What Ancient Romans Used Instead of Toilet Paper

I see what you did there.

I can immediately see the application of a tersorium, but not water and soap.

And to demonstrate this they used human stature (height) as a way to workout the effect of this practise on health and well being, and the results were constinent with the hypothesis.

Conclusion: People are taller in the countries where toilet paper is used.

Unfortunately, few minutes of googling didn't turn up any links now.

The problem with using hands is that the people often shortcut and do not wash hands properly now if you don't use hands, then this entire problem disappears.

What do you value more, then money spent on toilet paper or the time spent washing your hands properly?

The law of life is that people will often take shortcuts where it is possible to take one and along the way suffer consequences which weren't in their mind at that point because all they wanted to achieve then is to get through this fast enough to do something else later.

To get best of both, there can be a service where someone else washes you but then you lose privacy and you need to allow others to touch you but then it's also possible if that person's health suffers then you might also suffer on subsequent contact.

Also - how do you prevent the bidet from becoming a fecal squirtgun? It sits inside the toilet no? Aren't you in effect washing off with everyone's shit mixed in?

The way I was taught as a Middle Eastern man was: first use toilet paper at least three times to remove the majority of the material. Secondly, hold the spray hose or the bottle in your right hand and point downwards towards your perineum from the FRONT of your legs. Use your left hand to lift your junk and have two fingers down there. Now pour water over your left hand towards the perineum, and let the fingers carry the water and rub to clean out the ass crack. Usually a single litre water bottle is enough to feel extremely clean and refreshed. This method obviously works better if you’re squatting, but I use it with western toilets too. The most common mistake people make is to try and put their hands behind their back or pour the water from behind - makes a mess and doesn’t clean right. The imagery of the cleaning motion is like a woman fingering herself.

But for a short answer:

1. Just water, the pressure is more than sufficient. Hell, it's too much sometimes.

2. You can get models that air dry, but even the good ones aren't too quick, so it's pretty common to use a few squares of TP to dry.

3. Depends on you. If you habitually sit off-center you might actually get a wet cheek. Otherwise it's eerily spot-on.

4. I don't know about using soap on my butt. That seems like it would be ... irritating. Water is plenty by itself.

I recommend trying one of the cheapo ones (Neo, for example), as they will give you an idea of what a washlet is like for a tenth or less of the cost. No heated seat or water, but I found that to be less of an issue than I expected. I bought the cheap one to see what I thought, and a couple years later I still haven't bothered upgrading to a Toto. I like the cold water. But where I live, it's not that cold.

Here's a pretty affordable one: https://www.amazon.com/Abedoe-Upgraded-Handheld-Sprayer-Oper...

Mine isn’t fancy, it doesn’t use power, just water pressure. The only setting is for front (for people without a penis) or for back (for everyone with an anus), and a knob for pressure.

You poop, and when you’re done, without getting up, you turn it on, and the jet of water shoots upward and hits you in the butt. It’s within an inch or two of the hole, and you can easily feel where it’s hitting you. A little wiggle/adjustment of your body on the seat to get it aligned (oh, you’ll know) and then you wait about 2-4 seconds. A little leaning of your body in the forward/backward axis (an inch or two, maybe) to sweep the crack, then you’re clean and you turn it off. Usually a second flush (if you’re the courtesy flush type like me) and the whole event is like it never happened.

Your hands are never involved, except to turn the knob on and off.

I don’t end up wet enough that I need TP at all—haven’t bought it in a year or more. It works more on pressure than water volume, sort of like the sprayer on a sink to rinse out a glass. Pretty much only the crack gets wet, it is more of a single focused jet than a spray. Some people like to use TP to dry afterwards, but there isn’t much water on you once you turn it off. It’s focused and it doesn’t really spray your cheeks or anything.

Mine was under $50 on Amazon. I buy one for every place I live in now, and couldn’t imagine going back. It’s night and day.

