I scoured the racks at my local Hallmark store from top to bottom, stem to stern, from the “Happy Belated Birthday” to the “Sorry to hear about your punctured lung” cards, but I didn’t have any luck.
As hard as I looked, I couldn’t find a single greeting card or knickknack to commemorate World Toilet Day. I guess I’ll just have to send flowers. That or some jasmine scented urinal cakes.
But I bet most of you didn’t even know Wednesday was World Toilet Day.
It’s clear you’re not as sentimental as I am. That’s for damn sure. What’s next? You gonna’ forget Christmas or Hanukah? Huh?
I know, I know, you’re just too wrapped up with work, appointments, and the mind numbing worry, worry, super-scurry, call the troops out in a hurry to remember every holiday, no matter how special.
Well, I guess I can’t come down on you too hard. After all, even Hallmark, ironically, decided to piss and shit on World Toilet Day and they didn’t even bother to flush, the cold-hearted corporate bastards.
But maybe you don’t think the toilet deserves its own day. I beg to differ, especially after flipping through Rose George’s new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters.
The thing that keeps gnawing away at me is the grim realization that not only does most of the world think our toilet habits are disgusting, but that they might be right.
Their logic is pretty much irrefutable.
You see, in the toilet world, there’s a clear ass-crack delineation between two camps: those that use paper, as in toilet paper, and those that use water to hose down their asshole.
To most of the world, using toilet paper to clean yourself makes about as much hygienic sense as rubbing yourself with a towel and imagining that you’re removing all the dirt.
Clearly, it doesn’t work. Need evidence? Take a look, if you dare, in the laundry hampers of almost any home where there are young boys or average not-so-fastidious adult males in residence.
Alexander Portnoy was one of the few who ever addressed this taboo subject:
Oh Doctor, I wipe and I wipe and I wipe, I spend as much time wiping as I do crapping, maybe even more. I use toilet paper like it grew on trees — so says my envious father — I wipe until that little orifice of mine is red as a raspberry; but still, much as I would like to please my mother by dropping into her laundry hamper at the end of each day jockey shorts such as might have encased the asshole of an angel, I deliver forth instead the fetid little drawers of a boy.
Alex, however, is not representative of the rest of humanity, as only 30% take paper to that particular orifice, the rest having always relied on cups of water, bidets, or some, like Japan, having recently made the switch to high-tech combination toilet/bidets.
Despite our soiled drawers, our toilets and paper have a huge advantage over most of the world. Our waste is magically flushed away from our houses, never to be seen again, except in the case of the occasional flood or backed-up sewer system when crows can be seen having a field day, feasting on rivers of undigested bits of corn and peas.
This flushing away is actually a huge sanitary deal.
Human waste is extremely toxic. It can carry bacteria, viruses, and worms, and there are 2.6 billion people on earth who have no access to a toilet whatsoever, including a latrine or even a bucket.
In India, they will drop homespun cloth and shit, so sari, wherever they can. That, or they have open defecation grounds on the outskirts of their cities, as they do in many countries, including Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Africa.
Children will do their business in these open grounds and tramp some of it back to their homes where some of it, invariably, ends up in their food. Someone, according to Rose George, calculated that people in these villages are probably ingesting 10 grams of it a day.
While some of these slums have public toilets, some have as few as 100 for 45,000 people. Many would prefer to resort to the use of “flying toilets” or “helicopter toilets,” which are euphemisms for the act of shitting in a plastic bag, tying it shut, and hurling it as far as you can into the next neighborhood.
Sadly, shitting in the woods or designated defecation grounds is probably preferable to what happens to the vast majority of the world’s sewage, as 90% of it ends up in rivers and lakes.
The toll on human life is incredible. The shit is ingested through drinking water or food and it kills 1.6 million children a year from diarrhea related disease, which is second only to respiratory infections as far as childhood mortality.
But thanks to our modern toilet, human life expectancy, at least in Western cultures, has increased roughly 20 years. If further evidence is needed, consider that prior to the introduction of the London sewer system in the 1850’s, one out of two children died before the age of two.
