It's Time for Americans to Get over It and Embrace the Bidet (2015)

Aerosolizing isn't a big deal because your butt is on the seat. It's nothing like the flush.

Finally, the TP that you use to dry is still quite a bit less than what you use to wipe. And it's so much easier on the skin down there - I'm currently staying at a place without a bidet, and it definitely adds to the discomfort around the day. It's something you don't know is an irritant until it returns.

Aiming really isn't a problem. For one, the water doesn't just come on at full blast, the control allows you to bring it up from off. It takes a few days to figure out where you setup is aimed and know how to position yourself there, and from that point on it's basically not a concern. Other fancier ones might have aiming capabilities that don't require you to move, I haven't found it to be something I feel I need, YMMV. Beyond that, you're sitting over everything and they aren't generally aiming far forward, so even if you miss at full blast, it's just going to hit you somewhere else.

After a few years of this, the only mess outside the bowl that has ever occurred was when the dog turned it on with no one on the seat (so to that end, put the lid down).

As for aerosolizing, not sure that there's been any particular studies but just speaking from a use perspective, again you're sitting over things keeping a lid on it as it were. The stream isn't exactly a pressure wash level of power (or at least, you can tune the stream to not be if you had really high water pressure) and if you were to imagine the effect of spraying a hose into a loose canvas awning hanging above you, that's generally how things happen. Lots of water sheeting of more or less straight down with a bit going to the side and down. A little wiggling about (again, since the Neo doesn't have any functionality to aim the nozzle) and you clean up even around the sides just fine and I would venture little is aerosolized and what little has been is largely contained in the same way having your lid down contains from flushes.

Yes, you still want to use a few squares of TP to dry up at the end, but if you sit for a few seconds, you'll drip dry most of the way, and 3-5 squares to pat dry is considerably less than used otherwise.

Wipe once with toilet paper (while on the toilet), then proceed to sit on the bidet. The water is not meant to flow on your butt, it's for your hands. Put soap on your hand (only one is needed), grab some water while sitting on the bidet, wash your butt as you would wash your hands, rinse with the running water, dry your butt with a towel, wash the bidet if necessary, go to the sink and wash your hands.

No poop in the air, no aiming challenge. It takes a bit of getting used to clean your butt without watching it.

1) "especially with no way to aim things before hand" - The precision and accuracy of the water stream is extremely high. On less sophisticated models, which can be had at local hardware stores and Amazon in the US for less than $50, you "aim" by adjusting your seated position. In other words, you bring your @* to the water stream. This sounds like more of a chore than it really is. It's a game of inches, not feet. More expensive models have some range parameters that can be changed for front and rear washing preferences.

2) "leads me to expect a mess being sprayed around the bowl" Practically speaking this has not been an issue for me.

3) "outside the bowl if you don't have a good seal" ??? You are seated on the toilet seat. Unless you weigh considerably less than me, I'm not sure how you wouldn't have a seal.

4) "Aerosolizing feces is already a problem with the flush, now we are splashing it around?" This is an interesting point, and one that I had not really considered. I am not aware of any studies in the literature (and I suspect it would be a bit of a red flag about myself if I were) that looked specifically at aerosolization during the actual act of using the bidet. However, a cursory search did yield a few studies that looked at bacterial colonization of the nozzle. This can be concerningly high in a shared use toilet, though the limited amount of studies are not in good agreement here. Iyo et al. (2016) found Pseudomonas aeruginosa on 2% of bidet toilets in a restroom on a university campus; a different study noted that in a university hospital, 34% (n = 10) of bidet nozzles contained isolated of Staphylococcus aureus (Katsuse et al. 2017). Tsunoda et al. (2019) found that there was an 87% colonization rate of bacteria (all species) in hospital toilets with bidets.

My follow up question would perhaps be "so what?" when you consider the issue in the frame of a personal toilet (rather than a toilet in a hospital), which might be shared with your family members and, more rarely, friends. I personally consider it a negligible risk in the grand scheme of microbial activity to which I am exposed elsewhere. I do take the nozzle cleanliness seriously, and I make it a point to clean the nozzle with a bleach-based toilet bowl cleaner.

That said, I agree with you that this is a relative unknown and one about which I would like to know more.

5) "And I assume you still need to use TP to wipe up, but anyone who has used toilet paper around water knows how ineffective it is at drying things." You do need to do this. Anything more than single-ply is up to the task. I have never had an issue with ineffective drying. Sometimes I only need to use 1-2 squares.

6) "Find a way to tell people how they actually work" They shoot a stream of water up your butt. This is conceptually simple enough (and logical, to boot: I'm sure everyone here is well aware of the common argument for bidets that water cleans better than paper). I personally think the bigger issue is that people are uncomfortable with the idea of something going up their butt, not that they don't understand the answers to the questions you've posed.

