Invisible Epidemic
The big problem no one wants to talk about
I am convinced that there is an invisible epidemic going on that no one is talking about. The epidemic? People pooping their pants.
First, let me be clear: I have never pooped my pants.
More precisely, I have never pooped my pants as an adult. I’m sure I was pooping my pants all the time as a baby. I’m sure I was a toddling two-year-old turd terrorist. I’d almost be disappointed if I hadn’t been.
But an actual waking memory of pooping my pants? Not really. The closest thing is a vague recollection of dropping an injudicious poo on the floor of my parents’ bedroom at an age when I should have known better. Maybe three or four years old? I don’t know. The time was long enough ago that memory is indistinguishable from dream: imprecise, isolated, fragmentary.
Even so, when I think about it, the fact that I have never ever pooped my pants strikes me as almost strange—little more than a neat trick of luck.
I had occasion to think about this recently when an acquaintance of mine related the following story to me:
- Acquaintance is taking a walk around the neighborhood.
- All of a sudden, more than a mile out from home (and its concomitant facilities), the need to drop a deuce urgently descends upon Acquaintance.
- Despite a most valiant effort, Acquaintance does not make it home in time.
- Acquaintance’s pants == pooped.
Conclude with an unpleasantly moist walk.
As I was listening to this story, I wasn’t thinking that this acquaintance of mine was an idiot, or that they should have known better, or that they were at all deficient in any way. Instead, the thing that kept running through my head was: There but for the grace of god go I.
Perhaps I took on this attitude purely because of the delightful good humor and tone of self-deprecation with which this acquaintance of mine told their story. But I also think it was, in part, because I can distinctly recall two or three times in my life when I’ve been dangerously close to pooping my pants. Two or three times when I avoided that deep unpleasantness due entirely to luck (or possibly the grace of a higher power).
There was the time near the end of high school when, while on a vacation to Turkey with my family, I was trapped on a tour bus. You can imagine the terror I felt in that moment; indeed, it has stayed with me to this day. Thankfully, we were close enough to our next stop that I was able to make it. But a few minutes’ difference would have made for an entirely different story.
Or another occurrence, in more mundane circumstances: I was riding the 27 line home (buses, it would seem, are very dangerous places), and something which I still cannot exactly determine (was it that lunch burrito? had the milk I’d had that morning gone bad?) caused in me the urgent and unrelenting need to shit. Would I make it home in time? Again, the story has an anticlimactic conclusion: after an agonizing ride and a somewhat stilted walk up my apartment building’s steps, I made home in time, no harm, no foul.
In my mind, two things characterize these experience which makes them particularly terrifying:
- The desperate need to poo, which descends swiftly, lovelessly, without forgiveness.
- The near-total reliance on luck: the vagaries of the public transit system; the hopeful proximity of facilities; that terrible game of Russian roulette whereby one hopes they are merely releasing gas that will provide a degree of blessed relief rather than gas that has been holding something altogether more terrible in.
Maybe my acquaintance and I are both idiots. Maybe normal people don’t have this problem. I don’t know.
But for argument’s sake, let’s say my experience is somewhere in the vicinity of usual. Let’s estimate that the average human adult has a close call re: pooping their own pants once every, oh, say, ten years. (This doesn’t seem insanely unreasonable to me.) Let’s further assume that the close call will turn out for the worse around 10% of the time. (This is pretty arbitrary, but the order of magnitude seems about right—if it were lower, would it really be a close call?)
Under these assumptions, and estimating that you have a solid 60 years of fully continent adulthood in you, you have a nearly-50% chance of accidentally pooping your pants at least once in your life.
This is remarkable. Think about it. Have you pooped your pants? No? Think of your significant other. One in every two people will poop their pants at some point; if it’s not you, it’s probably them. And if neither of you have, then at least one of you is on track to do so at some point in the future.
Or think of your parents; think of Mom and Dad. Odds are one of them has pooed their pants. Which of them would you prefer? Loving Mom? Dear old Dad?
Think of all your friends and family, every acquaintance you know; think of your business associates and coworkers, your bosses and employees; think of the people you see on the street and the ones in the coffee shop; think of your heroes, think of history’s great villains, think of presidents and popes, geniuses and artists, freedom fighters, philosophers, royalty—half of all the great women and men of history are pants poopers.
My point here is twofold:
- As a society, I suspect more can be done to mitigate the risk of pooping one’s pants. For instance, in San Francisco where I live, there’s a paucity of public restrooms. It’s pretty pathetic.
- Perhaps pooping ones pants is part of the human condition. While certainly an unpleasant experience (and probably one to be avoided) maybe we should work together to lift the stigma of shame that surrounds it.
I think the second point is fairly self-evident. After all: shit happens. If you think someone is somehow lesser or contemptible for having pooped their pants once or twice in their lives, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Maybe you need to strengthen your empathic muscle? Maybe you’re externalizing some kind of self-hatred? Whatever it is, you have some deep self-examination ahead of you. Godspeed.
As to the first point: while I realize the logistical difficulties involved in maintaining a large network of public restroom facilities may seem insurmountable, I do believe there is hope.
Recently I went on a trip to Japan for the first time. I was astonished by what I found there. In the popular imagination, I believe the phrase “Japanese toilet” conjures up images of high-tech wizardry, a technicolor fountain of delights. And although my experience in Japan certainly confirmed this notion, I would submit to you, dear reader, that what’s really advanced about Japanese toiletry is not its technical sophistication. No—rather, it comes down to a single word:
Ubiquity.
Despite the stereotype of advanced Japanese toiletry, the country’s public restrooms are distinctly unfancy. In fact, a lot of them contain squat toilets of the variety you hardly ever see in the States. The restrooms are never equipped with soap. They rarely even contain trash cans. But (and this is critical, this is of vast and cosmic importance) they are everywhere.
I assume they can get away with this because the restrooms are so totally low-maintenance. Because it’s just sinks, urinals, and toilets, because there are no soap or paper towel dispensers to refill, because there’s no trash to take out, because there are no electric hand driers to maintain—they can have a ton of ‘em. I’m sure there are also cultural considerations to take into account. But the fact of the matter is that the whole time I was traveling through Japan, I felt totally secure from any and all potential bathroom emergencies.
It was an epiphany. I’d lived my whole life under this clench of persistent, low-level dread which I’d never even been aware of; and now, suddenly, the clench had become slack. I had a sense of complete bathroom security.
Today, I nurse the beautiful dream that one day we’ll all have that security, anywhere we go.
