Would love be soluble in the flush? Behind the toilet door, the crystallization dear to Stendhal vanishes at the slightest suspicious noise: the other, this adored being, would therefore be just as human as me, subject to the vagaries of his digestive system…Albert Cohen already told us about it in Beauty of the Lordin 1968. Ariane and Solal dream of a couple without digestive irruption: “He was afraid, when she went to take her bath, to hear the preliminary and terrifying rumble of the flush, a disastrous tumult”, he writes. Couple and toilets: the cinema has made a running gag of it. In First vacationJonathan Cohen panics and runs to defecate in the garden so that his new girlfriend does not surprise him. Fools Rush In shows Matthew Perry embarrassed to see Salma Hayek on the throne. Ben Stiller turning on the shower to drown out the echoes of his diarrhea, in Polly and meis surely one of the biggest discomforts of cinema. “But what possessed you to cast a bronze at her place?” », a friend replies on the phone. Wouldn’t the right question be: how did natural needs become a couple’s most famous enemy?
“Christian culture has always seen the behind as a shameful thing, the excremental function as filth,” writes sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann
Sophie was 18 when she met Louis (the first names have been changed). They live with their parents, in the east of France, forty-five minutes away. The weekends, they pass them in the family of one or the other. At Louis’s father’s, there are two brothers and a resounding toilet, adjoining the kitchen. Not comfortable, so: “Impossible to go there, slices the young woman. Finally, until this day when I find myself at the foot of the wall. » After a week of vacation there, without being able to relieve his digestive system, the stomach aches become a torture: “I don’t dare to move too much, I tell myself that at any moment it blows up. » On the sixth noon, he is served a raclette. “It’s one meal too many. I’m sweating. When someone hands me the charcuterie, I see everything black and I feel faint. » Mortified by the embarrassment, she decides to talk to Louis about it. He is quite the opposite, not complexed for a penny, able to open the door. Together, that day, they find the escape: he will take everyone to play football, she will pretend to have to revise. “They walked through the door, I ran to the toilet! »
Opposed to the logic of seduction
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