你应该知道的关于“便便”的五件事（二）Five things about Poo（1）​

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今天让我们来谈一谈......你应该知道的关于“便便”的五件事（二）

Claire Darling 
Nick, how is the language and the way we talk about poo related to the psychological responses that we have?

Nick Haslam 
Universally, excrement is the main taboo term across, pretty much, all languages. It's also the most common thing that people with Tourette's Syndrome blurt out: faecal words like shit. That sort of shows it's the - really seen as the most offensive thing to say because people who lose those inhibitions express it those ways.

Apparently, there's 10 different meanings of the word shit in swearing. You know this makes sense. The taboo words we use to express strong emotions are the ones attached to the most primal taboo subjects, usually sex, excrement and god. So although these excrement related words are universally taboo and widespread across almost all languages, they're more used in some languages than others. 

There's been cross-cultural studies on swearing, on how people respond to someone who's violated some social rule. Especially Germans and Americans, it's been shown, tend to use more anally themed swearing. So it's more in some cultures than others - maybe the more Anglo Saxon ones - but, nevertheless, it's fairly universal as a theme, as a taboo theme, because it's a taboo issue for all human beings.

Claire Darling 
Can you tell us more about the role gender plays in going to the bathroom?

Nick Haslam 
Sure. It's one of the areas where I think we often forget that there are pretty significant differences. So people talk an awful lot about the sexual double standard, but I think there's also an excretory double standard. I think women are held to much higher standards of odourlessness, soundlessness. Women tend to be more bothered about using public rest rooms. At least the studies show that.

One terrific study showed that women are really penalised socially if they are seen as going to the bathroom. An experiment: either male or female, left the room in the study and told the participant in the study that they were going in one condition to the bathroom, and the other condition just to get some papers. 

Then the impressions of the participant of the experimenter were observed. The woman who said she was going off the bathroom was judged more negatively than the one who'd just gone to get some papers, but there was no excretion penalty for the male experimenter. There's something incompatible between femininity and excretion, I think, in the popular mind.

Women are also more, on average, censorious towards things like flatulence. They object more. They find some of these things, on average, more offensive. So gender plays a big role here. I think, in part, that’s because men play up their grossness as a reaction against femininity because femininity is associated with being proper, with being clean, with being neat. One way to display raucous masculinity is to do the opposite.

Claire Darling 
According to Naomi Francis females have added challenges in low income settings like Timor-Leste.

Naomi Francis 
The specific gender needs of people using toilets are the same all over the world. For women their specific needs are around menstrual hygiene management and around pregnancy. When you're thinking about getting people to use toilets you need to take the menstrual hygiene management needs of women into account. That usually includes having a larger space for changing clothes or for washing clothes. That means also having a place where you can have water and drainage in the toilet.

In a low income setting that’s particularly important because women are often using rags, rather than disposable products. But the main thing is the privacy, I guess. That means having a toilet that is specifically for women. It needs to have doors that lock from the inside properly. Programs these days that deal with menstrual hygiene management also look at the psychosocial elements of it, so the stigma around menstruation.

Claire Darling 
Nick, Freud talked about the anal personality type. What's your take on this?

Nick Haslam 
Well, my take on this is that he was actually right about describing a kind of person. Freud said there was this - what he called the anal triad of personality traits that tend to go together. They were orderliness, being perfectionistic, requiring things to be just so and rigid. There was obstinacy, being stubborn and irascible. And there was parsimony, which is basically being tight with money or concerned about not wasting things, not wasting time.

It turns out that those things do, in fact, go together. Those characteristics are a part of the recognised type of person. The trouble is Freud thought that these things stemmed from toilet training practices, that there was a group of people who had these traits who remembered, as children, taking pleasure in retaining their faeces. There's absolutely no evidence for that.

So Freud was right in describing a kind of personality. It's real, and it's actually still in the diagnostic manual of psychiatry to this day. It's called obsessive compulsive personality disorder. It completely precisely matches Freud's description of the anal character, but it's got nothing to do with the anus. 

Claire Darling 
Naomi, can you tell us about toilet graveyards and how your community led program may offer a different solution?

Naomi Francis 
You can go all over the world in low income settings and see toilet graveyards everywhere because NGOs and governments that have thought what we need to do is build toilets because they don’t have the money to build them, whereas, actually, it's a much more - I guess a psychologically based reason for not using them.

What we've found since is that people didn’t actually end up using the toilets, and so we have what is called toilet graveyards around the world where there's these beautifully constructed toilets that aren’t being used anymore, or they're being used for anything but defecation. So I've seen people cooking in their toilets because you've got this nice concrete basin that you can put a fire in.

Some toilets you would often find full of faeces, but it would be cow dung which is being dried out because that will be the driest place in the village. People are definitely using them for interesting things, but not what they're intended for.

My research is looking at what that event changes basically. I measured sanitation indicators before that triggering meeting. What I found was that a lot of people had started building their toilets or had made active plans to build a toilet. They were starting to get materials, that kind of thing, in that one week after. Six to nine months later there was a bit of a spread. Some people still had not started building toilets. Some of them had built toilets but those toilets had already broken down. 

Other people had built and maintained and were improving their toilets. They were adding concrete to it or they were adding - what they call ‘atanki’, which is a little concrete tank next to the toilet for washing themselves afterwards. There were all levels of responses at that long-term follow-up.

Claire Darling 
Nick, tell us what measures do some people take to conceal their toilet habits?

Nick Haslam 
We're talking about anxieties about using bathrooms. This, I think, has got a long history. There's a terrific anecdote, a sad anecdote, from the early 20th century of two sisters who worked in a mill and had to walk past a particular window where they could be observed by male workmates every time they had to go to the loo.

They found that so unpleasant that they ended up not going, and ended up only being able to go on weekends, both of them, and having to spend most of Sunday evacuating their bowels because they developed this inhibition about being observed by male workmates. I think this sort of concern about being observed is really widespread.

Apparently, in Japan you can buy machines that make white noise so that you can disguise your sounds. They're very widely used, especially by Japanese women, I gather. This is something where people don’t like being exposed. Even if they're in private, they would rather have this illusion that no-one else is around.

Claire Darling 
What would be a course of action to improve upon that person's phobia?

Nick Haslam 
It's easy to make light of this subject, but it actually could be quite serious. Some of these problems can be quite debilitating. Look, I think the thing to do is to get in touch with a psychologist who specialises in anxiety. They’ll do a program of treatment which gradually helps you to feel less anxious, more relaxed, less threatened, and guide you through a process of learning to have fewer inhibitions in this kind of area. 

Chris Hatzis 
That’s five things about poo. It's possibly a little bit more than five. We're good with words, just not with counting. Thanks to Claire Darling, Professor Nick Haslam and Naomi Francis from the University of Melbourne.

This podcast was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on 23 February 2017. Producers were Chris Hatzis, Carley Tye, Susanna Cornelius, Claire Darling and Andi Horvath. Audio engineering by Arch Cuthbertson. The Five Things About Podcasts is a University of Melbourne training program created by Dr Andi Horvath. 

Still curious? Nip over to our other podcasts, Up Close and Eavesdrop on Experts for more.

Claudia Hooper 
You’ve been listening to a bonus episode of Eavesdrop on Experts, called 5 Things About. Brought to you with assistance from Cecilia Robinson and me, Claudia Hooper. 

Join us next time for the return of the regular, Eavesdrop on Experts.