There are other kinds which are more of a sink sprayer kind where you hold the sprayer and have to do some aiming and whatnot; I have little experience with those. Mine is the squirting type that installs between the toilet seat the the ceramic bowl (“lux neo 120”).

In answer to your question: I find that the bidet gets rid of all of the poop the vast majority of the time. I just pat myself down with a small amount of toilet paper to dry myself off. If I see poop on the paper I give myself another rinse.

I can't handle dry wiping now. I save my poops for home.

Wet wipes are a nice upgrade for those that can't stand the thought of TP, although they're usually not that easy to dispose of when not at home.

The bananas too ! No comparison to the bananas in the US.

Many things are becoming more and more homogenous globally - but I found that weddings, funerals, and indeed toilets appear to be somewhat resistant to that creeping homogenisation.

Many regions don't really use toilet paper, such as Iran, parts of Indonesia, etc. Personally, I like to have it handy, though in case of emergency pages from a Lufthansa flight plan work (try that with an iPad... (and yes, flight plans were printed and freely distributed decades ago)).

More importantly though, many many regions provide an opportunity to wash with water, either via a separate bidet, or built into the toilet ("washlet", as famously in Japan), or with a hose (bidet shower) next to the toilet. A revelation.

If you think about it, using only dry toilet paper is really rather primitive and disgusting. When I build a house, it'll have a German washing machine and dryer (maybe Korean), and a Japanese toilet.

Did you buy one in the states?

If a bird shits on your hand will you use paper or water to clean it ? Its just that simple to comprehend. Just use water damn it. Cheap, hygienic, no left overs and green too !

The only use of toilet paper in that case would be to dry yourself off after.

Nevertheless, bidets are unavailable in (I would say) most households and definitely unavailable when not using the toilet at home. Furthermore, it's rather inconvenient to use it every time after going to the bathroom because one has to pretty much take off their pants and underwear in order to have proper access. Their only advantage is that they are still more convenient than showering.

The Japanese water toilets don't seem like such a great idea to me, for the same reason that properly washing ones hands after using the bathroom requires thoroughly rubbing them together for some time with soap, not just rinsing them with water: using just water doesn't work. Spraying pressured water will help with cleaning, but also spread fine particles of crap everywhere.

Toilet paper may not be as efficient as a bidet, maybe less efficient than using just water, but it still works and using those Japanse toilets or a bidet is really not the mind-blowing revolution that it's made to look like. As long as one cleans up after using the toilet, washes their hands properly and showers reasonably often, I don't see any advantage to all these contraptions. It's more of a squeamishness or comfort thing. And there's always wet wipes.

I was very, very confused about the hygienic requirements during a recent visit - turns out that they don't have the plumbing to handle the paper in the loo.

Now, how much land each tree needs, and how long it takes to grow is not exactly easy to calculate. But, something like 2 * 200 trees per acre / 20 years for fast growth forest ~= 1/20 acre of forest per person for sustainable production does not sound bad.

And that’s assuming you can’t use waste streams from some other processes like sawmills.

No thanks, I like a conversational story. This Wis written like how the author would tell it live. Humans remember things best when there is a bit of narrative to root the facts to.

Because short articles are penalized in search engine rankings.

* People are rewarded for how long they can keep people looking at ads, not how much value those readers find in their work.

* Finding/re-engaging an audience via aggregator sites such as this one is cheaper than maintaining an audience loyal to the quality of your journalism. For the most part, people click on titles, rather than domain names.

The end result is small amounts of content, disbursed as slowly as possible, with a clickbait title.

Having said that, I agree that a) this article was extremely light on facts, b) many other long articles about actually important topics digress way too much on setting the scene.

if it was just the answer paragraph + affiliate paragraphs you'd notice it, rule of thumb is one paragraph of content per one of cross-linking.

This style is leaking into documentaries too. The best example is "Wild Wild Country" – a six hour long docuseries where I still had to read the wikipedia page afterwards.