Bowel Movements End Product - The First Taboo by Daniel Sabbath

An excerpt from the book End Product - The First Taboo by Daniel Sabbath and Mandel Hall a look at number two and bowel movements.

END PRODUCT-THE FIRST TABOO by Daniel Sabbath and Mandel Hall. New York: Urizen Books, 1977.

About the Book: End Product is the magnum opus of defecation. It is the first scholarly and philosophical work wholly devoted to #2. Drawing on great works of literature, history, and psychology, as well as a hilarious collection of historical and personal anecdotes, the authors expose the myths and taboos behind our bowel movements, and urge us to develop a less shamefaced attitude toward this routine task. In fact, the authors tell us, we are so ashamed of it, we are truly obsessed with it. Here is a passionate, funny, and convincing plea for defecation liberation.

From the Book:

"Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, sister?" We Westerners tend to look upon Gandhi as a little perverse. We think of ourselves as dwelling in the upper extremities of our flesh. In fact, we rarely descend below the neck. Our feelings have been exiled to our heads. We kiss by the book. We love with the passion of rats running mazes, and we read while we defecate. Gandhi's inquiry suggested with yogalike simplicity that spirit lives in all flesh. The bowels sooner than the brain will know if a body is at peace.

Early in my research I discovered a tradition of the Chagga in Africa that struck me as wholly preposterous. Chagga men do not defecate at all. At the age of initiation a male youth is taken from home by the adult males. He is forced to sit repeatedly on a bed of thorns while he is told never to pass wind or defecate in the presence of women. When he returns home, his bloody bottom is said to be the result of having his anus plugged and sewn up. Henceforth, so far as women and children are concerned, he has no need to defecate. If he needs a nurse, old women who are party to the ruse will care for him. . . .

This illusion of purity is the source of a warrior's strength. Man's superiority to women lies here, and he must never tell his wife. The tribe will take all his possessions from him if he does. If another woman finds any of his excrement and carries it off, he will never have children, and will die quickly. Only when he reaches old age can be relax his caution. The warriors take him into the woods, where he is smeared with lamb's blood, and he returns to the village supposedly having been cut back open.

I am beginning to understand that the Chagga have nothing on us. They limit the illusion to warriors in their prime; ours is a more widespread lie. We are never cut back open. In our normal assault on eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch, we are rendering ourselves literally senseless.

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