Dirty talk

120 students seated in rows. Listening. Not hearing, but listening to the teacher’s wisdom. Taking it all in. You learn about perception, nonverbal signs, how haptics is an important part of maintaining relationships…

You daydream a little bit and allow yourself a mental trip outside the classroom. Thinking about the workout you’ll do later, what you need in your fridge, every now and then glancing at the clock, counting down the minutes till you get off. You occasionally hear “selection,” “organization,” “cognitive schemata,” but all of a sudden it evolves into “cuddling,” “intimacy,” and “sex.”

Snaps you back into reality. Both because it’s pretty out of context and because the word is an attention-getter. The teacher starts to talk about how his friend and his friend’s wife haven’t had sex in a year and a half. Asks the student if sex is an important part of a relationship? And suddenly the intimacy level of the class is at a whole other level.

Certain words are more difficult than others to get over our lips, because they’re a taboo to talk about or suffer from previously being a taboo. Like sex. Back in the days, this was not something you’d talk openly about, which is why you don’t say the word on autopilot like you do with milk. You never think about it when you say the word “milk.” But you become very conscious about your uttering when you say out loud the word sex, no matter how natural you try to make it. It changes the conversation.

Sometimes the ‘difficulty’ of saying some words or sentences varies within different languages. English is not my mother tongue, and saying ‘dirty words’ in English is just seemingly much more innocent. “I love you” in my own language is much more difficult to get over the lips than saying it in English, because it doesn’t have the same meaning to us who don’t have English as our first language.

Even these particular three words are an interesting kind of “everyday life-taboo,” because you don’t talk about it and the meaning of it until someone has said it out loud, but both parts involved think about it. And if someone says it and the other one don’t say it back – boy we’ll have an awkward situation.

There is a huge difference between thinking or reading these tabooed words and then saying them out loud. Getting them over your lips. You become much more conscious about your uttering and turn off the autopilot. It is a curious thing why we react this way around “dirty” words or awkward subjects like “I love you, I love you not.” They are an attention-getter and they change the ‘mood’ of the conversation. But practice makes perfect right? So practice may make natural as well.

Tabooed parents

The bus smells like lunchboxes. There is a loud buzz of screams, talk and laughter reflecting the kids’ expectations. You’re sitting in the warm, soft bus seat, feet way above the floor, swinging front and back, and your nose is pressed against the window as you keep your eyes focused on mom and dad. They wave up until you’re no longer visible in the horizon.

You kiss them hi and goodbye.

The school entrance is busy in the morning with students crossing in and out. Dad drove you to school, but you made sure to tell him NOT to kiss or hug you when you got to the school. God that would be embarrassing if any of your friends saw you. It’s a taboo now. You prefer him just dropping you off outside without anything, might throw a small wave at him, but other than that you have to be cool. Independent. Grown up.

You go to parental meetings at the school, hoping and praying that your parents won’t say anything embarrassing or act stupidly.

You get your first boyfriend and tell your parents NOT to tell the story about how “cute” (meaning how many embarrassing things you did) you were as a baby.

You finish college and go on a voyage around the world, hug your parents and wave at them like crazy in the airport.

Growing up, there will be a lot of things that seem like a taboo for your parents to do in your eyes. There’s a very clear distinction between when it’s ok for them to kiss you hi and goodbye (low age), wave (still low age), not do anything at all (including not waving) and craziness NOT being appreciated (teenage), wave again and craziness being appreciated (older and mature age).

As you grow older, what was seemingly a tabooed action can, when looking back, be appreciated as fun, caring, lovely, nice or you name it. Also, physical actions get another meaning as you enter different stages of your life. That’s why you don’t keep kissing your parents hi and goodbye… But it is also because it becomes a taboo to be too addicted to your parents, or to be seen as a “little kid”, when all you want in that pre-teenage phase is to be older. As you do become older, you learn that you’re in no rush to be “grown up” and start appreciating these things.

Bottom line is that you change your perspective throughout life. As you grow on life-experiences, you grown on lenses to see the world through.

