This comes from Adbusters - The Big Ideas of 2013. I have known guys like the one in this piece, guys who seemed to fear the natural bodily processes we all learn are normal as children - and with books like Everyone Poops, it's even easier to help kids become accepting of bodily functions.
Sometimes, however, I have seen this denial of bodily functions in some of my trauma clients, for whom urination and/or defication are stimgatized so severely by a dysfunctional care-giver (often the mom, though not placing blame) that they will literaly starve themselves (in part) to avoid having to shit. That is an extreme example.
Many other children are raised to be proper at all time and in all locations (kind of like the narrator below) - so much so that they are unable to imagine pulling out their penis and pissing outside. They have never experienced the challenge of writing their name in the snow with their urine stream. Sad.
After years of hand sanitizer, hotel suites and shimmering porcelain, releasing anywhere other than a hand-crafted Italian basin seemed rude, disrespectful, inhuman. Growing up I'd been taught that the essence of humanity was about shedding this animal skin. And though no one ever said it out loud, I knew from a very young age that there was something blasphemous about my piss.
Over time I learned to push the disturbing biological reminders farther and farther from my consciousness. I ran the tap to hide the sound. I stopped looking into the bowl to see if it was yellow or clear. I outfitted the house with the best fans. I insisted on calling the restrooms. I excused myself to the restroom quietly in social occasions, eventually dropping the restroom altogether and just went with "excuse me." I sat down to piss.
Then I met these men from the suburbs. Friends of friends. They joined me at an upscale lakeside retreat. soft roughing it I called it – the elements of the wild with the amenities of home. The restrooms were the best I'd ever experienced. Spaces as large as bedrooms. Basins like small baths. Exquisite. Almost artistic. Complete and total disguises.
But these friends of friends didn't share the same appreciation. In fact they barely noticed the restroom except to comment on the power of the basin's flush. They preferred to pull out their dicks in the middle of the gravel driveway and piss. They often did this in mid-sentence while talking to each other – without even so much as a pause.
Imagine it. Holding their dicks. Laughing. Making eye contact. Shaking the last droplets out of the end. They would zip their trousers in stride as they returned to whatever it was they were doing.
It wasn't long before they stopped using the toilets to piss altogether. Even in the dark of night, they'd stumble across the room banging their knees, tripping over haphazardly strewn shoes and clothing, to unlatch the front door so they could release barefoot under the night sky. Sometimes they'd dribble on their own feet, smiling as the warm urine cut through the damp lakeside air on their skin. I watched from the kitchen one evening as they chuckled to themselves, rubbing the tops of their wet feet on the back of their trousers. God I wanted that.
One day, instead of discretely turning my head and moving to the side, I stood beside them as they pissed together on the driveway. "How come you never piss outside?" one of them asked. I stared blankly at the streams of urine flowing from the large dark puddles of piss. It didn't seem to matter to them either way. They carried on with their conversation. Maybe it was just an idle curiosity. And I couldn't answer because I didn't know why.
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