If it's yellow, let it mellow
When I was eleven years old, I remember having a sleepover at a friend’s place where I had to pee in the middle of the night. I went to the loo, which was next to her parents’ bedroom, and then agonised over whether I should flush the toilet. Still undecided, I eventually put the lid down and crept back to my friend’s room to wake her and ask if I should flush. I distinctly recall her look of combined disgust and incredulity when she told me that of course I should flush!
Now, given that I have written an entire post on the etiquette of dealing with unpleasant surprises in toilets, you might be surprised that I would consider leaving an unpleasant surprise myself, so allow me to explain. You see, when I was growing up, the policy at our house was that if you had to wee in the night, you didn’t flush because it was liable to wake other people up. As my bedroom was right next to the loo and I am a light sleeper, I personally appreciated this policy.1 The only downside was being the first person to use the toilet in the morning, although it turns out that the stench of urine left to steep overnight in the tropics is even more effective than caffeine in jolting you awake.
As the movie Meet the Fockers attests, my family was not alone in this policy, although I had not heard the expression ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down’ prior to watching the film. Still, in contrast to the Fockers, it’s worth noting that no-flush policies are typically more about maximising sleep than minimising water wastage, and therefore mostly instigated at night.
There appear to be two very different schools of thought on the topic of not flushing after weeing: those who see it as a practical measure and those who view it as uniformly disgusting. The latter view seems to be dominant—at least, according to Miss Manners (and, for the record, my husband).
For instance, a reader recently wrote in to an etiquette column in the Mercury News with the following question: ‘Is there a rule against flushing the toilet at night that I have so far overlooked?’ According to the author, her family had recently had several overnight guests who asked her permission to flush the toilet at night before they went to bed, based on the concern that they would wake her children.
She writes, ‘This isn’t something I’ve ever worried about, or thought to ask at someone else’s house. Is it rude to flush without permission? I can’t imagine not flushing would be a good option for anyone’. Miss Manners responds that she can see no compelling reason why flushing should ever be suspended in the home, and that ‘The shock of any late-night noise will surely be far less offensive than that of waking up to refuse that has been lingering overnight’.
Still, based on a Reddit thread on this topic titled ‘So… do you flush the toilet during the night or not?’, not everyone agrees with Miss Manners. Comments seem relatively evenly divided between those asserting variants of ‘no, getting woken up sucks’ and those declaring that ‘yes, pissy toilets are disgusting’—although the conversation is somewhat enlivened by one reader’s suggestion to ‘Use the sink everyone happy then’.2
What I find interesting is that while presumably a joke, pissing in the sink does neatly solve the dilemma between leaving bodily refuse and making noise.3 Yet, I imagine that many people would find the idea revolting, although it’s not terribly far removed from peeing in the shower, which I’m firmly in favour of. As George from Seinfeld says, ‘It’s all pipes! What’s the difference?’
Indeed, some people have argued that peeing in the shower is more efficient and environmentally friendly than using a toilet. For instance, the BBC reported in 2014 that two students at the University of East Anglia had started a ‘Go with the flow’ campaign encouraging students to expel their first wee of the morning in the shower. ‘We’ve done the maths’, the campaigners declared; ‘With 15,000 students at UEA, over a year we would save enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool 26 times over’. Still, the campaign never really caught on. Although the founders observed at the time that ‘people either seem to love it or hate it’, the haters clearly won out in the end.
Possibly, the campaign poster may have had something to do with ‘Go with the flow’s’ failure to catch on, although it vividly highlights the central problem, which is that weeing in the shower inevitably entails pissing on your feet. Although immediately flushed away by water, any bodily contact with urine following its departure from the urethra is generally perceived as polluting.4 People seem especially repulsed by the idea of peeing in a communally used shower, despite the fact that there are no hygiene risks as long as the water is flowing.
This suggests that our perception of the polluting qualities of urine is driven more by its symbolic attributes than its biological ones. This comes across strongly in an exchange between two commenters on the aforementioned Reddit thread. One writes, ‘We don’t flush at night mainly because it is a waste of water. During the day we flush about every 3 wees. There is only the two of us though not sure how I would feel if there was more of us’. Clearly forgetting that until the rise of indoor plumbing, chamberpots were the norm, another Redditor bluntly responds, ‘This is foul’. Understandably miffed at the criticism, the original poster replies, ‘It is urine not toxic waste’.
That many people see urine in precisely these terms speaks to the salience of the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s arguments about the symbolic meanings of bodily refuse. As I have discussed at length in prior posts on farting, snot and saliva, Douglas argued that bodily substances are universally seen to be a symbol of power and danger because they traverse the boundaries of the body.
