When The Going Gets Tough . . .

Apparently, we take our bathroom habits for granted when we really shouldn't because, like James Kotecki's political satire, American toilet hygiene is not something to be especially proud of. But no one is talking about how using toilet paper is not the best way to get clean "down there."

The world divides into water cultures and paper cultures. This comes into quite stark relief in Japan because Japan used to be a paper culture. Two hundred years ago they used sticks or stones or paper. And now, because Japan has had a toilet revolution, they've turned into a water culture, and they have very high-tech toilets with in-built bidets and drying systems that can massage you and probably sing to you.

But the U.S. and the U.K. stubbornly remain paper cultures, and attempts to introduce bidet toilets have failed. Hygienically, bidet toilets are infinitely superior. Using toilet paper to clean yourself down there makes about as much hygienic sense as cleaning yourself with a towel and imagining you're rubbing off the dirt. We've got a very unhygienic way of cleaning a place of our body that we would like to be very clean.

Overall, better bathroom hygiene "has added 20 years to the modern lifespan, so this thing that we won't even discuss is actually responsible for perhaps decades of all of our lives." But, like lots of things, we could be doing it better.

Head over to Salon to read the full article.