Farts, Defensive Egotism, Sexual Addiction,
and a Good Crap Detector
I have an ambivalent relationship with my farts. Let me explain.
Like all people, I fart. I break wind. I expel intestinal gas from my
anus. I really don't know where I rank as a farter. I don't know if
I am a below average farter, an average farter, or an above average
farter. Maybe nobody knows what kind of farter they are. I sure don't
know. My ambivalence doesn't so much involve my fart ranking as it does
my fart style.
My father was a cavalier farter. In my opinion, he was also an above
average farter. He farted long, loud farts at the dinner table. When
he did that my mom sometimes said, "Charley". That is an odd thing to
say when you think about it. Why would you say someone's name when they
fart? It is not as if you only recognized the person by the sound and
scent of their flatulent release. So, maybe some of my ambivalence about
my farts started with my father's indifference to the impact of his
farts. But the big thing happened later.
When I was in my 20s I worked in a big hotel as a room service waiter.
I worked days. It's an odd sort of job when you think about it. A day
room service waiter rides elevators and goes into people's bedrooms
to bring them breakfast and coffee. That's about all you do. One winter
I had some malady in my digestive track. It made me fart often and quite
malodorously. There was also an unusual urgency to this particular bout
of farticiousness. My farts would not take no for an answer.
So there I was, spending my days on elevators and in people's bedrooms
and farting my brains out. Each time I delivered an order, before I
would knock on a door to announce my arrival, I walked a few paces down
the hallway and farted. I tried not to fart in the rooms. That would
have been unwaiterly. It happened sometimes when I squatted or bent
over. But I tried to avoid inflicting my wicked gasses on other people's
breakfast atmosphere. I tried to avoid my own embarrassment. If I had
felt strong and confident about myself at the time, this would not have
been a big deal. But I didn't, so it was.
The elevators were a different matter. Room service waiters and other
hotel staff in this hotel rode service elevators. The guests rode the
public elevators. I was usually alone on the elevators. When I was alone,
I farted at will. Of course, other people sometimes got onto the elevator
after I had farted. So there I stood in my stinky cloud. When you are
with one other person in an elevator and is a fart in the air, there
is little point in looking at someone else and screwing up your nose.
You are caught red "rectumed". Of course I was embarrassed. As this
situation began to seem inevitable, I came to expect daily humiliation.
I was helpless in the face of my own flatulence. Eventually it didn't
seem much different if I farted when someone was on the elevator with
me. It was awful. People thought of me as stinky.
I was more than embarrassed. I was so embarrassed that I didn't want
to let on that I was embarrassed. They say that the truth is the first
casualty of war. Maybe so. But the truth is also often a casualty of
insecurity. I decided to alter reality.
I referred the problem of my recurrent embarrassment at my persistent
fartopia to my intellect. There I conspired with my intellect to protect
my fragile ego from the social consequences of my putrid gut. I decided
that those who felt repelled by my stink were suffering from and uptight
conventional delusion about propriety. After all, did not all of us
smell like farts on the inside all the time. The implication was that,
just because someone else was uncomfortable with his or her insides
did not mean I should be uncomfortable with mine. I had elevated my
affliction to an icon of self-actualization. And I convinced myself
of that rubbish. I went on and on about it. I had heard somewhere that
the aversion to poop and poop smell was not inherent but rather was
socialized and learned. If something was socialized, that meant that
it was not good in my cock-eyed frame of reference. Babies play with
their own poop because they are still pure and untainted by society.
Of course, even then, I would have gagged had I played with my own poop.
Never mind that I knew that dogs, while they might sniff a pile of their
own poop and occasionally eat poop for reasons too disgusting to discuss,
also assiduously avoid stepping in their own poop and the poop of others.
In the meantime, due to frequent exposure, I had generally become
indifferent to the smell of my farts and eventually, by generalization,
desensitized to the farts of others. Not a bad thing, altogether. But
not my original aim. My original aim was to protect my fragile ego from
the rejection I perceived from others because there was this odd, stinky
thing about me. Mind you, I know that my fragile ego was not caused
by my farts - the farts merely exacerbated it.
