EuroCrap
It’s true - there are toilets out there that don’t completely submerge your poop in water. In fact, there are toilets in developed countries that force you to inspect your crap in full form before flushing it down the pipes. And I’ll tell you what - I kind of liked it.
If you think your shit don’t stink, try taking one that remains, in all its glory, in the toilet bowl. Then, sit an extra few seconds on the seat and let the smell waft up like a pungent soup.
Philosophers have tried to describe what cultural differences in toilets mean about different cultures, but they got it all wrong. After experiencing these shitters firsthand, I can safely say that the styles are more a reflection on how these cultures treat people than their histories.
Spend a few days in Holland with a Dutch family and you’ll see: they’re more blunt, open, and averse to hyperbole. There is less to hide. When you greet someone, it’s not about how beautiful they look even if they’ve gained weight, it’s about, “Oh, you look like you’ve gained weight.” Nothing harmful, just honest.
In the U.S.’s attempts to hide our flaws, we cover them up. In the process, however, we don’t discover as much about ourselves. Shouldn’t we know if our body is changing odors, or if there is a slightly different hue to our droppings? All of these things are very telling of our health and diet, yet because they might reveal something bad about us (oh, that we actually poop), we choose to do our best to mask what comes out instead of inspecting and analyzing it.
Like all of our creations -whether they be written work, artistic drawings, culinary delights, wardrobe choices, or human waste - we should be critical of what we produce so we are able to edit and change the way we produce it in the future.
Americans, I believe, are more harsh on imperfections. The basic toilet structure is a reflection on this. For Dutch and German toilets that have this ’shelf,’ poop is expected to smell like poop. But when you walk into a bathroom in the states, whether at work or in you public, if you smell something, you automatically start thinking about ‘who dropped the bomb,’ not - oh this is a bathroom and it’s supposed to smell like shit.
As a foreigner in Holland, I have to admit, I was pretty scared when I sat up and saw a large mush of poop, forgetting the shelf when I sat down. I had a few moments of worry that the flush would not carry this dry mass to the bottom of the toilet and successfully wipe out the smell. So I did what any American would do - I lit a candle, flushed in intervals, and had the brush handy to take care of the bowl stains. And yes, the stains were very present. But you can’t just shit and pretend it didn’t happen.
Mark Madness September 16th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Author Philip Slater, in his 1980 book, “The Pursuit of Loneliness,” discussed something he referred to as the “toilet assumption.” The “toilet assumption” asserts that when society is faced with an annoying and difficult social problem, often the expedient policy of choice is to flush the problem “out of sight,” and consequently, “out of mind.”
Slater elaborated on his “toilet assumption,” saying that “the result of our social efforts has been to remove the underlying problems of our society farther and farther from daily experience and daily consciousness, and hence to decrease, in the mass of the population, the knowledge, skill, resources, and motivation necessary to deal with them.”
In other words, “just shit and pretend it didn’t happen.”