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People are finally discussing the secret etiquette of pooping at someone else's house

Is the courtesy flush polite or a waste of water?

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Lighting a candle? That's basic compared to these advanced tips.

Poop anxiety isn't the most heavily studied medical field, but some estimates say up to a third of people suffer from some kind of anxiety around going to the bathroom in a public place or another person's home. On the low end, they can feel ashamed or embarrassed. At the higher end, they may avoid social functions, public events, or leaving their own home entirely. This phenomenon also tends to affect women more than men. For some people the worry gets so bad that they constipate themselves or refuse to eat, all because they're worried of what people will think of them.

But you don't have to have extreme "shy bowel" to know the uncertainty associated with feeling a rumbly tummy while you're a guest in someone's house. There are a lot of unknowns to manage. How good is their soundproofing? Does their toilet actually flush properly? Will someone be waiting to go in right after me? Some people anticipate these worries and come up with elaborate rules and routines to leave as little evidence of their go as possible.

A guy took a simple question to social media: Should you always courtesy flush when you're a guest in someone's house? The answer sparked a huge debate about the secret etiquette of public pooping.


poop, bathroom, dancing, funny, humor, toiletThis dancing poop says pooping can be fun!Giphy

In a thread on the subreddit r/NoStupidQuestions, the OP asked: "My mother tells me that at other people's houses, when going to the bathroom, it's expected to do a 'courtesy flush'. Is this a real thing?"

For the uninitiated, a courtesy flush is when you flush halfway through your "go." The thinking is that it helps get rid of odors before they build up. Not only that did the poster's mother advocate for courtesy flushing, she insisted on a very specific ritual when visiting other people's homes:

  1. Always carry Poopurri and spray before you go
  2. Flush halfway through your session
  3. Flush at the end (obviously)
  4. Clean toilet bowl with wand... every time!
If it sounds a little extreme to you, you're not alone.

However, some commenters were extremely pro-courtesy flush.

toilet, bathroom, home, hygiene, cleaning, etiquetteWhite ceramic toilet bowl with cover. Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

"I’ve done the 'courtesy flush' thing for years… mainly to help minimize lingering odors more than any other reason."

"That’s good advice. First flush on delivery, second flush with clean up. Reduces odor and skid marks."

A few people noted that the courtesy flush is common in jails and prisons, of all places. Due to the tight (extremely tight) quarters, inmates are encouraged to repeatedly flush while they go. I don't want to know what the consequence might be for violating this code.

Others claimed the courtesy flush was a waste of water:

"Flushing twice seems very wasteful in my opinion. I would not like a guest to do that."

"No, please don't waste my water. But do make sure everything goes down."

"If someone did that at my house I'd be low key annoyed at them for wasting water."

Experts agree that the effectiveness of the courtesy flush is very much up for debate. Does it mildly lessen odor? Maybe. It's also a gigantic waste of water. Older toilets can use up to six gallons per flush—yikes! An extra flush is also questionable at best when it comes to sanitation—flushing poop with the lid open is known to spray bacteria all over the bathroom. Yuck.

"Everyone poops, I don't want my guests worrying about it," wrote one commenter. "Crack a window if it's like, lethally stinky, I guess. If you clog the toilet, the plunger is in a plastic tub right there. If you need help, cool, now we have a funny story."

The courtesy flush, however, was only the beginning of the OPSEC tips for pooping in public.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Some commenters were on board with OP's mother's idea of using the toilet brush if it's available:

"If there's some brown stuck to the porcelain after I flush, and if there's a toilet brush on hand, I give it a quick cleaning and a second flush. But not if things look clean otherwise," someone wrote.

Another commenter had an even more advanced idea: "You can also float a strip of toilet paper on top of the water before you poo. Gets wrapped in paper as you drop off your delivery and less likely to leave skid marks in the bowl."

Of course, commenters in threads all over the Internet sing the praises of Poo-Pourri, or even carrying a lighter with you at all times to burn up some of the stinky oxygen. And how's this for a pro-level tip?

"Tip for the courtesy flush.. if one who finds it hard to poop in a public bathroom because you don’t want people to hear you. Flush just right before you push and the sound of the water will cover the sound of gas etc and it will go right down with the water so very minimal smell."

I mean, all you can do really is clap at the social-anxiety-fueled ingenuity on display. The experts seem to agree here. Even Healthlinerecommends carrying air purifier spray, lining the inside of the bowl with toilet paper to absorb sound, and flushing several times to reduce anxiety worries.

