But the greatest of the standing-pee genre has to be Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke" (1999), in which Harvey Keitel tries to deprogram cult initiate Kate Winslet in Australia's outback. Halfway through the film, the naked Winslet breaks down and tries to kiss Keitel. He refuses and turns away. The sound of trickling water makes him look back, and he sees Winslet walking toward him, urine running down her legs. She embraces him, and this time he returns her kisses. The power balance has shifted, all because of urine. A few scenes later Keitel is crawling around the desert in a scarlet dress.

Winslet has said that she wasn't actually doing the deed in the scene -- what we see is a saline drip from a harness attached to her head -- though she did actually try it for real once. "The problem is, of course that the wee dribbles down one leg," she told Observer Life. (A little practice, using tips from Decker's Web site, and she wouldn't have had a problem.)

Whether they're real or not, the shock value of these pee scenes is undeniable. "I think it's basically just pushing it a bit further in the PG/PG-13/R slide game of the ratings system," says Northwestern's Kleinhans. "Hustler, now in a rather desperate struggle to recover losses due to its Internet competition, has begun using several photo layouts in each issue which include urination by females. This used to be a prosecutable no-no. But after the hair gel bit in "There's Something About Mary," all kinds of bodily fluids seem to have a new stature ... once you have the presidential stain on Lewinsky's dress, what further censorship can be evoked?"

Of course, pee scenes have been the dominion of hardcore porn mags since they first went to press. But Kleinhans is right. These days even tamer rags like Penthouse are in on the action. Maybe that's to keep abreast of the Web, which is a virtual clearinghouse of every type of pee (and other) fetish imaginable.

All that's left is poop, and that's already here. The recent remake of "Shaft" does not have a pee scene, as the title might suggest, but the second variety of bathroom activity. It involves a Puerto Rican gangster who's had it with a spoiled white fascist-type. During a conversation in the bathroom, he sits down, drops some kids off at the pool and continues his discussion. And on an episode of HBO's "Oz" last season, one inmate empties his colon on another. (These scenes, of course, fit into the PD subset.)

As if that isn't enough, there's an English TV show called "Drop Dead" that analyzes the stool of three contestants. In what is most certainly a low moment in the history of world television, the challengers must enter three onstage bathroom stalls and try to defecate. The one who produces excrement first wins 800 pounds ($1,200).

We're not at that point in the U.S. yet. But when you consider all of the imported television hits and Hollywood's current infatuation with reality TV, well, it's only a matter of time before someone figures out that it doesn't get much more authentic than real, live defecation.

In the meantime, something tells me that next season on "Sex in the City" Ms. Carrie Bradshaw may be a little bit less inhibited when it comes to pissing or getting off the pot.

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