Baby weasel
Decades ago I did (or actually didn’t do) something that makes me feel so badly that I can still hardly talk about it. Someone brought us a baby weasel barely five or six inches long. I made it a bed, put a lightbulb where it would warm but not cook the baby (that was a previous mistake -- I put my fertile goose egg in our bed under the electric blanket and turned it too high), and fed it with a tiny bottle. When it cried, I petted it and held it and rocked it. I did all the Mama things except one. I did not know -- though I seen it when the Mama cat was raising kittens -- that baby mammals need to have their anuses gently stimulated, as by licking. The little weasel died writhing, swollen.
Our Victorian prissiness is slowly receding, rather like our glaciers. (I could not think of a way they were related.) In fact, Garrison Keillor is so fond of bathroom stories that it’s a bit of a relief to watch “Downton Abbey” where there are evidently no bathrooms. Still, in some ways it’s better to know things. Recently I read that gentle massage on the middle perineum (the stretch between the anus and the etc.) is very helpful for chronic constipation. A flannel cloth and a little baby shampoo might be a good idea. (Be guarded about doing this for a human child, for instance, as it could be misinterpreted. Luckily, in general one’s arms are just long enough to reach one’s own crotch. No doubt that’s an evolutionary advantage.)
One can also help bowels move by walking, which produces something like internal massage. People who are paralyzed from the waist down must handle internal waste via irrigation, a regular protocol requiring help. When I did my hospital chaplaincy, people wanted to talk about BM's more than about God. So I've been alert ever since. This article is worth opening.
It’s not the case that every creature has an anus. The very smallest animals simply vomit out their excretions or push them out of pores in the cell wall (maybe there’s only one cell) or a few just accumulate what we would call feces all their lives. In fact, if one kind of scorpion has its tail torn off, either because of the sting being embedded in an enemy or because it was grabbed, the anus goes with it. In time, the scorpion dies of an accumulation of toxic materials it cannot discard. (I’ve known people like that.)
Crotch shot of a lizard
When I write about my toilet (old and balky -- can a toilet be constipated?) I often invoke St. Cloaca, who is an invented persona named for the tail-end openings of birds, fish and reptiles, which fuse the functions of excretion and sex in one accommodating aperture. There are also creatures -- again very small -- that breathe through their butts. (Humans are more likely to be mouth breathers.) But humans deliberately ingest substances through their anal pucker and even use it for sex, though without fertility. The experience, we are told, is no longer confined to SM practice where it gives more drastic meaning to a “hand job”, but is used to avoid pregnancy. “Downton Abbey” DID include this. England is a nation of buttock obsessors. They say it is because of their disciplinary practices.
A patriotic pooper
Mouth, nose, vagina, rectum are or can be receivers, access to the internal world of the person. As such, they are exquisitely endowed with sensory perceivers, because it is necessary to guard what enters, even at the one-cell level. The first evidence of sentience is in the ability to approach what is food and avoid what is destructive. This is the separating line between plant and animal. Because these organs are so sensitive, they are inevitably involved in eros. Because they are often controlled by taboos and, to be frank, icky stinky qualities, those who crave the mental stimulation of breaking prohibitions will mix that into eros as one kind of porn.
In a livestock raising community, people know a lot about what is under the tail of a cow. In fact, it is often necessary to reach into a cow’s arm-length vagina in order to deliver semen which is very expensive but still cheaper than keeping a bull. In the end, if the placenta fails to detach from the uterine wall completely -- it is fastened by a lot of tiny fingers that may tear loose instead of releasing -- one must reach in and tease them free. This is not particularly pleasant for the person with the arm, since the cow squeezes tight enough to cut off circulation, and generally is stimulated to excrete manure on the shoulder of the person.
Fisting a cow in order to start a calf
Also, unborn livestock may present themselves for delivery the wrong way around or with legs bent the wrong way. Humans sometimes have trouble expelling a baby but generally instruments are used -- or were before it became simpler to simply cut open the woman’s belly. In the most extreme cases of constipation, when feces have hardened beyond the possibility of expulsion, surgery might be necessary, but fully equipped clinics will have a set of “spoons” that can be used to scoop muck that still is soft enough.
Back on more scientific ground, researchers have been trying to understand the evolutionary origin of the anus. One possibility is the “cloacal” vent. (The internal ceiling of the UU Church in Hartford, Connecticut, is made up of small slats that converge at one pleated point in the center. In more irreverent moments, we sometimes debated whether it were meant to symbolize the anus or the cervix, those two little round drawstring organs.)
As Matt Walker remarks in his BBC article, it’s very difficult to stay serious about this subject. But as experience teaches, ignoring it can have life-ending consequences.
Another possibility proposed in the past is that the anus evolved alongside bi-lateralism, the physical two-sidedness of us, which is so obvious and accepted that we have to be prompted to notice. Some animals have an exit next to their entrance. Some have “transient” anuses though no one can really figure them out. Again the creatures are small. Of course, cells themselves even in complex creatures, have cell wall ports where molecules can get in -- like oxygen and glucose -- and unwanted stuff can be pushed out. These don’t seem to be in one dedicated place, but rather many ports are scattered around, as well as points of attachment for other cells. “The polyclad flatworm (Thysanozoon nigropapillosum) have multiple anuses, situated on their back.”
One could form a musical group called the “Anals” (something like LeDoux’s group The Amygdaloids) but they would only play now and then. Wind instruments, of course.
One could form a musical group called the “Anals” (something like LeDoux’s group The Amygdaloids) but they would only play now and then. Wind instruments, of course.
Quoting Walker: “The review into the evolutionary origins and development of the anus is published in the journal Zoologischer Anzeiger - A Journal of Comparative Zoology. Molecular biologist Dr Andreas Hejnol and Dr Chema Martín-Durán, of the University of Bergen, Norway undertook the research in part, because no one else had.
“Hejnol and Martín-Durán’s review confirms that two sets of genes in particular, known as brachyury and ParaHox genes, which are present in nearly all animals, play a key-role in the formation of the anal orifice. Animals that have an anus, almost uniformly express these genes in the tissues surrounding the organ. Those animals that do not have an anus, do not.”
When the anus is considered as the transition out of the intestinal tubing, which can be reversed in a possibly necessary or possibly erotic strategy, it is clearly not just “there.” So why not think about it, instead of just sitting on the subject?
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