But lose your girlfriend and you re dumped. You feel shat on. You poor turd. Part of the problem is that the elimination is poorly designed to find a constituency in an identity-based culture such as ours. The two sexes perform the act identically.
Male homosexuals have ambivalent feelings toward it.
There is nothing empowering or glamorous about moving one s bowels. The feces fall downward, not outward there is no parallel to manifest destiny in its movements and its coloration analogizes not to gold, as urine does, but to the dross of the soil. Shit is for farmers. Most of all, defecation is a reminder that we too will go back into the earth, that the journey the bolus takes through the building plumbing, into the casketlike sewer main and on to the treatment plant and the ocean prefigures our own inevitable dissolution into bits of carbon and water. As 19th-century philosophers noted, one of the characteristics of bourgeois culture is an inordinate fear of death.