Cultures regulate body functions to deny their animal nature

Evidence

Men of the Chagga tribe in villages on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro traditionally wear anal plugs throughout their adult lives, pretending to have sealed up the opening as if they never needed to defecate. The Kikuyu of Kenya believe that men and women have strong sex drives and that sex is necessary for health and sanity. However, wives are forbidden to touch their husband’s genitals, and husbands must not touch their wives’ nipples with their mouths or hands. A man must lie on top of a woman with her legs around him. Any violation of these rules is believed to be fatal. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 553

Categorization

• CANDY: The Chagga anal plugs and Kikuyu fatal sex-rule violations are absurd, great dinner-conversation facts.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both deal with cross-cultural regulation of the body as identity signaling, here extended to taboos on genital and excretory contact.
• XREF: Parallels Norbert Elias’s ‘The Civilizing Process’ on bodily taboos and embarrassment as markers of cultural superiority. — connects to: The truism humans are animals is revolutionary because western culture denies it — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 51