Incidentally, contrary to urban lore, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. While Crapper was a famous plumber who improved the functionality of the toilet, the true inventor was one Sir John Harrington who installed the first ceramic toilet in Queen Elizabeth’s Richmond, Surrey residence in 1596. (He was widely ridiculed for the invention and never built another.)
Despite all the good that the common toilet has done us, we’re still looked down on in the cleanliness hierarchy, with even the shit-anywhere-they-please Indians considering us unclean.
Indians can routinely be seen carrying paper or ceramic cups, but they’re not filled with Starbuck’s. Instead, they’re filled with water. They’ll stoop in a convenient spot, either out behind a tree, beside a road, or behind a billboard for Apu’s Tandoori-Style McNuggets and when they’re done defecating, they’ll use the water to cleanse themselves.
Still, the landscape is littered with steaming piles and the amount of photoshopping necessary to produce travel brochures must be mind numbing.
The Indian government has a program in place where they build latrines for Indian families, but it’s not working very well. For one thing, the latrines often end up being the nicest room the family has, so they turn it into a temple or a spare room.
Besides, in India it’s considered unclean to have a latrine near the house.
While most Middle Eastern countries have sewer systems, they too eschew the use of toilet paper, instead using water to cleanse themselves. This cleansing is always done with the left hand and thus it’s considered a grave insult to shake hands or hand over an item with your left hand.
They too consider Westerners filthy for our toilet habits.
Interestingly, Japan used to be a paper culture. Two hundred years ago they used sticks, stones, seaweed, or paper. They now employ fantastically high-tech combination toilet/bidets with heated seats and built-in dryers and you can even plug your MP3 player in them. This must be why I think I saw “Toilet Classics” on iTunes Essentials.
Anyhow, they’ve even introduced one version that zaps your urine with lasers and performs diagnostic tests on it to detect metabolic imbalances.
These “Washlets,” as they’re known, are constructed by toilet giant Toto, and more Japanese households own Washlets toilet than they do computers. Toto USA started up about 20 years ago, but growth is much slower than they’d hoped.
The Toto “Washlet.”
The most basic feature of the Washlet is a pencil-sized nozzle that emerges from the bottom of the seat and squirts water. It has two settings, one for the anus and one for the vulva, and they’re designated as “posterior wash” and “feminine wash.” The user selects the appropriate squirt by pushing the corresponding button on the control panel.
Even though the Japanese have seemingly taken toilet technology to a whole new level, they may have taken a step backwards as far as general health is concerned. Some experts think that the “throne” construction of the modern toilet has led to a cesspool of non sanitation-related ailments.
Apparently, sitting on a chair or throne isn’t the best physiological position to shit in. If you sit up instead of squat down, you supposedly never achieve complete evacuation, and incomplete evacuation is considered by some researchers to be a major risk factor for colon cancer.
Other illnesses allegedly exacerbated by sitting/shitting high up include hemorrhoids, diverticulitis, prostate and bladder problems, and even appendicitis. The associations between these diseases and sitting high up to defecate are compelling but hardly conclusive.
For instance, appendicitis was allegedly unknown before sitting toilets were introduced 150 years ago.
Likewise, prostate problems thought by some to be caused by bearing down to evacuate while sitting. This pressure causes the perineum to bulge out, which over the long term stretches and damages the pelvic nerves, resulting in loss of bladder control and loss of communication between the prostate and the brain.
Supposedly, researchers in Australia have been able to reverse bladder incontinence by simply getting men to squat instead of sit.
It seems to make sense. When you were a baby, you knew instinctively to squat down. Only after weeks of training and cajoling by your parents were you taught the proper, “civilized” way to shit.
Maybe “the King” would still be alive today if his rockin’ heart hadn’t burst while straining so to move his brick-hard bowels while atop his physiologically incorrect toilet throne.
It’s something to think about, especially if you printed out this article for some “library” reading.
