Don’t stare at dead things or animals having sex.
I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless. The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies. The morality experts quoted by the article are suggesting that the Body Worlds exhibit, sponsored by the St. Louis Science Center, “exploits the dead for entertainment and commerce.”
What is Body Worlds? Check out the short video at the bottom of this page. Here’s a written description from the official Body Worlds site:
The BODY WORLDS exhibitions are first-of-their-kind exhibitions through which visitors learn about anatomy, physiology, and health by viewing real human bodies, using an extraordinary process called Plastination a groundbreaking method for specimen preservation invented by Dr. von Hagens in 1977. Each exhibition features more than 200 real human specimens, including whole-body plastinates,
individual organs, organ configurations and transparent body slices. The specimens on display stem from the body donation program that Gunther von Hagens established in 1983. The exhibitions also allow visitors to see and better understand the long-term impact of diseases, the effects of tobacco consumption and the mechanics of artificial supports such as knees and hips. To date, nearly 25 million people around the world have viewed the BODY WORLDS exhibits.
I visited the Body Worlds exhibit twice while it was in Chicago two years ago. The exhibition was breath-taking and educational. I plan to see Body Worlds III while it is in St. Louis. I plan to bring my kids (aged 7 and 9), because this is a terrific chance to learn about one of the most incredible phenomena on Earth—the human body. Viewing the body from the numerous perspectives offered by the exibitors, the question is not why it sometimes breaks down or dies. The real question is how it ever actually works, given its surreal complexity. There is no reason that human specimens should be viewable by anatomy students, but off-limits to the rest of us. Why has the viewing of dead humans become off-limits to most of us? There is probably no single reason, but it’s not because we aren’t interested in viewing dead bodies. I’ve long suspected that it’s due to a widespread reluctance to consider the undeniable fact that humans are animals. See here and here and here and here and here and here.
While at Body Worlds, I plan to be inspired (as I was in Chicago) by Gunther von Hagens’ professionalism and creativity. He puts boundless time and energy into preparing his specimens. Perhaps the problem for some people is that von Hagens has a little fun with his specimens. Instead laying the bodies out on slabs, he arranges them in real-world postures. They “do” things like play chess and ride bicycles. Oh, but how dare they arrange dead human bodies so that they are doing the same things that living humans do! Such disrespect!
Yes, there are now accusations that Body Worlds is “exploiting the dead for entertainment and commerce,” as though the dead can be exploited. And as though dead bodies aren’t exploited whenever they are dressed up for wakes, to allow us to pretend that those dead people are merely sleeping.
Consider yet another way of displaying images of dead human bodies: Two days ago, my family attended a St. Louis animal preserve run by Anheuser-Busch.
This beautiful facility is called “Grant’s Farm” because part of the land was once owned by Ulysses S. Grant. Given that Halloween is coming up, the grounds were decorated with ghoulish specimens that undoubtedly exploit the dead for entertainment and commerce. 
Check out these photos, then nod your head in agreement that we have a stark double-standard at play:
In two weeks, images of creepy dead people like this will be ubiquitous. Children will dress up like dead decaying people and we will chuckle and hand them candy. We’ll revel in the realism of the costumes and images and no one will judge us as immoral because of our desire to combine kids, candy and corpses. We just can’t get enough of the stuff, of course, so we’ll need to do it all over again, year after year.
But that’s not all. Not only do we look at things we’re not supposed to look at (the dead). We refuse to look at things we should feel free to look at because they’re interesting. You want an example of that to which I am referring? It was an unplanned show that we also saw at Grant’s Farm. It was (drum roll) . . . Llama sex. No, this is not my code word for something metaphorical. I mean llama sex. Llamas having sex. Llamas in flagrante delicto.
My two daughters noticed two llamas going at it in the llama area about 100 feet away from the camel area where we were standing along with dozens of other people. My kids kept staring because what they saw was interesting. I eventually took their cue and announced, “Hey, let’s go take a look at those llamas.” Here’s what we saw.
The sounds were as interesting as the sight, I can assure you. My daughters and I spoke candidly about the scene as we watched for a minute or two.
The llamas were interesting, but not as interesting as the tourists who were pretending not to watch the llamas. Dozens of tourists remained standing up the hill, ostensibly viewing the camels, 100 feet from the randy llamas. They were all sneaking peeks at the llamas, though none of them wanted to be seen actually looking at llamas having sex. They really really (really) wanted to walk down the small hill and take a closer look at those grunting llamas along with my young daughters and me. In the end, only two or three immoral souls joined us (a mom and her two kids).
