Essay #10 – Miles Horner – Violating a social norm.
I have always been a very gassy person. Growing up, it caused a lot of issues for me, especially around the dinner table, in classroom settings, and with extended family. It’s always felt rather arbitrary; it’s a natural, biological process that, when suppressed, can be genuinely detrimental to your gastrointestinal health. Even though I have conformed to the social norm of not passing gas in public places throughout much of my life, I would describe my relationship with it as one of compliance, not acceptance. I’ve never really accepted that it’s something I have to self-regulate. My anxiety is often demonstrated in my stomach + gastrointestinal system, and I find that sometimes the anxiety around conforming to social expectations around flatulence can start a sort of feedback loop — I’m nervous about farting in the wrong place, which leads to increased stomach activity, leading to more flatulence.
As a result, when presented with an assignment that requested for me to violate one social norm, this one was the one I felt obligated to choose. My week of farting wherever I wanted began. Social norms exist, largely, to uphold social order. They’re defined as “the unwritten rules that guide behavior, and are shared by a group of people.” I find Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment to be the most useful in understanding how flatulence, and what places it is socially accepted, could be understood as a social norm. In it, participants were placed in a group with two confederates, or actors working for the experimenter, and were forced to compare a set of lines. The confederates would intentionally give the plainly incorrect answer, and Asch was looking to see if the participants would choose to follow the group’s decision or trust their own internal judgement. 75% of participants conformed to the group’s incorrect answer at least once – demonstrating the power of other people’s opinions over your own. The inability for individuals to pass gas in public is incredibly tied to conformity – the only thing keeping people from doing so are cultural expectations; medically, you really should be passing gas whenever you feel the need to. That people constantly choose not to do so, the “incorrect,” answer, so to speak, is an example of conformity.
My week of choosing to not follow this social norm came with a combination of guilt and a sense of relative freedom. Even though I feel the social taboo around passing gas in public is a misplaced one, I still found myself needing to apologize to people who I passed gas around. These social norms are relatively powerful – even when I know that I don’t believe them personally, I still feel obliged to apologize for breaking them. The moment when I felt the influence of this social norm the most was during a dinner at a restaurant with a couple friends. After letting out a particularly loud fart, I was met with a genuine look of disgust from one of my closest friends, and experienced some genuine guilt and shame. The friend followed up that look by saying “Miles! We’re in a restaurant!”, reminding me of the same words my parents told me when I was younger and violated that same social norm. This forced me to think about the pervasiveness of these social norms, that the same attitudes and feelings around an action can present themselves in people from widely different backgrounds and very different ages. I also began to realize the relationship between flatulence and authority – the spaces in which we aren’t typically allowed to pass gas – the classroom, fancy restaurants, formal events, etc. – are places where authority often also resides. Flatulence, with an aggressive odor and abrasive noise, disrupts the clean, totalizing order that these spaces of authority try to cultivate. It also connotes a lack of respect; prying, since I knew I had to write this essay, I asked, “Why?" to which, my friend replied, "it's just not respectful." A week of breaking this social norm showed me that even small acts of defiance can reveal just how deeply ingrained these social norms are into the psyche.
A quick examination of a few Quora and Reddit forums that discussed the expectations around farting in other cultures shows how they vary quite a lot depending on culture. Someone spoke about the prevalence of farting in places like France, where it’s generally understood as a fact of life, and something that is even acceptable in popular culture. One commenter brought up the example of “Le Pétomane,” a showman who was quite popular for his farting in the early 1900s. This was in stark contrast to the experience of the Pashtun, an ethnic group in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “In all seriousness,” they wrote, “it can lead to being shunned, friendship breaking apart and not occasionally, actual violence.” The writer describes the cultural shock when being on a school bus with Punjabi children his age, watching them fart and laugh, saying, “It felt like blasphemy.” A common theme among all cultures represented in the forums was that as people got older, and they lost more control over their bodily systems, the culture’s respect for elders generally outweighed their distaste for flatulence. “Once you get super old and it’s harder to control your farts,” a Pashtun-American writes, “the respect for your elders trumps the fart culture.” Certain social norms and expectations can be outweighed by others, which is yet another example of conformity – even though one may truly believe that farting is reprehensible, if the generally accepted social opinion is that disrespecting elders is more reprehensible, the individual is very likely to conform.
Sources:
https://www.quora.com/In-which-cultures-is-it-acceptable-to-fart-in-public
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A9tomane
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