By Sasha von Oldershausen in the New York Times
Ed note: We have bidet toilet seats in both of our bathrooms. Several manufactures now make them to fit the standard toilet. Maintenance helped us with the installation. Europe and Japan are laughing at our rush for TP!
In recent weeks, as the coronavirus has tightened restrictions on public and private life, Americans have been hoarding toilet paper, their shopping carts piled high, as supplies were quickly depleted: the shelves, and sometimes whole aisles, bare.
What we buy in times of crisis says a lot about who we are. “The pasta shelves are empty!” cried an older man stepping out of an Italian grocery store in a video from February. It makes sense that one of the first things to fly off the shelves in Italy’s version of coronavirus panic shopping was pasta — not just because Italians love pasta, but because food is so tethered to the way of life there, it’s almost synonymous with living. (They weren’t as concerned about toilet paper; many Italians use bidets.)
When the virus hit Iran, middle-class families bought rotting fruit at a discounted price from vendors who put out their bruised and unsaleable produce each evening, according to one Los Angeles Times report, reflecting the strain that U.S. sanctions, and now the pandemic, have placed on the country’s economy and its people.
The food made sense to me. But as the new coronavirus has radically altered many of our needs and habits, I have found it hard to wrap my head around all the toilet paper.
I grew up with an Iranian Muslim mother, who had passed along the ritual of washing after every bowel movement. What began as a source of shame (“Why do you keep watering cans next to all your toilets?” my friends would ask when they came to our house) would eventually become a badge of honor. My bathroom hygiene was immaculate. I would never know skid marks, except as something grotesque and unfathomable, like fascism.
After I moved out of my childhood home, I continued the tradition, keeping one watering can for my windowsill plants and another for me. I began to proselytize to friends: We use water to clean almost everything else. Why make an exception on the commode? They would cringe, unable to push past the thought of digital contact with feces.
But in the face of a toilet paper shortage, could they be convinced?
“At the heart of this is the question of sanitation itself,” said Martin Melosi, the Cullen professor emeritus of history at the University of Houston and the author of “The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America From Colonial Times to the Present,” in a phone interview. “What does cleanliness mean?”