Is there a moral to these stories? Perhaps. What is certain is that people often claim to be offended by things that don’t really offend them. What they are really worried about is that someone else might think ill of them if they were seen looking at something they found interesting. That attitude is unfortunate. Life is short and looking at love-making llamas is not immoral (though maybe my llama sex photography is closer to that line!). I have no doubt that most of those people who were too embarrassed to stare at the llamas would have walked down the hill and watched, at least for a minute, had they been the only person in the park.
Maybe the next time those hesitant tourists spy something interesting, they will have the courage to ignore social pressures and actually go learn something. In the meantime, they might want to consider going to Body Worlds, whether or not their neighbor approves of that exhibit. If they do have the “guts” to actually see Body Worlds, they could, later that night, visit the judgmental neighbor wearing one of those gory Halloween skeleton costumes (to put the neighbor at ease) and then tell him or her a few of the amazing things they just learned by staring, unashamed, at creatively displayed human cadavers.
Erich, again i am not bristling at the gross-out factor. Having worked as a nursing assistant when I was in college, I’ve probably cleaned up more human shit than you will ever see in your entire life. Caring for a colostomy patient or seeing a nurse dig a fecal impaction our of a bedridden patient certainly gives one an appreciation for the wonders of a normal healthy bowel movement.
What I object to is the trivialization of a process that involves just about every system in the body and which is the beginning of a life-long relationship. To pick an event that is gender neutral, dying is also as natural as peeing. If someone, perhaps a lonely person
who has no one else to talk to, begins pouring out the details of their terminal cancer, would you cut them off by saying “dying from cancer - it’s as natural as taking a piss.”
As you point out elsewhere, there is no soul separate from the body. Everything, all our most profound experiences, our deepest thoughts, hopes, wishes, dreams, and noblest actions are contained in ridiculously fragile sack of blood and bones and shit and mucus. Throughout history, people have turned to religion to help and support them through life events such as birth and death. If we can offer no vocabulary, no way of talking about the experience of being a human animal, other than a dismissive and reductionist one, then people will continue to turn to religion.
In my mind the above consideration, the fact that most women of my generation have mothers who gave birth in twilight sleep and never learned to breastfeed, and the feminist insight that “the personal is the political,” I think there was an important discussion buried here. I have not been very skillful, reacting in a judgmental way instead of nurturing a conversation.
Grumpy
End product of bowel movement=shit
End product of birth = baby
Ouch.
I will not trouble you with them anymore.
I am sorry for the accusations I made, but not for the parts where I tried to explain my feelings.
I would have liked to see the reactions of people following such a comment.
It is after all only directed at people with cancer their friends who ignore the usual boundaries of good taste when discussing the condition in public. Most people do not want to hear sick people talk about death. Wasn’t there someone who recently complained about this horrible person who talked so much and drove everybody away? What’s his name again?
Vicki writes:
“End product of bowel movement=shit
End product of birth = baby”
Vicki, you again amaze me by how much you are reading into my comment. Please, please try to get a grip. I was once a baby myself, so whatever you might consider “hurtful” about my comment would be applicable to me as well, and I certainly don’t consider it hurtful.
As regards your rants, this website welcomes longwinded rants. My objection is that you should try to keep things in perspective, and recognize that your replies have gone way, way off on an unnecessary tangent. My choice of BMs was utterly arbitrary and in no way intended to connote the many things you have read into it. Indeed, if you reread my original comment, you will see that I never disparaged *pregnancy* at all. My comment was directed to women for whom pregnancy becomes an excuse to suspend normal boundaries of good taste in public conversation. Thus, the ONLY people for whom my comment might be viewed as “hurtful” would be women who practice such behavior. So, go ahead and rant all you want, but please rant about something that I actually said, not some imagined attack on pregnancy that exists only in your imagination.
Grumpy, you’ve convinced me. Those living pregnant women who natter endlessly on about their natural bodily processes are indeed a serious threat to our society’s high standards of good taste.
With this principle established, we can go back to feeling superior to people who feel creeped out by an exhibit that includes a dead pregnant woman, flayed and sliced open.
I agree with you Vicki. It was a poorly chosen analogy, arbitary or not.
I’m still waiting for ANY of my above critics to provide a better example than the one I mentioned. EVERY HUMAN ON OUR PLANET shits — usually every day — so what is so horrible about using that as my example? If you don’t like my example, then give me a better one and I’ll be happy to use that one instead.
Grumpy, since you don’t seem willing to drop this, here are some thoughts:
1. I could go into all the physiological differences between pregnancy/birth and pooping. In fact, the only thing they have in common is expelling something from the body. So your “metaphor” seems more like a synecdoche, with the second stage of labor standing in for the whole undifferentiated concept of “pregnancy.”
