The etiquette of dealing with unpleasant surprises in toilets
This post is dedicated to Sarah Clay, who happened to be staying while I was working on this piece and who contributed useful observations on the topic.
Recently, when I went to the women’s toilets at work – a small restroom containing only two loos – a godawful smell hit me as soon as I entered. In fact, it was so awful that I was immediately driven from the restroom; I figured I could come back later, once the smell had dissipated.
Shortly after I left, my colleague entered the loo, but she diligently investigated the source of the smell. It turns out that the culprit was a ginormous turd in one of the toilets. Rather than immediately abandoning the facility, in an act of civic-mindedness she tried to flush it. However, it would not budge. Unsure of what to do, she reported to security that someone had done a large poo in one of the women’s toilets that had blocked it up.
She told me that the security guard had looked somewhat taken aback when she reported the incident to him; he also seemed to think it was the responsibility of estates to deal with it. However, my colleague, figuring she had already gone above and beyond the call of duty, left it with him. When we discussed the incident, she had two questions: 1) who would do a giant, loo-blocking poo in a public toilet and walk away, leaving it for someone else to deal with and 2) did the security guard think that, in fact, she was the culprit? The answers, we decided, were respectively ‘an arsehole’ and ‘most definitely’.
Still, we’ve all been there. You enter a toilet only to discover that someone has left an unpleasant surprise. While you can immediately abandon the stall, this strategy has risks attached, especially if someone else is waiting to use it. Invariably, they will think that you are the person responsible – a concern illustrated to entertaining effect in David Sedaris’s essay ‘Big Boy’ in Me Talk Pretty One Day, where he goes to an Easter dinner at his friend John’s place, only to discover a ‘long and coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito’ enveloping the bowl. He tries to flush it, but it doesn’t move.
Just as he is contemplating fleeing the scene, someone knocks on the bathroom door. In describing his response, Sedaris writes,
I seriously considered lifting the turd out of the toilet and tossing it out the window. It honestly crossed my mind, but John lived on the ground floor and a dozen people were seated at a picnic table ten feet away... And these were people who would surely gather round and investigate. Then there I’d be with my unspeakably filthy hands, trying to explain that it wasn’t mine.
Of course, the situation is not much better when it is, in fact, you who has deposited the unflushable turd – as the above scene from the Australian TV show Colin from Accounts illustrates. Nor are such fears the stuff of fiction. In their academic research on the faecal bodily habits of 172 American college students, the sociologists Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams found that various interviewees expressed anxieties around leaving skid marks and unflushable turds in other people’s toilets. To quote one of the men they interviewed in their study,
I was at my aunt’s house. This sucks. I took the most horrible shit, and the toilet wouldn’t flush, and I tried several times to flush it, and pushed so hard that I broke the handle. My aunt, she didn’t find out it was me, but she saw the shit and the broken handle. Because I was there, I was still a suspect, still scared of being called out in front of my entire family.1
Thankfully, I’ve never been confronted with this problem – probably because I am a shitbreak and make a point of defecating primarily at home. However, I have peed in enough dodgy loos to have experienced the anxiety of the anaemic flush – i.e., the toilet that requires you to flush at least five times before the paper disintegrates enough for you to think ‘Eh, good enough’ and walk away.
Still, everybody knows that if you’re ever caught in this situation, there’s a certain etiquette for dealing with it. First, you must cover your excrement with a layer of toilet paper – like a dead body at a crime scene – to avoid others inadvertently getting a glimpse of it. To quote a woman in Weinberg and Williams’ study, ‘If it didn’t [flush] I’d have to put a bunch of toilet paper in there to hide the little thing. I’m not about to just leave it there for the next person’.
Second, if you have a pen and paper handy, you should write a note and prop it on the toilet door handle stating ‘toilet broken’ or some variant thereof. Third, it’s common courtesy to warn people who happen to be entering the restroom that the toilet won’t flush (whether you claim responsibility for the problem is another matter). Finally, if you are particularly diligent, you can follow the lead of my colleague and report the malfunction to management if the loo is in an office building, restaurant, department store, etc.
Of course, few of us resort to the last measure. While this is, in part, because of the time and hassle it entails, it’s also because many of us are embarrassed about confessing to being the producer of a toilet-blocking turd. But why is it that we feel so embarrassed in this situation? After all, regular and robust bowel movements are a blessing, as anyone who has ever experienced an extended bout of constipation can attest.2
An answer to this question can be found in the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias. As I have previously discussed, in Elias’s book The Civilizing Process, he suggested that radical changes in social standards occurred in Europe between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries due to the growing European preoccupation with ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ behaviour. In particular, there was an expanding threshold of repugnance around natural bodily functions such as farting, blowing one’s nose and, most significantly for my present purposes, defecating. This explains why the Romans had no problem excreting in public, while the Victorians hid the damning evidence in water closets away from public view.
Arguably, the roots of our contemporary embarrassment lie in what the sociologist David Inglis terms the ‘bourgeois faecal habitus’. In his book A Sociological History of Excretory Experience, he suggests that the heart of the bourgeois faecal habitus is a pretence that we do not defecate. We maintain this illusion via an elaborate set of physical, symbolic and linguistic practices aimed at disguising the reality that our bowels constantly betray our ideal of complete bodily mastery and control.