This is clearly evident in the notion that urine taints the surfaces it comes into contact with, whether they be feet, showers or sinks. But it’s equally evident in the idea that urine’s power is so great that drinking it will restore one’s vitality. Yes, in case you weren’t aware, the ‘golden fountain’ is being touted as a miracle cure for all sorts of medical ailments by proponents of urine therapy. To quote one of its advocates,
‘Not only is urine sterile, but it is a valuable physiological substance… Urine contains vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes, hormones, antibodies and amino acids. This forms the basis of urine therapy, which is simply ‘recycling’ urine by drinking it. Practitioners claim that it has cured, amongst many others, constipation, psoriasis, eczema, endometriosis, rheumatism, allergies and even some cancers. I have drunk over a pint of urine daily for seven years and can vouch for its efficacy’.5
Notably, these dual properties are frequently found cross-culturally as well. An excellent illustration is provided by the anthropologist Anna Meigs’ work in the 1970s with the Hua people of Papua New Guinea. According to Meigs, the Hua had a category of substances they avoided called siro na, literally ‘dirty thing’. Into this category fell sexual fluids, faeces, urine, breath, body odours, sweat, body oil, hair, saliva, fingernails, flesh and blood. These were identified as a negative form of an individual’s vital essence, or nu. But these substances could also be aune: a positive form of nu that enhanced rather than reduced health. Basically, whether bodily substances were polluting or efficacious was determined largely by their potential for unauthorised invasion of another’s body.
For example, urine was a dirty thing if it dropped from one’s genitals onto the body, food or tools of another—as the Hua traditionally wore loin cloths, with their genitals exposed underneath, this was a live concern, because such contamination was thought to result in a loss of health or even death. However, if a man was sick, his relatives might commission a sister who had married into another community to place a stalk of ginger in a location where it could be urinated on by the men of the village. The ginger was then given to the sick man on the premise that eating it would enable him to capture some of the aune, or positive vital essence, of the men in the neighbouring village.
Meigs suggested that although Hua conceptions of bodily pollution were more developed than American ones, there were strong parallels between them. For example, although we think we dislike the bodily emissions of others, this isn’t always the case. In her words,
‘Where the relationship between persons is positive, contact with some of each other’s emissions is easily accepted if not desired. One shares a glass, even a fork, with a friend. Victors in a field sport embrace each other’s sweating bodies. Saliva and sweat are freely exchanged in love-making’.
Ultimately, this helps to explain why the ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down’ policy is more likely to be practiced amongst couples and families than housemates. It’s also why the ‘Go with the flow’ campaign didn’t catch on in college dorms, although I, for one, faithfully adhere to the practice in my own home.6
In the end, it’s clear that our relationship with urine is more complicated than we think—as the many Australian and British expressions involving ‘piss’ attest. After all, most of us enjoy people who are ‘full of piss and vinegar’, although we don’t want people ‘pissing in our pocket’ or ‘taking the piss’.7 So while most of us would rather be pissed off than pissed on (aficionados of the golden shower aside), it turns out that while we don’t necessarily love urine, well, we don’t exactly hate it either.
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Especially because few members of my family bother to shut the door when they urinate (note the present tense). I attribute my longstanding dislike of the sound of peeing to my formative childhood experience of being constantly exposed to it.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but 24 years ago, I used to assign a gender norm violation project for students in my gender course at the University of Northern Colorado. Most students chose an innocuous gender norm to violate, like holding doors for the opposite sex if they were female, or carrying a handbag if they were male (this was before the ascendance of the man bag). But I once had a student who chose to pee in sinks for her gender norm violation project. I had to explain that this was a social norm violation rather than a gender norm violation, as blokes don’t—as far as I know—go around pissing in sinks.*
*Although based on the Reddit thread, I’m beginning to rethink that stance. As one philosophising commenter asks, ‘If a man pees in the sink at night and no one sees it, does it happen?’ Quite.
Well, for males, at least. For females, it seems somewhat anatomically improbable, unless you’re over 5’ 10” and are using a She-wee. In fact, I’m not convinced that a short man could safely manage the feat either.
Which is why those people would be horrified to learn that I occasionally pee in the bath. Look, the bottom line is that sometimes I can’t be arsed getting out the bath when I need to pee, and happen to be okay with the resultant urine particle : water ratio, which I figure probably isn’t all that different from my local swimming pool.
The comment comes from an old Guardian thread on whether urine is sterile. The prize for the best response goes to one Alan Bray, who writes, ‘May I confirm Clive Barker’s findings on the health benefits from drinking urine. Since moving from Rochdale to Spain 10 years ago I have been drinking three to four pints daily, but here we call it San Miguel’.
And if my husband didn’t know that already, I guess he does now. Happy 25th Anniversary, Andrew!
In case a translation is required: ‘Most of us enjoy people who are full of spunk, but nobody wants false flattery* and we’re not too fond of being mocked or teased either’. In different ways, these sayings all imply that piss is something desirable to have.
*‘Don’t piss in my pocket’ is roughly equivalent to ‘don’t blow smoke up my arse’, which begs the question of why our expressions about false flattery often seem to involve bodily substances and orifices.