Why aren’t bidets more common?

I’m from the United States, and I’d heard of them as a kid.  I remember wondering why we didn’t have them there.  I even once asked my mom about it, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.  Instead of just shrugging and letting it go, I explained it to her, fully expecting her to take my side.  She did not.  She said, “Just use toilet paper.”

Yeah, OK.  I let it go.  I mentally added it to the long list of things I just didn’t understand about my own country and culture.

(This list includes, but is certainly not limited to:  Why can’t we vote for president directly?  Why is our folding money all the same color and size?  Why can’t I order food off the kids’ menu?  The list is actually pretty long.  Maybe that would be a good blog post…)

But this one really bothered me.  It made no sense.  If any American (or most people, really) touch shit with any other part of their body, nothing would do but to stop whatever they’re doing in order scrub that body part clean of any sign of said shit, including any smell.  If you had shit on your hand at all, for example, you’d be disgusted and you’d use water and soap – a lot of soap – to clean it completely off.  And yet, we just take a wad of dry paper to wipe this shit off your butt?  That’s all?  And it often doesn’t do a very good job, leaving skid marks in our underwear.  I never found that funny.  

When I finally left the U.S. I went to New Zealand (no bidets) and then Mexico (ditto the bidet sitch), but then I wound up in Indonesia.

Say what you will about the Muslim world; they could certainly teach the rest of us a bit about personal hygiene, though I don’t miss the social taboo of USING YOUR LEFT HAND.  The hygiene thing can go too far.

Anyway, all I could find on the Internet was reasons that bidets aren’t more popular in the United States.

(Of course, most of the articles talk about why they aren’t popular in “America”, which makes me crazy, because they actually ARE fairly popular in large parts of South America, but I know that by “America” they mean to refer to the United States, a usage that makes me grind my teeth – the Internet is not only Anglocentric.  It actually skews toward the United States in particular – another possible blog topic)….where was I?

Oh.  Yeah.  OK.  Anyway, no one seems to know the precise answer to this, but a couple of ideas ring true, even if they aren’t:

1. The French invented and popularized them back in the day, and because of that, the British rejected the idea just out of pissiness and their feeling got imported to the North American colonies, and

2. Americans (United Statesers?) first encountered them during World War II in European brothels, and from that they associated bidets with lasciviousness, as Americans do.

But bidets are awesome.  I haven’t lived without some form of one since I first encountered one in my toilet in Indonesia.

And there are a few different forms.  Up there at the top of this post, is a photo of a regular bidet, as a separate fixture.  I’ve never had one of these.  The first one I had was an in-toilet bidet, as in this picture:

This one has a control on the side of the toilet seat that the user can turn on and control without getting up from the toilet.  This is my favorite form.  Really cool.  It does, however, need to be aimed correctly so it sprays at the user’s asshole rather than to one side or another.  It can be controlled to thin or broaden the stream, for good cleaning.

More common, the type I had in China, some places in Indonesia, and now in Georgia, is what I call the ass hose, but I recently read is more euphemistically known as the shower bidet:

This can also be used easily by standing up to a squat over the toilet bowl and squirting at the areas you want to clean.

Another advantage of any type of bidet is that it saves a TON of money on toilet paper.  We in China heard about the run on toilet paper in the U.S. during the pandemic, and we found that mystifying.  I still don’t get it.  But with a bidet, you only need a square or two to dry yourself, and it comes out fairly white after.  If you have a bidet, running out of toilet paper is not the emergency it could become.  You can just air dry, and you’re good to go.

It’s just one of those mysteries of life, but I’m never going to live without a bidet again.