Why Is Shitting Still So Embarrassing?

It’s 9.30PM and you’re at the pub necking espresso martinis, hitting the Elf Bar hard. It’s the perfect recipe for the number two that’s been brewing all day. Your stomach tightens and you clench your butt cheeks, making a beeline for the loos. 

Then you see it - the unisex toilet sign and a large pair of Salomon trainers visible under the next door cubicle. What if it’s that fittie you were eyeing up earlier? You can’t be seen to be the culprit of the plop, or god forbid the fumes wafting around the bathroom. You accept your fate and stay trapped in the toilet until the coast is clear, praying your mates haven’t left for the club already. 

Seriously, why do we all still find shitting so embarrassing? Much like birth, death and the 24 hours we have in a day (thank you, Molly Mae), it’s one of life’s great levellers. Right this second, approximately 79 million people around the world are doing it, according to Seed Health, a microbial sciences company based in LA. That’s a lot of shit.

But when it comes to actually acknowledging the stuff, people are reluctant to talk about their own poo. It’s the ultimate conspiracy, as if one day the whole human race signed an NDA guaranteeing we will plop as privately as possible.

Slowly, under the cloak of anonymity, people come forward to tell me that, yes, they find pooing pretty mortifying. I ask them, why? “Pooing destroys the ego - it strips you bare,” says Jasper, 27, who’s asked to remain anonymous like others in this piece. “It’s disgusting, smelly and unhygienic. You can be as charming as you want, but if people hear you taking a shit, it rips all of that away.”

Lottie, 26, agrees. “It’s sticky, mushy and the smell can be horrible. You can tell by the sounds if someone is doing a big one, or small pellets if they haven’t been eating their greens. It’s just a bit cringe,” she says. 

It’s clear we’re all pretty anal about who hears our plops. Some use a method the New York Times calls “The Poop Dupe”; pivoting to the mirror to check your hair after seeing a colleague in the bathroom. Another tried and tested method is The Flush Hush: continuously flushing the toilet to drown out any sound. 

For times when toilets are alarmingly close to each other, Danni, 26, has developed a method we’re calling The Poop Pillow. She tells me it involves wrapping mounds of toilet roll round your hand and holding it under your bum. “I catch the poo and slow it from hitting the water, so there isn’t a sound,” she says. When Danni needs a poo at her boyfriend’s house, she speaks in a baby voice to make it sound cute. “I’m like, ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just off to do an ickle poo poo,’” she lisps down the phone.

The course of true love and shitting never did run smooth. According to research by Healthline, more than 28 percent of men and 22 percent of women say they’d wait between one and three months before pooing at their partner's place. “One of the worst things is needing a shit during a one night stand. It’s too obvious to go, so you have to hold it in,” says Jasper. “But that makes you need to fart, it’s so uncomfortable - you can’t sleep, you can’t have sex, you just have to lie there.” 

Some go to greater extremes. We all remember that viral story, reported by the BBC in 2017, about the girl who did a massive, unflushable poo on a date and chucked it out the window. In a harrowing turn of events, the poo got lodged between two panes of glass and she got stuck trying to retrieve it - her date even had to call the fire brigade. 

What the hell is wrong with us all? I put the question to Nick Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of Psychology in the Bathroom. He explains that, since time immemorial, fecally transmitted infection has been a major source of death. “Contamination is a significant problem, so there are very good reasons to put poo out of sight and out of mind,” he says. 

Our disgust towards poo, he explains, doesn’t fully exist from birth; we acquire it as we grow up. “Part of the toilet training process is to mildly embarrass and shame children who don’t put stuff in the right place… to try to cut down on contamination and sickness,” he says. “There’s shame associated with having poo, or the stench of poo, on you. It goes alongside this other emotion of disgust, which many people say evolved partly to protect us from rot, contamination and excrement. We tend to be ashamed of what disgusts us, and poo is one of those prototypical disgust stimuli.”

Admit it, poo is also kind of funny. Like when you see men queuing to use cubicles rather than urinals in a club, because it’s obvious they need a dump. There’s no reason why this should be amusing, but it just is - or at least it’s fascinating in an I-know-what-you’ve-just-done kind of way. “It’s the same as when someone comes back to the table at the pub after being gone for ages,” says Liz, 26. “Everyone thinks, ‘Ooh, they’ve been for a shit.’”