2. A better analogy might have been sex. Sex is something that most people experience as positive, and it’s generally a very absorbing topic for discussion and thought. However, in a formal or “polite” setting, play-by-play descriptions of sexual encounters are generally off-limits. Between friends though, and in single-sex settings, such discussions are usually acceptable to most participants. If some of the participants in such a discussion have never actually had sex, there can be a fascination/repulsion thing going on, and an anxiety as to whether the listener will be able to “perform’ when the time comes. I think that’s quite similar to how most women, and many men, experience discussions about childbirth.
3. Your comments (original and subsequent justifications) seem to accomplish a neat trick. Erich suggested that people were uncomfortable viewing dead bodies at this exhibit because they were uncomfortable with the fact that people are animals. There was more than a bit of self-congratulation going on for being among the few who can face this fact. But at the same time, you censure pregnant women for breaking the humans-as-animals taboo, instead of celebrating them for telling it like it is. In this way, you never have to climb off the judge’s box and admit that you too, are uncomfortable with some aspects of human animality. You could have just said - yeah, I get uncomfortable when I hear too-detailed descriptions of pregnancy and birth.
4. I do admit there are aspects of birth stories and talking about birth that resemble the way men exchange war stories. There’s an element of bragging - look what I endured, and I survived. And some women do have very traumatic experiences of birth that haven’t really been fully processed, and when they start to tell their stories, more and more details that they’ve been repressing come out. This sort of thing usually happens around other women/parents, but if lots of your friends have kids, you may have been the odd man out in some of these sessions. You could always excuse yourself, maybe offer to do the dishes or something until a new topic gets introduced.
Self-congratulation? Well . . . maybe. It’s because I have to work hard to see the obvious and then I want to share it. Fair enough?
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell.
Self-congratulation and nothing else? I can’t agree with to that extent. I think that we humans excel in pretending that we are other than what we are and that this inability to deal with the extradinary foundation for human thought–the living meat of the human body–is the origin of endless social mischief.
Working hard to see humans as human animals can bring deep lasting humility. It can also explode one’s sense of entitlement. Just try to give me a better antidote for hubris.
Vicki I think you’re arguing with too much reason for grumpy to understand and I’d hate to see you get upset about him… He doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t want to understand. Usually he makes sense, but not on this post, that’s somewhat disappointing.
OK, one more point - from the time we can wipe our own bums and as long as we have full mobility, most of us are able to poop without help from others. But due to the fact that evolution has given us big brains and upright posture, most women need help giving birth and in the post-partum period. Breast-feeding also is not completely instinctual in humans (maybe not in primates) and requires the right setting to get established. Many women cannot look to their mothers for the most basic info they need to give birth and feed their babies normally, because in our culture, the abnormal has become the norm. So the urge to bond and talk with others around pregnancy and birth is not only normal but quite necessary. Grumpy may argue that rules of “good taste” - whatever that may mean in an age of Jerry Springer and live televised colonoscopies - should always prevail over a pregnant woman’s need to compare notes with others, but I don’t think he has much of a case.
Erich - Maybe self-congratulation isn’t the right word, but perhaps too willing to assume that an intellectual insight is the same as fully coming to terms with something. You have to agree that it takes a special talent to look down one’s nose on both sides, so to speak.
I think the reason why we need rituals and practices to cope with the death of a loved one is because we’ve developed a theory of mind and we need to come to terms with the physical absence of someone who is integrated into our own personalities. We come together to compose and compile the corpus of stories about the individual who has died, and to write the final chapter. Because there will be no new stories about the dead person.
In BodyWorlds, it’s the impression of the assembly line that I find off-putting. Medical students dissecting a cadaver are really getting to know a distinct individual through their remains. But at BodyWorlds, the dead are arranged like so many mannekins at a department store.
Projectleiterin:iIch ärgere mich nicht, sondern amusiere mich.
Vicki: Gut, gut. Zeig’s ihm.
Vicki writes: “A better analogy might have been sex.”
OK, let’s use that example. Is it appropriate for people to openly discuss their sexual experiences — in detail — in public? Even Dr. Ruth has reasonable limits on what she says and where she says it.
Define “in public.” How much detail? It’s all very vague. Can you describe a specific personal experience of the type of inappropriate talk you are condemning?
Vicki also mentions breast feeding. That’s another good example: though we celebrate the dedication of women who breast feed their child in public, are there still not boundaries on what we consider reasonable ways to do it?
