Hacker News Reader

Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

This might be TMI but I never understood toilet paper. Think about it. You are taking a piece of paper and just spreading it around. No matter how hard you try it's still there. It's not clean. Gross.

In fact, the use of toilet paper has spurred a whole new industry that most other countries don't have...the ointment industry.

Washlets or bidets are far cleaner and preferred.

View on HN

Seems like that same logic would obviate the dish cloth/sponge, dust cloth, mop, and towel too. Since these devices actually work, I suspect you're thesis is kinda wrong. Needless to say, when you wipe with an "clean" cloth, some of the material you want to remove sticks to the cloth and gets removed, leaving less on the surface being cleaned. Some number of repetitions pushes the concentration down below whatever it is you want to consider your target.

It works no differently for poop or spilled gravy.

I'll take no position on the bidet vs. paper debate.

> It works no differently for poop or spilled gravy.

Let's assume you have poop on your hands, would you clean yourself with paper?

(First off, let me just say how hilarious it is that no less than two people are actually downvoting me over a bidet comment. I eagerly await more.)

If I had to, sure. You realize people did this successfully for like... always, right? Sure, detergent and water and abrasion works better, but bidets don't provide two of those three elements.

What you're really wanting to compare is getting shit (just call it shit, OK?) off your hands with only toilet paper or only water, I guess. And if I was really forced to make that choice... honestly, I'd want to see numbers. Toilet paper will 100% absolutely get things visually cleaner than mere washing at household faucet flow rates. Go try it sometime.

Water from a properly-functioning bidet certainly does provide water and water abrasion, since the pressure is far higher than an open pipe. In fact, if a bidet is activated full-blast without someone on it, it will typically reach the ceiling. Furthermore, almost all detergents will damage the anus, so that is not something desirable for this application; even those detergents that work for some people will cause excessive dryness of the skin for others.

If one is willing to use their hand to provide abrasion, merely poured water enables far superior waste removal than toilet paper. This can easily be tested by using swabs and agar plates, which I did in my childhood to my own satisfaction; I'd be surprised if peer-reviewed experiments haven't yet confirmed this, but I haven't looked for them either.

> If one is willing to use their hand to provide abrasion, merely poured water enables far superior waste removal than toilet paper.

Trouble is, you then have excrement on your hand. So perhaps there is a trade off between having a clean butthole and a clean hand?

Another benefit of toilet paper is immediate feedback - you can wipe and inspect the paper, then repeat with clean paper until you are satisfied with the result. With poured water, how do you know when you are 'done'?

'I'll take no position on the bidet vs. paper debate.'

In the UK bidets are not that common but in Spain, where I live atm, they are.

Now I'll reveal my ignorance by stating I thought one was meant to compliment the other.

Speaking of TMI, one solution (ahem) to spreading feces around is to spit on one side of the toilet paper and then wipe. After several repetitions with fresh paper/saliva, the paper will come back relatively clean and you can then use plain paper to dry.

(I learned to do this from my Asian mom. When I finally did travel to Japan, I greatly preferred their washlets to US-style toilets.)

EDIT: adjective/quantifier, punctuation, adverb

But when you use water - don’t you get your hands dirty? At least with paper you have paper to do all the work instead of your fingers?

You can wash your hands with a nice antibacterial soap. It's easy and very clean.

Isn't every soap antibacterial?

Yup. But some have extra stuff that poisons you and your environment too marketed to rubes as 'antibacterial'

No most are just detergents that make the dirt loose and then you wash it off using water. Anti-bacterial soap kills the bacteria before you wash them off using water.

Yes, regular soap is as good as killing bacteria as anti-bacterial soap: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20070817/plain-soap-...

It's also bad for you and the environment, and completely unnecessary.

Don't care. I just want to clean my hands.

Soap gives you clean hands. Antibacterial soap gives you super bugs.

My hands get dirty using shit tickets. I hope you know yours do too. You do wash after rubbing a highly porous sheet of paper around in your poops, don't you?

You can use more than one piece at a time though?

Your hands do not get dirty because you just wet half the toilet paper. Only half of it really touches you, the other half is what you're holding. Either way, your bum is clean because of the water vs. using dry toilet paper.

But in the end, it doesn't beat a washlet or bidet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com