Do you sit or stand?
This was the first question on my classmate Danny Newman’s AP statistics final project during my senior year of high school. The subject was male bathroom wiping habits, and the project’s objective was to establish whether a statistically significant percentage of guys wipe standing or sitting. At first glance, this project appears to be the immature, phoned-in efforts of a high school senior boy who had long since checked out of Evanston Township High School and booked his ticket to Rice University in Houston.
How wrong one would be to cast off Danny’s study as a mere attempt at cheap teenage bathroom humor. To this day, I have learned more from his AP stats project on the subject of butt-wiping than any other essay, thesis, presentation or project completed by a peer. And that includes the paper a classmate wrote from my Duke freshman seminar on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that was so good that the venerable Professor Denis Mickiewicz had her read aloud all 20-plus pages to the class.
Her essay was excellent, but it is but a footnote compared to the butt-wiping study, the results of which were nothing short of revolutionary and evolutionary, groundbreaking and earth-shaking, in the manner in which they shaped my worldview.
Half sat and half stood. Interesting data, and it’s confirmed by an 8,000 person online survey conducted through the reputable Web site www.poopreport.com (tagline: Your No. 1 source, for your No. 2 business). But this alone is not the root of the project’s brilliance. Rather, it is that the sitters and the standers did not know the other existed.
Your roommate, someone who sleeps only a few yards away, could be a sitter and you would be none the wiser. Unbeknownst to you, your best friend could fold toilet paper, your uncle could crumple it and your brother could use baby wipes. And you wouldn’t know about nor would you understand what appears to you to be their deviant behavior.
Whether it is in the bathroom or in the bedroom, in our minds, hearts or souls, all we know in these most private places is our own experience.
I should note that it is not mere matters of opinion to which I refer here. It is not new news to you that someone doesn’t agree with you that an austere 2.5 hour black and white German movie is good (it is), or that Rajon Rondo is a basketball super-villain (he is). You don’t need reminding that others believe the health care reform that you so desire to be socialism, fascism and (not or) communism. No, it is something far more fundamental than preferences and opinions. It’s our most private and deeply ingrained frameworks from which we approach involuntarily the world around us.
This phenomenon extends far beyond bathroom habits and basic daily routines to your sexuality, your prejudices and your moral code, among other things. You may either assume everyone else thinks the same way you do, or that nobody else thinks the same way you do. The former can get you into trouble [“Oh sorry baby, I thought everybody was into (insert weird thing that you just tried to do)”]. The latter can isolate you [“Oh, if only someone else were into (insert weird thing that you want to do)”].
Studies like Danny’s or the slightly better known “Kinsey Reports” do much to teach us that we either are not alone or are not representative of the entire human race. At Duke, a number of valuable and exceedingly popular events seek to do the same thing.
Ruth Westheimer’s recent discussion, “Sexually Speaking,” drew more than 500 people to Reynolds Theater to talk frankly about subjects that only a four-ft.-seven-inch, 81-year-old sex expert can approach.
The Center for Race Relations has done a particularly excellent job in recent years of fostering similar discussions on race, gender and sexuality that nobody wants to have, but, judging by the popularity of the Me Too Monologues and the bi-annual Common Ground retreats, everyone wants to have.
Together, these two events provide dialogues that allow participants and audience members to question their previously unquestioned assumptions. Of course, profound differences persist, but these events bridge the divides between sitters, standers and the 7 percent of the population that crouches. Indeed, we still must be reminded that everybody poops.
Jordan Rice is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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