetheless, I stand behind the spirit of the quote, which was really about our interest in body curiosity and the threshold of shame, which is much of what makes sex more interesting than, say, jogging.
I find myself attracted to this shame threshold in lovers the point at which a woman looks down, averts her eyes, blushes. This isn't always easy to find in this sex-positive era most of my girlfriends have been admirably happy with their bodies and the process of sharing them. Whatever shame they do feel usually recedes like a cold front with intimacy, and I instinctively chase after it until I can no longer.
My chase usually ends at the loo, the last outpost of bodily shame. Few people want company when they are hard at work on the throne, but somehow whenever my honey's in this position I feel a pressing need for a Q-Tip or conversation. More often than not I ask to be let in and press against the bathroom door, she shrieks, pushes back and threatens violence. I then retreat, oddly satisfied by the whole encounter.
No doubt the vestigial mischievousness of an older brother is at play here, but there is more going on. My interest in these inopportune visits and my lovers' resistance to them derive, I think, from the same incredulity: How could a substance so rank come out of a body so sweet smelling and beautiful? It seems somehow impossible, a cosmic mistake, a biological blunder to be kept under wraps. Indeed, I have heard men say, in all seriousness, that they don't believe that women fart; this is a difficult expectation to live up to. I suspect some women feel that they shouldn't defecate at all, as if it were some kind of unusual problem, a virus that could be treated with antibiotics. If surgeons could perform an operation at childbirth to prevent shitting altogether, how many would have it done?
The likelihood that some of my fellow countrymen would opt not to shit saddens me, because for me anyway, excretion is a dulcet song in the human repertoire of sensual experiences. The spinal shivers, the brushfire of goosebumps, the flush of heat to the cheeks, the cool contact of air after the final nubbin is released, the conclusive involuntary sphincter clench as many before me have said, there is nothing like a good dump.
It takes a strong fear of odor to offset these pleasures, and never has this fear been stronger than it is in our fastidiously sanitized late twentieth-century America. Yet shitting is the one thing we can't seem to do away with it's one of our few remaining tethers to the moldy, sweaty, acrid world in which our species has spent most of the last several million years. We've deployed sophisticated technology to contain the stench, we've pressed it back to the far recesses of our bodies with vigorous daily scrubbing and generous application of perfumes, soaps and antiperspirants. We can fumigate our exteriors until every little cubbyhole has the bouquet of a flower girl, but the interior remains unconquerable (mouths aside, which have long been compulsively freshened). Massengill led a deoderizing foray to the interior in the 70s, and a few bold colon-hydrotherapists voyage up the backside with aromatic fire hoses, but for the most part the deoderizing armies have begrudgingly accepted the nether orifices as natural boundaries and the stenches therein feisty, uncontrollable guerilla factions. Each shit and fart is a sortie, an insolent rebel invasion serving mostly to remind the fragrant authoritarian regime of its inability to maintain absolute command.
As I guess I have revealed, I support the guerilla forces, and enjoy seeing the deoderizing despots embarrassed. That said, I have not reached full comfort with the possibilities presented by the aft side in bed. I too am uncomfortable when I am on the john in front of a girlfriend, I too have been known to baracade the door. The fear, of course, is that a body that produces such scents is unlovable, that if someone really knew how bad we can smell, I mean the full extent of it, they would run for the hills and never look back. Perhaps so, but I think it's worth knocking on the door to make sure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rufus left his reliable salary and position as an editor and director of new media at Cader Books, a publisher of bestselling humor and entertainment titles, in order to co-found Hooksexup in 1997 with Genevieve Field.
Before working at Cader, he was managing editor for two years at August House, a publisher of contemporary storytelling and folklore. Earlier still, he was book review editor at The Free Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Baltimore Sun and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. He graduated from Brown University in 1991.