The general consensus is that, when pooping at someone's house, basic etiquette applies. Clean up after yourself to a normal degree, but remember, as the saying goes: Everybody poops.

Some people are really protective over the bathrooms in their homes, which is their right. But if that's the case, they really shouldn't be having guests over and expecting them not to partake in normal human biological behaviors.

Some of the advanced tips shared by anxious-pooers might help, but try not to send yourself into a tailspin trying to cover your tracks. In extreme cases of bathroom anxiety, experts say cognitive behavior therapy or even antidepressants may be needed. But the rest of us might just need to read that world famous children's book again.

This article originally appeared in March

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Admit it, you're curious: This is how cow poop becomes energy.

An unexpected energy source may be hiding in plain sight.

True
Gates Foundation: The Story of Food

Let’s get straight to the facts: A dairy cow produces around 112 pounds of wet manure every day.

Even on a farm with only 187 cows (the U.S. average), that’s nearly 21,000 pounds of cow poop every single day.

Cows produce around 112 pounds of wet manure every day. Image via iStock.

Other livestock also produce staggering amounts of waste. According to National Geographic, the 2.3 million hogs in rural North Carolina’s Duplin County “generate twice as much waste each day as the city of New York.” Holy, um, hog.

Usually, this waste is a big nuisance for farmers. It takes up space, it smells, it releases methane into the atmosphere ... the list goes on.

What if there were a way to harness all that poo for good?

Turns out there is.

The concept is simple, and the technology has been around for decades: Animal waste is collected in a closed container and broken down by bacteria through anaerobic digestion. The resulting methane gas (which naturally occurs in animal waste and would otherwise be released as a harmful greenhouse gas) is then captured and either used for energy on the farm or piped to a power plant in the area.

Poop goes in, usable energy comes out.

Waste must be collected and stored in a closed container to capture the methane. Image via iStock.

Better yet, the energy obtained from the methane gas isn’t the only benefit of using this system. Other byproducts of a biodigester on a dairy farm, for example, include: liquid waste, which can be used for fertilizer or cycled back into the digestion process; fibrous material, used for compost or even animal bedding; and waste heat, used to warm homes and other buildings on-site.

Converting animal waste to energy isn’t a technology of the future; it’s already in use all over the world.

In Colorado, the Heartland Biogas project processes both animal and food waste, sending the resulting methane to an interstate pipeline. According to NPR, the facility can process up to 1.7 million gallons of waste at a time.

Image via iStock.

In North Carolina, hog farmers are generating biogas from waste lagoons — a mixture of solid and liquid waste typically held in uncovered containers. Covering these waste pits allows farmers to capture the valuable methane gas and drastically reduces the overpowering odor these facilities are known for.

In Germany, the Munich Zoo has a small biodigestion program that converts animal waste (mostly from the elephants) to biogas, which fulfills a percentage of the zoo’s electricity needs. The waste heat, in this case, is used to warm the gorilla enclosure. Other zoos around the world, including in Detroit and Toronto, are adopting similar approaches.

A baby elephant in the Munich Zoo, where waste is converted to energy. Image by Andreas Gebert/AFP/Getty Images.

Of course, biodigesters aren't the solution for all of our energy needs.

For one, they're incredibly expensive to set up (so much so that the cost is prohibitive for most farmers). According to PBS, even a primitive digester only makes financial sense on a farm with 2,000 cows or more. But luckily, some farmers are able to reap the benefits without paying too high of a cost (such as those located close enough to a large biodigestion operation like Colorado's Heartland facility).

Many critics also point out that converting waste to energy doesn't solve our waste issue at its root — if you're putting food scraps in a biodigester, it would have been better to feed those scraps to humans. If you're putting animal waste in a biodigester, you must consider the resources it took to raise those animals and whether they would have been better spent on less intensive crops for human consumption.

But if we're going to make any progress in tackling the world's energy crisis, utilizing the waste we're already creating is a great place to start.

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Yes, poop is gross. But that's not the only reason for its shameful social stigma.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

The famous poop emoji

Why are we all so prim and anxious about the sounds, smells, and substances that emanate from our keisters?

The obvious answer is that, well, poop and farts are gross. It is waste, after all, and full of (potentially harmful) bacteria. That's why other people's farts always smell worse than our own: to warn us of the impending intrusion of intestinal insalubrity.

