Butt germs

from Nudism as an Illegalism

CW: extensive discussion of shit & adjacent topics

















In my opinion, despite the fact that that was kinda gross (because, what if!), it probably wasn't really a huge problem. Most of the time a that a bare ass hit a plastic seat, I would expect that excrement was not caking the inside of those cheeks. Even if they did, though. shit is everywhere; it's unlikely that one unwashed bum on a plastic seat was going to cause an outbreak of anything in and of itself.













There are 24 Comments

Let's make this interesting and discuss the ideal anarchist toilet design and type of waste disposal for the future, which doesn't use so much water.

idk compost toilets are smellier and require more work that nobody wants to do.

this is false. have you ever been to a filthy public restroom? it’s the lack of cleaning and careless use that makes them so smelly and disgusting. sure, no one wants to clean bathrooms, yet there are janitors who slave over cleaning rows of stalls in buildings, domestic labor traditionally imposed by default on women, the role of plumber for installation and maintenance traditionally assigned to men, the role of engineer and the sprawling infrastructure that relies on extractivism and industrial mass production and dumps shit into the ocean and makes it toxic. etc.

simple artisanally made compost toilets require less expertise and maintenance and yes shit stinks, no ifs ands or buts about it. what is true is that that kind of toilet cannot be scaled to serve a city with millions of people densely populating a small area (skyscrapers etc).

Composting toilets are very easy. It's literally a bucket with some mulch or sawdust. Then you dump in a dry spot where it can compost in a big pile. Much less work than cleaning an indoor bathroom, especially if it's outside. Pooping indoors is gross.

In the desert it just crusts over in an hour and stops emitting shit gas molecules into the air, thus ceasing to smell. If you have dung beetles they'll bury the drying shitball its rolled, otherwise it dries into a crust and eventually crumbles like a cookie into the ground. The atoms in our bodies were once inside dinosaur shit.

There are shit molecules which where once in the bowels of alleycats and old burnt out hobos floating through the inner city thoroughfares whilst you sit outside in the Paris-esque café table sipping lattés. Bon appetite!

Yes, exactly. You don't know. This is why convictions are meant to be broken through learning and experimenting new perspectives. Like reading the comments above that are dead-on. Compost toilets are way better than the toilets in your bathroom, if done the right way (ergo, using saw dust, waste paper and some chalk will help)... as long as you know where to empty the bucket.

TOTALLY unrelated question: Is there a police station, a bank, a shopping mall or a hipster bar & grill or dessert parlour near your place? Thank me later, bye.

Fewer risks and less complications by default, even though poop is obviously kinda dangerous.

It’s hypocritical if people who have cats indoor and sleep with their dogs and even kiss the in the mouth or let themselves be licked by them denounce public nudity under the pretense of hygiene concerns. It’s even more hypocritical if anarchists would be against nudity in public. Specially if they’re the type who would protest against mask wearing and lockdowns. A piece of cloth over the mouth and under the butt when seating should be enough to ease people’s concerns. But just as there are laws that criminalize homelessness, there are laws that criminalize nudity, as if simple being wasn’t enough, you’re required to own accessory products, or be accessory to these products, to be allowed the barest existence in public.

OMG Pet lovers kissing their animals on the mouth after they've been licking their ass clean, omg, dry reaching now

Hygiene ain't the primary reason why nudist get more exposure (no pun intended lol, but maybe yes) and friends. It's aesthetics. That includes someone who stinks, as smell is also a lesser-conscious part of aesthetics.

Or I guess for people who're into butt sex... ok hygiene here makes more sense. So is dick and vagina hygiene, as these tend to get nasty easily without regular wash. But how does nudism has anything to do with sexual intercourse? That is a question the author could better develop upon, like in other writings.

Of course there are way dangerous bacteria in poo, but bacteriophages are also found in sewage waters, and shit makes good compost as long as you don't use the compost for at least a year (enough time for the bad bacteria die out), so there's nothing that's totally bad in shit. So a more important and constructive discussion to be had about shit is how to better make use of it, instead of just rejecting it in the aquifer (along with and therefore intoxicating nature the way this society does. The toilets we're using in cities aren't compost toilets.

Where all this shit goes? I'm pretty certain that 98% of the people in your city don't know, and wouldn't care about it... it's literally the physical reification of the collective subconscious, right there. A shitty superego that tells people to evacuate that shit as far detached from their lives on the conscious strata of the city/hive-mind. Regardless of how bad it'll be for the environment, or how demanding it is for human waste management.

I dont see anything inherently good about it. If you're wondering why people are once again laughing at "crime thinc.", then that's the reason why.

There's benefits to cleanliness as there are also benefits to dirtyness. When households are too asceptic and clean, then people tend to develop more allergies due to an un-trained immune system over reacting to things in the air.

People with good hygiene use water and soap. Gtfo of here, you gross barbaric Westerner.

Got use to poo like a wild feral human, not sitting on the toilet seat. My daily coffee abuse every morning it goes out pretty quick.

Computer chair is my toilet seat. Keep that for posterity and tell your kids.

