Aging & Wisdom Quote by Myriam Miedzian

She’s trying to weaponize shame against our most romanticized vice. By yoking violence to bodily functions, Myriam Miedzian doesn’t argue that aggression is “wrong” in some abstract moral sense; she reframes it as socially pathetic, a failure of self-control so basic we’d rather not be seen doing it. The line is provocative because it drags violence out of the realm of heroic narrative - soldier, avenger, tough guy - and drops it into the category of things civilized people simply don’t do in front of others.

The nuclear-age context is the accelerant. When the consequences of violence can scale from a fistfight to annihilation, old cultural permissions (“boys will be boys,” “sometimes you have to hit back,” “strength is dominance”) become existential liabilities. Miedzian’s intent isn’t pacifist purity; it’s harm reduction at civilizational scale. She’s asking for a cultural retrofit: treat violence the way modern societies treat public sanitation. Not eliminated by sermonizing, but curbed through norms, infrastructure, and swift social disapproval.

The subtext is a critique of how we currently distribute embarrassment. We’re trained to feel shame about bodies, vulnerability, and “mess,” while violence is often rewarded with attention, status, or cinematic glow. Her analogy implies that norms are malleable: if we could collectively decide that defecating in public is beyond the pale, we can decide the same about hitting, humiliating, and killing. It’s an actress’s line in the best sense - a punchy image designed to rewrite the audience’s emotional reflex.