7) "Put them in hotels" I have seen them at a hotel in Hawaii, but this was due to Japanese influence. I do not think that most hotels would take on the investment in order to be the harbinger of change in this country. It might cut down on their TP costs, but they buy (horrible quality) rolls for pennies on the dollar.

Bonus: I recommend watching the South Park episode wherein Randy buys a bidet, for further (albeit fictional) testimonial to their greatness.

--- References: Iyo, T., Asakura, K., Nakano, M., Yamada, M. and Omae, K. (2016) Bidet toilet seats with warm-water tanks: residual chlorine, microbial community, and structural analyses. J Water Health 14, 68–80.

Katsuse, A.K., Takahashi, H., Yoshizawa, S., Tateda, K., Nakanishi, Y., Kaneko, A. and Kobayashi, I. (2017) Public health and healthcare-associated risk of electric, warmwater bidet toilets. J Hosp Infect 97, 296–300.

Tsunoda, A., Otsuka, Y., Toguchi, A., Watanabe, K., Nishino, R. and Takahashi, T. (2019) Survey on bacteria contamination of bidet toilets and relation to the interval of scrubbing these units. J Water Health 17, 863–869.

Abney, S. E., Bright, K. R., McKinney, J., Ijaz, M. K., & Gerba, C. P. (2021). Toilet hygiene—review and research needs. Journal of Applied Microbiology, 131(6), 2705-2714.

As long as you wipe well, there's really very little bad that can happen before your next daily shower.

Note that I have nothing against bidets, but this argument is not a very strong one.

That said, I have liked my experience with bidets.

Exactly.

Here in India we mostly use what's called a health faucet (or bidet shower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet_shower). Its lesser of an installation than a bidet.

Bidets aren't an alternative to washing hands.. you should be able to dry off without soaking them

I backed a Boaty kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boaty/the-boaty-kit-a-n...) a few years ago; though those close friends of mine use regular (though _clearly_ marked) washcloths.

I also happen to be a guy, so what I'm about to say applies only to my #2 process -- so no direct experience with ladies' #1 or any concern about cross-contamination by water running to the frontal anatomy (though my research back then mentioned that shouldn't be a bigger concern than without these items).

1. Within a few attempts you get very good at aiming (blind) and keeping only the inside of your bum cheeks wet. With the handheld want it's "all in the wrist", with the integrated system you get to do a silly little hip dance for 5 seconds and move on your with life.

2. It immediately joins and is flushed with the rest of your deposit. I do dry my cheeks with the boaty towels, and find it particularly pleasant and clean, at least comparatively to the previous decades of my life. So "with the spraying water?" yes, overwhelmingly, and "into the laundry machine?" trace amounts for sure, but emphasis on trace amounts.

Hope this helps, I'm also a _fanatical convert_ of this new process.

As it turns out, the water is quite effective at removing the dirt. At first I was worried it would disperse it and I'd be wiping a larger region, but in fact it's easy to quickly confirm with the white toilet paper that virtually zero waste is left remaining after only a few seconds of running the bidet.

[0] This depends on the model, some Europeon models I have encountered are configured as a completely separate "bowl" and they spray aerated water with such low force that the water would never leave the bowl, whether a body is present or not.

2. The water takes away (into the toilet bowl) all the soil if done right, and the small toilet paper is mostly just for drying. But you’re still using the toilet paper.

Maybe there is a body type / layout difference? It feels incredibly straightforward to me but reading the comments you are definitely not alone. My suggestion would be to just try it a couple of times.

You are seated... your underwear is around your ankles. You aren't standing straight up after.

2. What takes the dirt away eventually? A clean towel? The force of the water? Where is it taken? With the spraying water? Into the laundry machine?

The force of the water removes it. It falls down into the toilet. It's literally just like an upward-facing hose - it sprays water. You maneuver your butt over the stream. It cleans in the same way a shower sprays water, or a hose sprays water, to wash away material. You then can either use a little toilet paper to dry yourself, or use the air dryer that comes on a fancier bidet.

As a side note, you can get that product at online retailers by searching HappyPo, as it appears the english website is currently down.

I'll also note that appeals to "did you fall in poo" are farcical and somewhat ignore the fact that most people don't bathe/shower every day. A practice that is surprisingly common in the US. (I gave a quick attempt to see these stats across all nations. Didn't find anything that looked good for comparisons.)

I'm personally not opposed to bidets. I also don't know that I expect to see a lot of benefit, though? Would love to know why our poo habits require so much more work than most animals seem to require.