Naked Butts

Time for a little social commentary by Cait… I have been pretty careful about writing about NOT writing most things that are strange and bizarre because I really don’t know what sort of higher powers read blogs and what sort of things are censored and cause lowly ESL teachers like me to disappear or something horrible along those lines… but then I realized that as long as I am not using certain words or encouraging anything bad there is really nothing to be angry about… I hope!

So one of the craziest things that I have seen is that the majority of babies here don’t use diapers. Seriously. I mean, it would be a hell of a lot of diapers filling up the landfills (or tossed out to sea) from all the people that live here, so that I can understand, but it is still a bit strange to see kids with their naked bits hanging out of their pants. See the pictures, then you can have a visual as you read this next part. I posed for the pic so she could avoid looking like a nasty old lady with butt close-ups… You have to double click on the actual photo so you can see the butt up close... I will look for some better pictures...





It used to be funny. I thought it was so cute to see these little smooshed butts peeking through the split pants that the kids all wear. Then it was just gross when the kids are just held over the grate in the street to go to the toilet, so you are probably stepping in some sort of human waste product at all times. I realized that most of the time adults do the wiping and then don’t wash their hands… and throw the trash on the street. Except for this one time my mom and I saw this mother with her kid in the grocery store and she was having him pee in the middle of the aisle… So yeah, it gets nasty. Then for a while the spite in me thought it was funny when I would see a baby pee on it’s parent or grandparent. And I stopped using carts if I could help it because the only thing I think of is a naked butt and however clean that naked butt is as it sat in the child seat on the cart… But then I thought about all the other places I sit… like seats on buses or trains or public park benches… There has surely been a split-pantzed little one sitting on that seat… But in the big picture, I come into contact with much nastier stuff than a butt on a daily basis so I guess it doesn’t matter.

I don’t really know how I feel about the whole thing anymore, except it is so quintessential to this country. Kinda gross, kinda backwards, kinda endearing and simply dirty. Perhaps I should write my public health school statement about crapping on the street…