Beyond Occident

As an undergraduate in Cultural Anthropology, I feel that it is my scholastic duty, nay, my sacred duty, to boldly explore a new culture, especially in areas that may disgust my fellow Americans. And so I have lately been utilizing the bidet, in order to discover whether it truly offers a healthier and exciting alternative to toilet paper. My results? Fantastic! Although I must mention that the bidets at the AUC  are not separate from the toilet, as they traditionally are. They are similar to the one in the picture I have conveniently posted on this page.

The bidet in action!

The American Bidet Company has a fine critique of the often negative American impression towards the Bidet, and their observation on toilet paper particularly resonated with me:

Toilet paper has been perfumed, decorated in color, sterilized and made antiseptic, but nevertheless, it is still dry paper and only a step better in evolutionary improvement than the pages of the mail order catalogue or the barbaric plantain leaf.

But then they take the argument against toilet paper and general ridicule of bidet-use a step farther:

However, upon graduating from infancy to the stage of self reliant childhood, they are permitted to revert to the medieval custom of wiping and dry toilet paper. American parents are solely responsible for depriving their children of the appropriate guidance and education on this subject. Perhaps this is the result of the Puritanical American culture and heritage handed down through the years.

Exactly! Our puritanical history and upbringing has caused widespread deterioration to our collective lavatory  habits and has rendered Americans nothing but savages. Barbaric plaintain leaf indeed. As an aside, I recommend that no one visit the American Bidet Company’s website. It may prove to be scaring, particularly the home page, and I am mostly convinced it’s a fake. But it makes for great comedy.

As some of you may know, I have a ‘traineeship’ with the the Desert Development Center at AUC this semester, and I have been part of a group examining how the school uses water. Part of this has involved testing the water pressure on toilets throughout campus. We needed to test toilets on different days and on different floors to see how the water pressure changes.

My partner was a girl and so we had to sneak into bathrooms, after making sure they weren’t in use of course, since a guy following a girl into a bathroom is… uh… frowned upon here, to say the least. We tried looking as official as possible though, clearly displaying our wrench, pressure gauge, data collecting tools, etc. A cleaning lady followed us in once and spent a few minutes furiously cleaning the vanity until we left, which seemed strange since it was already in pristine condition. Anyway, after checking the water pressure on the second or so toilet, we test flushed it to make sure we reconnected it correctly. I was standing a couple feet in front of the toilet and was blasted from the bidet, as apparently the pressure had built up during our test. I was drenched. The whole episode was somewhat similar to the picture above.

This all reminded me of earlier in the semester, when our group was studying the condition/layout of bathrooms in the Administration Building to see if there was any leaks and to make sure it all matched up with the building’s blueprint (Wow, I never realized how much work I’ve been doing in bathrooms this semester). We kept finding bathrooms that were simply devastated. We were informed by maintenance that the water had been shut off during the weekend and when it was turned back on, the built up pressure in some of the toilet’s bidets, which had not been turned off properly, had shot through the ceiling tiles and otherwise flooded the bathrooms. I really can’t properly describe it. Imagine the scene in the Matrix when Neo and Trinity shoot up the front hall of the building that Morpheus is being held captive in. It looked remarkably similar to that, as the ceiling tiles and other lavatory features were in pieces everywhere. In fact, I can’t stop laughing every time I imagine what it must have looked like when it happened.