We're definitely well in psychoanalytic terrain here. People are not NATURALLY born averse to shit or shit-smells or body-smells. Infants may initially like to play with shit, like shit smells, and like shitting. They might shit on a carer as a "gift". Aversion is learnt in early childhood. Unfortunately, it's learnt pretty deep, so it tends to stick, and to be experienced as "natural". I've no idea if the process can be reversed, but at present AFAIK it can't. The aversion will vary in intensity, and be strongest in anal-retentive types and people with strong sensory aversions more broadly; often the shit has symbolic meanings tied-up with such things as fears around detachability of body-parts and fears that there are hostile entities inside one's body. Functionally it probably has to be treated as a sensory need. On a broader level it does seem the cost to everyone of avoiding shit, holding in farts etc is far higher than the gain to everyone.

Hygiene/disease risk is a good argument for keeping some degree of poo-taboo (in overcrowded cities), but it isn't the driver for why it developed. Both public shitting and public nudity tended to be tabooed around the same time as a bunch of other things, all focused on visibility of the body and of bodily functions and/or violence. Round the same time, punishment was moved from public squares to prisons, animal slaughter was moved from streets to abattoirs, public sex was discouraged or banned, etc - c. 1500-1600 in the elite (see Elias, The Civilising Process). This was part of the rise of the modern bourgeoisie and the definition of the modern subject, focused on the mind as separate from the body. To this end, only the "civilised" mind and not the "animal/primitive" body was to be seen in public or presented in social relations. The germ theory of disease did not appear until centuries later, and provided a retrospective scientific grounding for some of the things people were already doing. (I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this kind of reactionary bilge is still being expanded; after all, they're basically adding hugs, kisses and handshakes to the list as we speak).

I still find it shocking that people who adhere to broadly liberal values (only harmful acts can be banned) nonetheless accept bans on public nudity. Particularly when these same people are up in arms about bans on burqas or compulsory mask mandates. Then again, these same people are often lax in applying their own principles to drug laws, or immigration, or the right to swear. I remember reading once, a piece by a reactionary legal scholar arguing that causing offence should be banned, based entirely on public shitting (redesigned to eliminate any disease risk) and a few related examples. It was all phrased very reasonably but it was clearly designed to appeal emotively to the reader's prejudices, as is so often the case with such pieces.

Elias is indeed an author that's been much neglected by anarchists and other radicals around here. I don't see how people can keep talking about civilization and anticiv without having read this book, among other "must reads". Civilization basically is defined here as a process of social pacification (and related repression of impulses, as seen with Reich), through the increasing codification of conducts.

Crust punks (not the oogle methheads we got in parts of NA, but the more radical Euro style ones, where is is more than just a runaway teenager thing), become extremely relevant when considering anti-sanitary affirmation as a form of anticiv counter-culture.

What does leaving bussy bacteria everywhere around the squat have to do with anarchy? All the nudist anarchist gardeners died from melanoma. How do you expect to overthrow the state with skin cancer and pink eye?

First off, I am not at all surprised that THIS is the post that would be crossposted to @news and widely commented upon, lol

It's interesting that a lot of people are talking about toilets and sanitation. There is a need, I think, for a concerted effort from among anarchists to talk about this subject too, just like nudism

A few people are probably just trolling, but just in case's it's not clear (for instance, for people who didn't actually read the thing), I'm into hygiene and not into, uh, this: https://anarchistnews.org/comment/31090#comment-31090 (lol)

But I think any good bit of writing ought to put some things into question. Especially things that are taboo. Hence this post

My main concern is with nudism, not poop, so please keep that in mind. My operating theory is that by talking more frankly about one topic, though, we might be able to start talking frankly about ALL topics - maybe with a mind to, y'know, creating a larger culture that is more open to heterogeneity and different ways of being. which is, like, at least PART of what anarchy means to me

so yeah. Most of my proposals are about, like, apparel and the body, which is a pretty "lowly" sort of thing compared to more cerebral, elevated concepts like economies, political institutions, etc. In this post, I went to an even lower subject (about as low as it gets, really, since at least "beautiful nudes" are lauded). I suppose I'd like to see more interesting, practical proposals from anarchists about such lowly, bodily, quotidian things, with a mind to rejuvenating a low-to-the-ground, embodied, everyday practice of anarchy

it's probably not a great idea to expect people to read an entire article...for example, the article "settlers on the red path" really intrigued me, but i only ended reading most of it. I always got a lot of things to do, I am certainly guilty of using this site as a giant chat room.

What does hygiene entail for you?? What do you do with your butt when you dump some toxic-choco into your latrine?

"What does hygiene entail for you?"

All the normal stuff, I suppose? I am honestly a bit of a slob sometimes, but I don't think any more so than any number of other people. I would rather be a bit cleaner than I actually am, but I'm also not wanting to, like, obsess over it - and y'know, I'm also lazy sometimes

"What do you do with your butt..." etc.

I wipe my ass. When I have had the opportunity to live more nakedly (probably between 8 and 10 months total, in my whole adult life), I also took a shower right after shitting more frequently (at least when shitting at home), but I definitely didn't do that every single time, either

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