Having erected my defense of my farts, I stayed in that position
for at least 20 years. I privately and sometimes publicly thought myself
superior because I had come to believe sincerely that my farts, stink
though they might, were a part of nature and so should be accepted without
wince. Felt that I should be respected for my transcendent relationship
with my bowelish gasses. I had defensively turned to a virtue what was
no doubt the consequence the occupation of my bowels by some wee little
disease critters.
By and by I began to take seriously that others were genuinely offended
by the flatus that I sometimes leaked or erupted. Whatever learning
or delusion might underpin that disgust, the disgust itself was a fact.
While, on one hand I have some conviction that my point of view about
farts is a healthy one overall, I also understand that I developed the
conviction defensively. Holding my rigid point of view required that
exclude certain important facts having to do with my impact on other
people. Partly, I still want to accepted by people, even in my foulest
fart, so that my ego can be protected. Partly I see that by becoming
defensive, I distanced myself from other people. To some degree, I isolated
myself. This was hardly good self-care and was the product of my immature,
defensive, egotism.
So what does that have to do with sexual addiction. Well, quite a
bit actually. Sex addicts feel different from other people. They may
have direct evidence that other people think there is something wrong
with them. They may have teased and harassed by family and other people.
Or, they may just feel different even though no one else ever made it
clear that they think so too. Of course you know that we think this
starts early and is the seed of shame. Shame is the force that leaves
the ego fragile.
When addicts are first discovering that they can ease their pain
through sexual experiences, they generally recognize that their sexual
behaviors would be judged negatively by other people. Some of that judgment
is because of the wacky, puritanical, sex-negative, uptight beliefs
in our culture. I don't doubt that. I think of that as the Yuck Factor.
But some of the anticipated reactions of other people are because of
violated boundaries, deception, the isolation of the addict, and so
forth. Addicts ignore the latter as I did with my farts.
Some addicts deal with the consequences of their addiction with the
sort of arrogant defensiveness I employed with my farts. They regard
themselves as liberated - freed from the usual constraints of socialization.
They see their hypersexuality as evidence that they have transcended
societal restrictions. And of course, there is a fleck of logic there.
We do live in a sexually repressive society. It is true that some people
are damaged by sexual repression. The trouble is, for addicts, the real
motive in the addiction is concealed. The true self is protected from
exposure to the core feelings of shame and inadequacy. Not the shame
about sexuality necessarily - but the shame of self for being here.
You might say that, when an addict is in a condition of arrogance, she
or he has become pathologically desensitized to sex.
When someone takes on arrogance, self-righteousness, as a defense,
they convince themselves they are needless - that they don't need the
acceptance of other people. They learn to ignore, deny, or minimize
the impact that they have on other people, as I did with my farts. They
become more and more isolated and, as we know, the isolation fuels the
addiction and the self-justification.
Now mind you, this sort of defensive arrogance does not only develop
with farts and sex. It develops in lots of other ways. The necessary
ingredients are a fragile sense of self and underlying feelings of shame,
real, imagined, or anticipated rejection by others, some intellectual
ability, and motivation to escape the pain of the shame.
The cure for defensive, intellectual, egotism is simple but not easy.
We must build crap detectors in our own minds. A crap detector is a
mental apparatus that is independent enough from ego, emotion, and shame
to objectively evaluate the quality of your own thinking. It was my
developing crap detector that eventually pointed out the flaws in my
thinking about farts. Crap detectors are like any other mental mechanisms.
They must be built and refined and improved and developed. They are
never perfect. They is always a chance, at any moment, that you are
deceiving yourself. So cure is the wrong word. The way is the way of
all recovery - progress and not perfection. However, as you become more
and more effective at detecting the crap in your own thinking, about
the defensive functions of your thinking and about other things, you
are more able to be in reality, make contact with other people, and
live in serenity. All and all, worth the investment I think.
