Eating ass is very pleasurable for some, so much that it has even hit the mainstream. Did you watch that scene in Girls when Marnie had her bum motorboated by Desi? It’s clear that was a desperate attempt (who eats ass like that?) by Lena Dunham at creating something “weird” or “shocking” that would grab headlines, and the media responded accordingly.

And whether you like it or not, rimming is everywhere, but I’m not going to talk about eating ass (this is just a teaser) but rather about not eating it and society’s collective aversion to poop. 

I once casually read an interview with Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal who killed and ate Renée Hartevelt, his fellow student at Sorbonne in Paris. In it he tells very graphic details about the taste and consistency of human flesh, which is apparently pretty thick and basically odorless. His way of explaining is so eloquent and scientific that you’re almost lulled into forgetting he’s a murderer, but what really struck me was something else. When asked whether he also likes eating poop, Sagawa replies horrified that eating shit would be one step too far. Right – he does after all have mental issues, but that was nonetheless a prime example of society’s knee-jerk dislike of poo. 

Okay, gratuitous poop-eating might still be a little far off for most of us (including the average customer of Lab.Oratory, Berlin’s premiere sex and fetish club), but feces can be much more of a health aid than at first thought. Among other health benefits, poop can, for instance, cure debilitating gut conditions, via some sort of poop transplant, in which one healthy person gives their poop to someone else with poor health. In the West, that treatment goes by the name of fecal microbiota transplant (also known as stool transplant), and it’s only been a valid practice since the 1960s. However, it was first developed in China more than a thousand years ago, although they get little credit for it. More interestingly, the Chinese scientist Li Shizhen even used “golden soups” to treat patients with abdominal diseases in the 16th century. And what did this soup consist of? You guessed it: fresh, dry or fermented stool (feces) – a soup of poop. 

I’ve never had severed gut pain, so I’ve never had the need to drink “golden soup”, but I can imagine it would taste a little like ass-eating, which, as far as I’ve tried, can taste pretty good, like a mid-morning French kiss. And perhaps if western societies were not so clinical and anxious about hygiene and allowed for more experimentation, we could all live in a much dirtier and more fun place, even if that would ruin the careers of future Christina Aguileras.

Gif: Gawker