A now world-renowned dad one day got an idea to dress up to wave at his 15, now 16, year old son and the highschool bus. It evolved into a huge blog-project, where the dad, Dale Price, dresses up in a new costume – every day – and waves at his son. Now at first, his son thought it was dead embarrassing, but later he started to kind of appreciate his dad’s craziness. It reflects how taboos tend to change with the age. Dale Price probably hasn’t looked at the dressing-up-part in the same way his son did. Because as a teenager, parents standing out from the norm is the worst – but as a parent, it’s fun. When the teenager ages a bit, he or she might find it fun as well, because fitting in suddenly isn’t so important. Breaking up with taboos may be more important.

Would you be embarrassed, as a teenager in a sensible phase, if you left every morning to join your friends in the highschool bus, looking at this? And would you find it funny now?

Embarrassing grocery shopping

You struggle to make your eyelids go up like curtains that are pulled down to fly up and let in the sunlight. You wink a few times on the way though, since the light is a dash too sharp for your groggy eyes. Your head has a visit from a bunch of artisans who are doing a very good job pounding on the inside of your skull. As you take a big, deep sigh and breathe out, you get a hint of why your head is pounding like this as you’re struck by a smell of vodka-juice and yesterday’s escapades come to you in a quick glance.

All you want, all you need, all you crave, is junk. Eatable junk, that is. So you continue the struggle to get out of bed, get in some clothes and tie your shoelaces. All is sort of happening in slowmotion and with multiple pauses in between. The artisans are really working hard now.

As you try to decide what type of junk you’re craving the most, your feet automatically head towards the supermarket. As you enter, you can feel your stomach somersaults of joy by the thought of pizza. So you go to the frozen section to pick one up. However, you struggle, this time not with any physical action, but with the decision of not caring about the cashier’s thoughts about your lonely, fat life when buying for one person (cause he or she doesn’t know why you wanna go on a junk-flip) or caring, being embarrassed and buying for two so it will look like your greasy eating plan is not just yours – but you and someone else’s.

How come these junk-flips are okay as long as you’re having them with someone, but embarrassing if it’s just you on your own? And how come we care so much about what goes through the cashier’s mind? So much that we would even consider buying two pizzas instead of one, if this is the only thing we came to get. It’s even more embarrassing if the pizza gets to lie on the cashier band for a long time and shine “I’m gonna be greasy, just me, on me own” whilst the customer in front produces waiting time due to whatever the reason.

Cashiers get hundreds of customers through during a day, but for some reason, we tend to think that they notice and judge exactly our goods. So we feel better about buying a dozen of other things that we don’t even need, but which can conceal the pizza, or buying two pizzas to make it look like it is a twosome planned thing. Or something else for that matter. Have you ever witnessed someone take courage to buy condoms? That’s hilarious (and time-consuming).

A lot of things are seemingly kind of a taboo to take through the cashier. But the cashier’s really don’t care what you buy. So why do we believe they can judge our entire person, life and situation from what we take through?

Hopefully the cashier won’t take this long when you buy embarrassing groceries:

Smelly adventures…

You have a tale of women waiting in line behind you. Classic. Had the symbol on the door been dress-less, it would be line-less. It’s your turn next. A door flings open and you walk with targeted steps towards the booth.

The moment you put your hand on the handle and push the beige, shiny hospital-like door open, your nose instantly reacts to the heavy odor that flows to meet you. Someone’s been doing some number-two-business in here. But you have to continue on your path. Getting uncomfortably close to the toilet bowl, you try to slip your way past it without touching it. Why do toilet doors open inward? Finally inside, door closed and lock turned, you fumble with your purse to hang it on the coat so it won’t touch the floor. Somehow everything seems a bit more bacteria-filled because of the smell.

You struggle to breathe as little as possible. However, you run into a dilemma – if you breathe through the nose, the stink will make your lunch turn 360 degrees. But if you breathe through the mouth, the particles of the smell will go straight down to your stomach. Not a very pleasant thought.

