Comments on: What I Learned in Japan About Using the Bathroom

By: kat

kat — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 03:54:15 +0000

Technology has gone too far when you have to have instructions to perform a natural bodily function.

By: Jeff Smithpeters

Jeff Smithpeters — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:40:30 +0000

And the equally aromatic followup to the paragraph above:
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.
from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/zize01_.html

By: Jeff Smithpeters

Jeff Smithpeters — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:37:21 +0000

Here is Marxist-Psychoanalytic-Eclectic writer Slavoj Zizek on how toilets reveal how nations think:
In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:26:46 +0000

Even the toilets in Japan are more technologically advanced.

By: Jota

Jota — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:44:18 +0000

Am I the only one who thinks that the picture on the bidet button looks like an iconic representation of a naked woman?

(Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that out loud.)

By: Stephanie Files

Stephanie Files — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:48:47 +0000

Russ and Steph<<<< *snicker, snicker*