Thus, we hide toilets away from view and we sit rather than squat to shit – like we might be reading a philosophical treatise rather than emptying our bowels into a porcelain bowl.3 We couch the activity in euphemism (e.g., ‘restroom’, ‘washroom’, ‘powdering one’s nose’) and we refrain from discussing our excretions in polite company. We also symbolically purify our excretory environs via an array of sights, smells and sounds – deodorisers, fixtures,4 sometimes even piped music – designed with this symbolic function in mind.
The existence of the bourgeois faecal habitus explains why going to a public toilet is an awkward experience at the best of times. This is because it destroys the illusion that we do not defecate.5 Informal toilet etiquette – avoiding eye contact with other people in the restroom, keeping as much physical distance as possible from other occupants (e.g., the ‘don’t go to the stall next to an occupied one if another toilet is available’ rule) – are the techniques we use to maintain some semblance of the pretence. Certainly, under no circumstances should you comment on any smells or noises you might hear.
But an unflushable deposit makes the pretence impossible to maintain, because it provides irrefutable proof of the act of excretion. As Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams note, ‘the imperative of “privacy” from the fecal habitus means that although we may hear and smell bowel movements, we seldom leave evidence that others can see’. According to their research, confronted with the inability to put the necessary physical and symbolic distance between ourself and our faeces, a kind of panic generally sets in. Weinberg and Williams’ subjects report fleeing the scene of the crime, and lying outright by claiming the faeces are someone else’s.
Interestingly, Weinberg and Williams’ research suggests that the fear of discovery is greater for acquaintances than complete strangers and longstanding intimates6 – a curvilinear pattern that is also replicated for farts, as I discussed in my post on farting and social relationships. Weinberg and Williams suggest that this is because,
For those closest to them, people generally expect that given the deeper and continuous nature of such a relationship, a negative event like a fecal mishap will not destroy an overall positive regard. The opinions of strangers also do not pose much of a threat, as any incompatible presentation of self is fleeting.
Indeed, one can assume that most people would not consider fishing a turd out of a toilet (either their own or someone else’s) unless they fear being identified as the bearer of it by someone whose opinion they value. In such circumstances, the ideal is to have other potential culprits around to displace the blame.
Objectively speaking, this intense anxiety about one of our most natural and necessary bodily functions seems a bit nuts – although it arguably expresses a core attribute of human beings. While all animals release waste, it is only humans who contemplate the meaning of the act.7 However, not all cultures exhibit the same hangups. Faeces might be universally symbolically (ahem) loaded, but the bourgeois faecal habitus is a peculiarly western phenomenon.
Still, when a large stool meets a constipated flush, there have surely got to be better options than fleeing the scene or taking matters quite literally into your own hands. My advice is to take a deep breath, remind yourself that shit happens – sometimes in the most literal of senses – then do us all a favour and go and report that poo to management!
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This has just given me the idea for a far more realistic version of the board game Cluedo: Poo-do. Was it Colonel Mustard in the disabled toilet after an Indian curry or Miss Scarlet in the ensuite loo after the California Cleanse?
I suffered from a two-week bout of constipation of the age of 11 – an experience I have never forgotten and hope never to repeat. I was away from my family and staying with cousins in South Australia and I believe the combination of being without my family for two weeks, and the fact that the toilet at my cousins’ house did not have a lock on the door, made my bowels clam up. The worst part was that I was too embarrassed to let my aunt and uncle know what the problem was – although that was partly because I was afraid of the likely remedy, having seen my cousin forced to drink cod liver oil in order to retrieve a piece from a board game we were playing* that she had accidentally swallowed.
*The game in question? Cluedo, which goes to show that everything really is connected, and gives me an idea for yet another board game: Spew-do. Was it Professor Plum in the kitchen sink after a big night out or Mrs Peacock on the bathroom floor after a dodgy prawn salad?
Of course, one activity does not preclude the other.
As I discuss in Silent but Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviour, there’s a reason why toilets and toilet paper are always white and it has nothing to do with hygiene in a technical sense. Basically, an arse wiped with white toilet paper just feels cleaner than one wiped with any other colour. This is because of the symbolic connotations of whiteness.
If the celebrity magazine The Richest is to be trusted, the Queen was so hell-bent on maintaining this illusion that her staff were not allowed in hearing distance when she went to the loo, even when she urinated. I remember being extremely shocked when I learned as a child that the Queen went to the toilet, so clearly the illusion worked.
This is unquestionably true. I would not dream of leaving a floater in the toilet of a friend, but as the frequent bearer of rabbit-like but surprisingly buoyant excretions, my husband is probably more familiar with the shape and consistency of my turds than he would prefer (although I am also intimately familiar with his skid marks, so I consider us even). But as I discussed in my post on spit, kinship is made not just through ties of blood and marriage, but shared substances. ‘Love me, love my spit; love me, love my shit’ might not make it onto any Valentine’s Day cards, but is true nonetheless – just ask any parent who has had to change their drooling child’s nappy.
Except for maybe this fellow, who has clearly contemplated his faeces long enough to realise it makes a useful projectile to throw at visitors to the zoo. From my point of view, this footage definitively resolves the question of ape intellect, because if I was forced to perform for gawping tourists, I’d be doing the same thing.
As always, the most entertaining passages are hidden in the footnotes (#2 in this case)