The Big Read: Real men don't poo

Pity the poo-flingers of Cape Town. Having managed to evade both the authorities and E. coli after their latest shit-and-run, the least they could have hoped for was some publicity. But apart from a Zapiro cartoon and a few cross letters from Nauseated of Newlands, they have hardly caused a ripple in the toilet bowl of public opinion.

Their mistake, of course, was to schedule their latest bout of drek-schlepping for three days before Women's Day. A few gallons of human effluent was never going to stand up against the tsunami of fresh, steaming bullshit that was the hoopla around a day that does nothing but remind women that men own all 365 days a year and have deigned to donate one of them, much as masters at the Cape gave their slaves the day off on Tweede Nuwe Jaar.

Inevitably, both women and poo-flingers were sidelined by last week's massive outpouring of fake activism. But even if the flingers had had the clear and undivided attention of the nation, it wouldn't have helped them. They might be appealing for some kind of human solidarity; they might be saying, in effect, "We're all in deep shit, so what's the plan?", but all the establishment can hear is "Pooooo!" It is one of the most deep-rooted and least interrogated taboos: the patriarchy might stoop to give women a day, but poo is the darkness that lies at the end of all things.

If you go to the loo at a certain eatery near my house, poo is the darkness that lies at the end of a porcelain shelf. The plumbing is more than a century old: the toilet is the ancestor of the modern German Flachspüler, designed to allow you to gauge your physical and emotional wellbeing by giving your Number Two a quick once-over. But Cape Town is not a Bavarian health spa. We return to our tables to talk about everything we're not supposed to - God, politics, money - but about what we've glimpsed on that little shelf. Never. To be a well-rounded man, the patriarchal zeitgeist tells us, is to suffer from lifelong constipation.

The television ads confirm it. Men don't poo. Yes, we get heartburn and indigestion, both requiring the insertion of tiny macho firemen into our stomachs, but apparently our food (which the ads tell us are hamburgers, garnished with explosions and lashings of unconscious homoeroticism) only ever comes up.

Women, on the other hand, are capable of pooing, but, perhaps because they are just women, they don't know how to do it properly. How else to explain that every single laxative ad is aimed at women, or, more specifically, at middle-aged women who wake up alone?

Perhaps it's understandable. According to the ads, young women don't eat anything but cereal designed to help "keep them regular", which, if the sensual stretches and coy smiles are anything to go by, is a euphemism for "have lots of multiple orgasms". After all that cereal monogamy, it's no wonder that their digestive systems are knackered by the time they reach middle age.

Clearly, the patriarchy has a problem with poo and has decreed it the preserve of prune-gobbling spinsters and the untouchable poor. Certainly, its distaste with anything that comes out of the human body seems to be growing: the day before Women's Day, a new television ad was peddling a sanitary pad with "odour lock", apparently because the smell of menstrual blood is luring wolves out of the woods and into our huts.

But perhaps such lunacy is inevitable when masculinity feels threatened, and there is no greater threat to its potency than having to admit that it does not have complete control over its own body. The patriarchy is built upon an assumption that a certain kind of masculinity is omnipotent, a shaper of worlds, the captain of its fate. And yet even iron-fisted tyrants must bend their knee to the despotism of their alimentary canal. They must concede that, like those insects taken over by a parasite that guides them to the food it prefers, they are foraging zombies, controlled by a length of tube.

When that Forbes 500 wunderkind claps to turn off his lights at night, his mighty brain must know that its true purpose is not to plan takeovers but to trick food into his mouth. For believers in masculine manifest destiny, that's a pretty crappy thought.

No doubt the flingers will continue to fling in justifiable desperation, Disgusted of Durbanville will continue to write letters, and the bowels of middle-aged women will remain a battle ground occupied by Big Pharma and Dumb Advertising.

But if the powerful and the constipated remain clogged and unmoving, little will change. And if nothing changes, the next time the shit hits anything, it may well be the fan.