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There are plenty of works in which the male characters could not plausibly talk about taking a shit. Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
Ultimately, fiction more often than not wants to show humans as they would like to be, not as they are. If humanity could reinvent itself according to its ideals, it would probably not poop.
(It's often downright jarring when fiction that otherwise has no pretense to cynical realism does involve defecation. I remember being jarred when Soukou Akki Muramasa's protagonist made sure to take a dump before getting in his robot armour.)
Apparently GRRM made up for all the lack of Tolkien talking about going to the latrine where there is no latrine. Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume, back in the before days when it was first published.
Unprecedented foresight and wisdom.
After getting burned by the Wheel of Time series, my "never start a fantasy series unless it's finished" rule has spared me from several much-hyped series that look like they will never be finished (GRRM and Rothfuss immediately come to mind).
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.
It seems to me that for many writers the fun is kind of in making up the story as you go along. JK Rowling who has had a pretty consistent regular output for 30+ years now, along with those thriller writers like Coben who churn out books on the regular, seem to do this - you can tell because they all suffer from the kind of plot holes that would be easily avoided if the whole story was very tightly plotted before the bulk of the writing began. They will usually have an idea of the vague events and ending, but most of what happens in terms of scene to scene or location to location stuff is probably decided at the time of writing.
By contrast, I think Martin probably suffers from the opposite problem. My suspicion is that he has known exactly how this story plays out in relatively minute detail (whether or not he shared all that detail with the show creators) for a long time because his great joy is world building, to the point that the actual writing is no longer a creative exercise in the same way. All that is left is hanging the prose of dialogue, description and second-to-second mechanical stage direction on the frame that he’s had in his head for many years, which is distinctly unsatisfying when one’s passion is imagining the setting and the grand sweep of events therein.
Classic pulp fiction and YA and mystery and adventure writers who churned out hundreds of books almost never cared about worldbuilding. Agatha Christie, Clive Cussler, these types had supporting characters come and go, backstories shift, large background elements were taken up and discarded, continuity was often broken with regularity to the point that even the ages of the protagonists often didn’t seem to make sense.
Yeah, I get the impression that is Martin's problem. He's worked it all out, he knows what the ending is, and it just needs to be written. But that's the boring part that he's already done in his head. So instead he sets off down rabbit-holes with new stories (like "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms") to occupy him, because mentally he's already finished with the Starks and the rest of them. He knows what comes next, there's no fun in writing it because there's nothing that will pop up along the way (which is why he gets distracted by side characters on their side missions with "ooh, what's this, what is going on here?" and meanders off for five hundred pages).
Yeah and it's probably why the story isn't going to be finished. The polite thing to do would be to share the description with the fans or let somebody else finish the story.
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