Thread by @danielgerling

Do we “Gotta Keep the Devil Way Down in the Hole,” as Tom Waits sings?
Most westerners assume our system of using 1.6 gallons of drinking water to flush our shit and piss is the the best & most natural system of waste removal. Is it, though? #Discard2020 @DiscardStudies 1/10

1850s U.S. had a choice regarding dry or wet toilets. And that choice still governs the way we shit today and—more importantly perhaps—the way we think about our shit. Oddly enough, Christianity played a significant role in choosing wet toilets. #Discard2020 2/10

As plumbing and water came to most 19th C U.S. cities, toilets as we know them could be put inside the home. Convenient, right? But this change didn’t happen without considerable anxiety. 1st, people believed sickness was spread through miasmas. #Discard2020 3/10

That is, they thought a person could get sick from the smell of decaying matter, including shit and farts. Dummies. Further complicating matters, the home—unlike the outhouse—was the Domestic Sphere, and women were guardians of it. #Discard2020 4/10

The Cult of Domesticity was an important 19th C movement that spawned the publication of thousands of domestic manuals teaching women how to keep a good home. Plumbing manuals were written primarily toward women, as this was now their territory. #Discard2020 5/10

Manuals leveraged the language of Christianity to rid the home of shit completely. Catharine Beecher described the task as a woman’s religious & social duty, referring to sewer gases & farts as “evil,” the most common euphemism/dysphemism for shit in manuals. #Discard2020 6/10

One author referred to shits as “Pungent convictions of sin.” More quoted John Wesley’s phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” & Deuteronomy 23:12 (look it up—in short, God doesn’t want to see your shit). Sewerage was the woman’s “divinely appointed mission.” #Discard2020 7/10

No wonder house designs expressed this anxiety, with many bathrooms looking like appendages to the house, some attached to the house but only accessible by walking outside the back door. Flush toilets had real problems, but there was no turning back. #Discard2020 8/10

So instead of using earth closets that Beecher initially championed, Christianity gave water closets the momentum to become the toilet of choice for the next 150 years. And now we have a flush & forget system that absolves us of our pungent convictions of sin. #Discard2020 9/10

As such, this unsustainable system has reinforced the idea that shit is “human waste,” even though it wasn’t described this way until 1867. Shit was a valuable fertilizer, and it could be again if we reimagine it as a necessary part of the nutrient cycle. #Discard2020 10/10

H/T to @MaxLiboiron and everyone else at @DiscardStudies. Also to my poop friends at @poop_project, @jenniferabarr, @raulpacheco, @nick_kawa, @rosegeorge3, @PortlandPHLUSH, @jackwto. And please donate to @SOILHaiti if you can. Happy #WorldToiletDay2020 on Thursday 11/19 as well!

I also want to give props to my student Nolan Ortbahn @n_ortbahn, who is doing cool research in sanitation.