Liz remembers queuing to see a giant poo that blocked one of the boys toilets when she was in school. “Everyone wanted to see this massive poo, including some teachers,” she says. “It was huge and stretched the whole way up the toilet bowl. It’s still the biggest poo I’ve seen.” No one ever owned up to the poo, she says, and the mystery remains: “A boy in my year claimed it was him because he wanted the glory, but we never found out who actually did it.”

That brings us to the gender politics of poo. Why would a man proudly declare he blocked a toilet when Liz, a mere observer of the giant poo, is reluctant to reveal her identity? Generally, women seem to be more embarrassed about pooing. In a national survey of more than 1,000 Canadian women, 71 percent said they go to great lengths to avoid defecating, especially in a public washroom. Yet I’ve heard stories of boys texting their friends pictures of their finest dumps.

“The idea that femininity is incompatible with excretion is very widespread, and there’s no single answer,” says Haslam. “You can think of it in terms of a double standard of hygiene, but there’s probably a difference in sensitivity as well.” You could also argue, he adds, that certain types of masculinity are about “deliberately flouting norms of what’s proper” - which might explain why teenage boys are more comfortable with things like toilet humour and farting.

For some people, the shame of pooing becomes so intense it develops into parcopresis or 'shy bowel syndrome'. This is a familiar story for Hannah, 27, who physically can’t poo in public toilets. “My body can’t relax if I’m not at home. It’s 100 percent a mental thing, the embarrassment of someone hearing terrifies to me,” she says. Her longest poo-free streaks include six days at Glastonbury and four days on holiday. “I took loads of laxatives and that still didn’t work. Then I was super bloated, which wasn’t great for my self esteem at the beach. I had to make my friend go for a walk outside the apartment so I could go,” she adds.

Who are the poo positive people? Is anybody out there? *Cue tumbleweed.* Surely we can rely on Gen Z to speak freely about poo? In the name of investigative journalism, I scroll through #pootok, which has 10.4 million views, until I find the page @postwhenwepoop. The account shows clips of people rating their poos out of ten, with variables such as, “stankiness”, “liquidity”, “burn level”, “relief” and “duration”. One video reads: “I just did my first poo after a night of drinking and we all know that means, it made me feel rejuvenated. The poo itself wasn’t even that good, but I feel incredible. 7/10.”

The godlike sensation after shitting is known as ‘poo-phoria’. In the book What's Your Poo Telling You?, Josh Richman and Dr. Anish Sheth describe it as: “The sense of euphoria and ecstasy you feel throughout your body when this type of faeces departs your system… to some it may feel like a religious experience, to others like an orgasm.” For Barney, 30, poo positivity takes a more primal approach. “I’ve always been attracted to smells and there’s something primitively instinctive about the smell of your own shit. This came out of you, you birthed this, you’ve created your own elixir,” he says. 

A number of initiatives are attempting to break the big poo taboo. In 2019, Seed Health launched their #GiveAShit For Science campaign, which encouraged people to upload a photo of their poo to their website, raising awareness of the links between poo and gut health. 

“The response was extraordinary. Just by taking a photo of your poop you're destigmatising it to a certain extent, because it’s an uncomfortable thing to do - most people don’t even look at it,” says Ara Katz, Seed Health’s co-founder. “The more we destigmatise it, the more it opens up discussion and education around why it’s such a critical biomarker of our health.”

Long term, Katz hopes the database will be able to train artificial intelligence to analyse the difference between healthy and unhealthy stools - because checking out your poo (every now and again) could save your life. Blood in your poo can be a symptom of bowel cancer, according to the charity Bowel Cancer UK. Monitoring your poo can help you notice signs of IBS, constipation, ulcerative colitis and more.

In their quest for poo positivity, Seed Health even created The Most Sh*ttiest NFT, the first NFT made from human faecal matter. Taking inspiration from the rise of NFTs during the pandemic, Katz saw the opportunity to “talk about poop as something as valuable as art”.

OK, we aren’t saying you should hang a framed picture of your shit on the wall. But maybe we can all find some comfort in the universal nature of poo. Life’s an absolute shitshow, so don’t be ashamed to sit back, relax and let it all out.

@alice_halll