More to the point: let’s go back to Erich’s original post about him and his daughters watching the lovemaking of those randy llamas. He wrote: “Maybe the next time those hesitant tourists spy something interesting, they will have the courage to ignore social pressures and actually go learn something.” Let’s apply this reasoning to Vicki’s breast feeding example: is it appropriate for a man to stare at a woman breast feeding her child in public, the way Erich’s daughters stared at those llamas? Is it appropriate for a man to walk up to a women who is breast feeding her child, explain that he finds her behavior “interesting,” and ask for a closer look?
Now let’s tie the topics together: is there any substantial difference between defending the right of a pregnant woman to graphically discuss her experiences at a PTA meeting, and defending the right of a man to intently observe a woman breast feeding her child in a public park? According to Vicki’s arguments, both would appear to be perfectly OK — we’re all just curious animals, after all.
is it appropriate for a man to stare at a woman breast feeding her child in public
defending the right of a pregnant woman to graphically discuss her experiences at a PTA meeting,
Grumpy, you must go to some interesting PTA meetings! If we imagine a scale of grossitude from 1 (When is the baby due) to 10 (descriptions of perineal cutting/tearing/stitching), I really think you’ll find that most public discussions of pregnancy are well under 6 or 7. Most women seem to be able to be make fairly appropriate decisions in this area, in my experience. YMMV. And of course, if you visit within the 1st week post-partum, be prepared for anything.
Grumpy, can you describe a single specific instance. including the circumstances, others present, etc, of the type of thing you’re complaining about?
hmm, looks like part of my comments got eaten by the Internets. Could have been the quake that hit while I was typing. This is what I meant to say:
“are there still not boundaries on what we consider reasonable ways to do it [breastfeed}?”
The baby should be positioned so as to latch on properly.
“is it appropriate for a man to stare at a woman breast feeding her child in public”
Staring can also be a sign of aggression and/or sexual attraction, which would be worrisome to a woman in that situation.
Still not convinced that more open discussion of childbearing issues reflects a grave threat to the social fabric of our nation.
What is a PTA meeting?
Because he’s a creep. I know that many guys have difficulties understanding why women will call another man creep or scum, so I don’t really expect you to understand it, but I would recommend you not to emulate his behavior.
Why is that on the one hand grumpy and Erich say that we’re just animals and people a bit too uptight, but on the other hand grumpy feels annoyed when people do animal things like breast feeding their child in public, talking about their pregnancy (ok, animals don’t do this, but if they could talk they would), sex and bowel movement? And where is the scientific mind that appreciates the manifold details of her operation. If that was a BBC documentary you’d love it. Every minute of it. Every second it.
“Still not convinced that more open discussion of childbearing issues reflects a grave threat to the social fabric of our nation.”
Obviously, that wasn’t my complaint; merely that I find it odd that some women seem so interested in discussing pregnancy, even though it is a routine biological function. Sorry, I can’t provide a specific example…it’s been a very long time since anyone I know has been pregnant.
Vicki’s mention of sex has had me thinking more about Erich’s original post above. Though we are all animals, we are also *social* animals, which means we have a wide range of social rules that we all live by. What’s important about these rules, as Erich’s post points out, is that most (if not all) of them are largely arbitrary. Take the example of breast feeding. We do not, for example, consider it appropriate in America for a woman to remove her blouse to breast feed her child, but there are human societies in which topless breast feeding is seen as ordinary behavior. Likewise, nude sunbathing is a routine practice in some inner-city parks in Europe, but would be considered a crime in virtually any American city. Defecating in public is a crime, as far as I know, everywhere in America, but on the Mongolian plains it is done by everyone. Public sex, to my knowledge, is condemned pretty much everywhere, but is there a rational reason why it should be? Bonobo monkeys do it all the time and seem no worse for it.
These are the sorts of questions Erich’s post raises — that we should all be more aware of the unwritten rules that we all live by, and that perhaps we should question those rules.
Grumpy, I don’t mean to pick endlessly on this one point, but you once again reveal what seems to be a subconscious disdain for women, or childbearing, or both in your choice of words! You make amends and the you ruin it with a statement like this…
“I find it odd that some women seem so interested in discussing pregnancy, even though it is a ROUTINE biological function.”
Pooping is a routine biological function, happening several times a day, if we are lucky. Childbirth happens less than a handful of times in a person’s LIFE and is the creation of a completely new human being! If that doesn’t qualify as the opposite of routine, I don’t know what does. I’m not trying to romanticize childbirth, but it is kind of special.
Maybe you should have said NATURAL instead of routine, but you didn’t. Maybe your analogy should have been sex instead of poop, but it wasn’t. Why DID you choose the words that you did? I think that you are perplexed at the response of some of us here to your words because you are still somewhat unaware of the underlying mindset that they accidentally reveal. Sorry to be an amateur pyschoanalyst from a distance, but that’s how I see it.