It was easy for the Church to convince people that sex was a dirty business. Reinforced by the proximity of the sexual parts to, and their close association with, the process of elimination of waste, it was only a matter of time before sex came to be identified with the elimination process—a way of transferring from one individual to another such waste matter as may have accumulated in one’s body.
Inter faeces et urinem nascimur.
We are born between fees and urine.
—St. Augustine
Church authorities loved the image. It was perfect. Man eliminated into woman, and her vagina was the repository for his filth. This even sanctioned the role the prostitute played, likening her to a common sewer who helping carry away man’s garbage. Chaucer’s Parson wrote of whores “that must be likened to a common gong (a toilet) where men purged their ordure.”
The theme was picked up in the language. Especially popular during the 1930s was the practice of getting one’s ashes hauled.11 A not unnatural thing, for when fires are raging, ashes are the natural residue. Someone has to remove them. After all, neatness counts, even in sex. It’s another bond between sexual release and personal hygiene.
You’ll find variations of this in contemporary blues songs, with references to how my garbage can is overflowing and requests to please empty my trash. We speak of sex as easing oneself (20thC), and doing one’s business (20thC). Some even refer to it as number three (20thC), an apparent also-ran behind numbers one and two, pissing and shitting respectively.
Hundreds of years after Chaucer’s Parson, a boy in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar described his first sexual experience with a whore being “as boring as going to the toilet.” Phillip Wylie in Opus 21 recounts how books of advice for young men attaining the age of desire sought to dissuade them from seeking the company of prostitutes. They employed not the toilet but the bathtub to make their point, asking indignantly, “Would you walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?”
Sex is great, but it’s really difficult to keep it clean.
Read more – http://bawdylanguage.com
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