I live in a country where little showers for your nethers next to the johns are commonplace. Toilet paper only exits here to dry your bumhole after you’re done spraying it clean.
As someone who was born in a country where TP is used to clean your bum - or rather, smear faeces all over it and irritate the hell out of it when you use too much TP, I now realize how utterly stupid and barbaric that was.
Wanna replace toilet paper forever - or at least reduce its usage dramatically? Make bidets compulsory. And Japan should know: they’re the world’s capital of high-tech bidets.
Is this a hot country or the bidet uses heated water? I shudder at the thought of freezing my asshole with the cold water we get in Scotland.
In people’s homes, it’s actually connected to the regular water faucet. The button on the shower head simply diverts the water from the faucet to the shower head as long as you press on it. So the water is as warm or as hot as you care to set it.
In public bathrooms, like in office buildings, hospitals and such, the shower head has its own water supply with a hot-cold mixer knob, so you don’t have to lean over to run the faucet.
nice!
Can a bidet beat wetwipes, though?
Consider the spray of poo-stained water that is released when a toilet is flushed with the lid up, clearly visible with UV lighting. Now imagine that coating your genitals. And your clothes, your face, and your respiratory tract. That’s a bidet.
You can wipe stuff down with toilet paper and hope the aerosolized poop didn’t get to places you didn’t reach in too high quantities. But realistically your clothes and face are going to have a fine mist of poop on them.
With wetwipes, there is no skin irritation or coating your body with poo. It’s easy to mechanically pass over everything to ensure there is no poo stuck to the outside of your body. The skin is sterilised and moisturized.
Then you lower the lid and the toilet sprays your shins with poop when you flush. But hey it’s progress.
The moisturizing/sterilizing part of wetwipes isn’t reusable, but neither is body lotion or hand washing soap. And in principle you could make wetwipes out of fine cloth and wash them.
That’s a bidet
Like I said, there are no French-style bidets or Japanese-style techno-johns here. Most johns have a small dedicated shower head next to them.
I suppose if the previous user’s business is still on the shower head, you will get some of it on your own rear-end when you turn the water on first thing. That’s why I usually “flush” the showerhead for a second directly into the bowl before directing the jet onto my rear-end.
I’m pretty sure it’s more than sanitary enough. Not perfect, probably, but it’s probably fine. How do I know? Because most people here - including I - don’t seem to get sick more often than the rest of the world, and have a long life expectancy.
Can a bidet beat wetwipes, though?
Probably not. But wet wipes are an environmental disaster. Not to mention, if you’ve ever had to call a septic service in the middle of the night because all the toilets in the house are backing up, because your septic tank is chock-full of those hateful things - that are anything but biodegradable, if you didn’t know - you know better than to use them.
Also, if you have to use several of them because you bum is exceptionally dirty, they too will irritate your rear-end because of friction, like TP does. Just less so.
I keep wet wipes in my bag and in my car as a last resort for when I travel somewhere where a spray-based bum cleaning option isn’t available - which may be a bathtub or a shower with a detachable head in the vicinity. Otherwise I stay clear the hell away from them. But they sure beat TP any day.
Sorry, maybe I should have been more explicit. When the water has scoured some feces off your anus, it splashes back into the bowl. That splash causes the mix of water and fecal matter to aerosolize and spray up to cover everything.
How do you know someone is using a bidet? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
That’s a weird response to a comment totally relevant to the post
Made with AI
Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.
I’m glad youtube now has a warning like this.
Sorry, didn’t watch the video. The topic was blatantly obvious and the AI script was soooo bad that it was redundant to label the video as made with AI.
Didn’t read. Is it three shells?
poop knife
It is just a typical Japanese bidet. I wish they were more common outside of Japan.
They need to make them affordable. Ridiculously overpriced in North America.
Reeeeally… First search on Amazon is a page full of sub $50 options. https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=bidet It literally took me 5 seconds to find them.