But there must be another reason for our rear ends' rude and ribald reputation, right? Well, as it turns out, there's a lot of cruddy history behind our shame.


Ancient civilizations believed our derrieres' disgusting discharge was indicative of defects and disorder within us.

Back around the 16th or 17th centuries BC, Egyptian medical texts — such as the Ebers Papyrus and the Edwin Smith Papyrus — helped popularize what's now known as autointoxication. Not to be confused with auto-brewery syndrome, the idea was that any undigested foodstuff that stayed in our system would end up rotting and poisoning us from the inside out and this was the primary cause of everything from schizophrenia to cancer.

That's right: The Egyptians believed that constipation caused cancer and that it was entirely your fault when it happened. Look, they were a little busy building those big fancy pyramids, so you can forgive them for a few anatomical oversights.

The ancient Greeks took this one step further with the introduction of the Four Humors.

Humorism was a theory of medicine that tried to explain our health and personalities through an internal balance of four metabolic liquid elements. The choleric temperament — yellow bile — worked through the digestive tract and was said to be responsible for coloring our poop.

It was also associated with aggressive, impulsive, and obstinate behavior. These were good qualities for leaders to have — in moderation. But too much yellow bile and, well, you were probably full of sh*t.

Then Christianity took the gluteus maximus and turned it into "Gloria in excrement Deo."

While there is some talk about fruit as food in the beginning of Genesis, the only thing that Adam and Eve ever actually eat in the Bible is that damn apple that got them into trouble in the first place. God cursed them with all kinds of pain and shame when He cast them out — and, well, it stands to reason that clippin' the biscuit would be among the awkward and uncomfortable bodily functions they were forced to endure. Just as they were ashamed of their own nakedness, they were probably ashamed of their stinky pebbles too.

This idea of poop-as-original-sin is also echoed in Deuteronomy 23: 12-14:

"12. Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. 13. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. 14. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.

Basically, stool is a filthy human function, and you need to clean up your crap so that God doesn't step in it.

But things changed in the late 1800s when the flush toilet started catching on.

As David Praeger explains in his book "Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product," hygiene became a hallmark of the elite, and the upwardly mobile Victorians saw their porcelain privilege as another way to set themselves above the lower classes.

Those with proper manners did not acknowledge the existence of their ... ya know. The social stigma asserted that only poor people pooped. (This probably compounded with Victorian concepts of purity and sexuality too, leading to that persistent and weirdly gendered notion that women don't poop.)

Our potty practices don't always agree with the pressure that the modern world places on our productivity either.

Good gut health can make our brains work better. But droppin' a deuce when you're supposed to be on duty doesn't always go so well. Even if your employer provides you with sick days and health care, they might take notice when nature calls and you're not at your desk when you should be.

"I try to time when I'm going to the bathroom at work based on when I expect that no one will be looking for me, so I can disappear for 15-20 minutes at a time," said Andy, a 30-year-old man with Irritable Bowel Syndrome who works in Washington, D.C., in an interview. Andy wasn't diagnosed until his mid-20s, when he was living on his own for the first time and realized that his heinie habits weren't like other people's, and it really wasn't funny anymore like it used to be in high school.

"But it's awkward when your boss sends you an email 'Where are you? I need this right now,' and you're in the bathroom. How do you say 'Hold on a minute, I'm pooping my brains out, but I'll get to it as soon as I can?' Suddenly you look like you're slacking off because people can't find you when they need you."

Unfortunately, these misinformed connections between virtue and our posterior pop'ems still linger like stink in our communal cultural bathroom. And that's a big problem.

To this day, our society still equates poopability with happiness and moral standing. So while yes, it's embarrassing and disgusting, this skewed sense of shame is preventing us from seeking the medical help we need to make our bodies function to the best of their abilities — poop and all.

For example, only about 22% of Americans seek health care for constipation, but it's one of the five most common gastrointestinal disorders. Meanwhile, we're spending $800 million a year on laxatives — and even more on emergency room visits for overstuffed bowels. The situation is so bad we barely know how to qualify what counts as a "normal" frequency of bowel movements because no one is willing to acknowledge they happen at all!

Don't get me wrong: Poop is gross. It's hilarious, but it's definitely gross — and it's something that everybody does.

So let's put a plug in the shame that comes from our butts and acknowledge the smelly struggles of everyone's poop chute.

Our physical well-being, not to mention our pride, may depend on it.

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