That is probably not your biggest worry though. As you finish your business and get ready to snake past the toilet bowl to get out and breathe again, you worry about the next person in the line. This one will highly likely assume that you can take credit for the smell. It would be awkward to mention that you really can’t, but it’s at least as awkward when you as you exit the booth and she enters meet her eyes and you know that only seconds later she will get hit by the smell…

This is a funny, somewhat “tabooed” part of our everyday life. In public as well as in private restrooms, the awkwardness speaks for itself. Smells from restrooms are an embarrassing subject that you don’t talk about unless in an inner monologue. No one comments it, although everyone thinks about the same thing, perhaps in an inner monologue. Who did it? It’s like trying to trace the farter – we can all smell it, but no one will pledge guilty. Still everyone has an idea of who might be the criminal… Same goes for smelly restrooms!

Booyaha – take a look at a few pieces of advice on how to avoid toilet odors.

Are you finding something up there?

No one is looking? Good. Let me just get this little fucker out. Tucking my finger a bit further into the dark, just to get everything. Ah, such a relief to get this chunk of all-the-best-from-a-long-day-at-work off my nasal wall. Delicately flipping it off by the feet to make sure it’s out of the way. A mid-aged guy has gone hunting in his nose, searching for bugaboos and cleared breathing ways, unaware that this scenario unfolds perfectly clear before my eyes. Invisibility doesn’t apply to you just because you’re in a car. When queuing or waiting in line for a green light, people have a tendency to slide into their own worlds and – maybe partially subconsciously – perform these tabooed behaviors that they would normally never do outside the walls of the house. They forget that the driver of the car in front of them can see their every move. So could I with this mid-aged guy when we were waiting for a green light. And boy did he went hunting. I kind of hope he also caught something after making such a great effort.

It’s a funny thing how picking one’s nose is a kind of social taboo. Every once in a while, you have to clear up and clean out up there, but if asked, of course you never do it. This blog post also picks up how we will never do certain behaviors in the presence of others, whilst there is logically nothing wrong with them. But logic doesn’t always fit our social behaviors. However, had I caught eye contact with the mid-aged guy, he would have been snapped into a sudden awareness of his socially tabooed act and become embarrassed. Kind of like the tale of Adam and Eve – you’re not embarrassed about your nakedness – or socially tabooed act – until you become aware that someone else’s eye is fixed on you. Maybe it’s an idea to throw this awareness overboard. Kids pick their noses all the time. In front of others even. If they catch something good, maybe they’ll stick it in your face with a proud smile. Maybe they’ll eat it. It’s ok because it’s kids. Right? They project what we all do. But because they haven’t been spun into the social awareness yet, it’s okay.

Welcome to a world of tabooyahas

You’ve just entered a virtual room that will make you go tabooyaha. Taboos, booyahs and ahas will float together in a humorous look at the silent sides of the everyday life. Here, the things that are unsaid will be said. The things we all think but never say out loud, will be said out loud. You could call these “things” everyday life’s little taboos. This blog is room for “untaboonizing” it through a written voice. I will zoom in and focus my gaze on the tiny details that tail embarrassment along. That makes us a little uncomfortable. That puts our brain on overtime to find a proper way out of the situation. And I will zoom out to look at it in the perspective of relations between the involved parties.

As an appetizer, I’ll throw out words like body parts, toilets, alcohol, sounds and smells. Imagine you, as a female student, notice your male teacher has his fly open…

He’s standing in front of a class of nearby 50 students, wavering his arms, eagerly walking around the class to “get to everyone”, even the ones in the back who sat there to avoid being “gotten to”. You know very well that everyone in the class, as well as yourself, struggles to keep their eyes from constantly floating towards his special area. The poor guy wanders around the classroom, unaware of his “openness”. As you as students are seated and he is standing, you get dropped one level closer to this scenario that is unfolding below the belt. Should someone, slash you, tell him? Awkwardness rises due to the teacher-student-relationship (God forbid you’d embarrass your teacher), and male-female regarding the sexual tension of the bodily area, you’ll undoubtedly fix eyes, conversation and attention of 50 students on.

Why is this transboundary? I will begin my journey into this taboo-jungle and try to illuminate the embarrassing, uncomfortable and unsaid. The scene will be set in the everyday life – in the trolley, in the supermarket, public restrooms… Just to name a few. My hope is that you get a few tics along the way, looks of recognition in the mirror and maybe even catch yourself with a glimpse of a smile.

Booyah, aha, and tabooyaha!

Bonus: Click to see another type of “Taboo”