Primitive humans lived in caves and wiped their asses with their hands. What’s your excuse?
Panic buying is trending again, and I feel equal parts empathy and amusement casually observing my fellow quarantine shoppers desperately squabble over packages of commercial grade toilet paper with the bunghole appeal of low grit sandpaper. It is possible to transcend the skirmishes of the papyrus corridor and elevate your sphincter scrubbing game beyond the scat scuttling struggles of the troglodytes. Journey with me through the dark crevices of history where we’ll expose the past, present and future of grundle grinding. And where we are going, we don’t need toilet paper.
To understand why hoarding toilet paper is the height of absurdity, we need to take a trip back through the annals of ass-wiping history. Scientists in Spain discovered what they believe to be the oldest human turd on record in a 50,000-year-old fire pit that was used for cooking. They analyzed the coprolite (fossilized feces) and found that it was composed primarily of fibrous plants and animal products. Absent from the sample were any traces of absorption enhancing surfactants, chlorine-free bleach or recycled paper products. This discovery proved two theories that fecal experts, commonly known as shitheads, have been propagating for many years. The first theory suggests that regardless of all other factors and for as long as people have gathered in groups there has always been ‘That One Asshole’. The absence of other fossils alongside the Paleolithic poop suggests a second, more readily accepted theory is also correct. As far back in history as modern science has been able to determine human beings have always wiped their asses with their hands.
Pharoes on the Porcelain Throne
The ancient world eventually graduated from manual fudge removal to slightly more sophisticated methods. Ancient Greeks were known to use ostraka and pessoi after pinching off a loaf. They would often inscribe the names of their enemies on these small stones and ceramic fragments before reckoning with the mud tracks in their cracks. A popular proverb of the Greco-Roman Era illustriously proposed ‘three stones are enough to wipe your arse’ although it is unclear if the virtue being promoted is frugality or moderation.
Romans, never ones to miss an opportunity for communal bonding, shared a tersorium—a sea sponge tied to a stick and dipped in vinegar—to tidy their rusty runways after molding underwater sculptures. They would also urinate in small jars and then use it to wash their clothes, which really puts our modern hygiene standards in perspective.
Significant progress with regards to cleansing after crafting a fudge pop came in the form of Buddhist monks traveling the Silk Road (no pun intended) into Han China at the end of the 1st Century. They brought with them a spatula made from bamboo called a cèchóu which literally translates to ‘shit stick’ in modern English.
Yup, that’s him
Yan Zhitui wrote of toilet paper being used in Asia as early as the 6th Century, marking the beginning of what would become a fifteen-hundred-year reign of processed lumber as humanity’s primary posterior polishing product. But the real infrastructure innovations wouldn’t come for another thousand years. The first flushable toilet was patented in the 1800s, and it’s been over a century since Thomas Crapper invented the ballcock (the tank filling mechanism that defines the modern latrine).
Over this entire millennium, human beings harnessed the power of electricity, split the atom, and walked on the moon. Every aspect of our daily lives has been enhanced by the genius of legendary inventors like Einstein, Edison, Franklin, Lamarr, Da Vinci, and Tesla. Yet somehow, despite all this progress, the manner in which we clean our keisters after busting a grumpy has largely remained stagnant. It is inconceivable that every day for a thousand years the greatest thinkers of our time have contemplated the mysteries of the universe while dropping stink pickles and no one developed a better rejoinder to the daily posterior polish than using ones hands to rub shit off their stink wrinkles with processed lumber.
Americans were particularly slow to modernize their methodology. Marketing campaigns from the 1930’s suggest we were still employing corn cobs and hay to scrape our dookie butter for years into the Jazz Age.
Free Love & Fried Chicken
It wasn’t until the swinging 1960s that Colonel Sanders began distributing wet wipes to help clean the cock and biddy juice off the phalanges of finger licking Americans everywhere. Moistened baby wipes became popular in the 1990s and adult use has recently become so popular that the personal care wipes market has grown to a $15 billion per year industry. But this was still really just smearing shit around.
The real solution had actually been invented two and a half centuries earlier. According to the WTO (World Toilet Organization) the bidet was invented in 1710 by a French furniture maker in the service of the monarchy. The French word for pony, bidets were straddled by the user as if they were riding a horse who would use a pump handle to direct a gentle spray of clean water at their aristocratic assholes. This quantum leap of cheek cleansing paradigms ushered in a golden yellow age of poop purging technology that continues today.
It’s like this for your butt
In the latter part of the 20th century, bidets propounded a plethora of innovations in the field of butt brushing that Americans have generally ignored to their everlasting detriment. Today, heated seats, night lights, UV cleansers, power lids and remote controls are common features on standalone stern sprayers and toilet attachments for all posteriors and price points. The variety and affordability of heiny hosers on the market today is almost inconceivable. They lend truth to an adage attributed to legendary showman PT Barnum: ‘there is an ass for every seat‘.
Which brings us to the future—represented perfectly by a scene from the 1993 futuristic action comedy “Demolition Man.” Sylvester Stallone stars as a cryogenically frozen vigilante cop from the 90s who is reanimated forty years later because Wesley Snipes is terrorizing Los Angeles and everyone else has turned into a bunch of pansies. In a memorable scene from this surprisingly well written film, Stallone’s character finds himself in a bathroom which has no toilet paper but only three seashells on a small shelf next to the commode. His attempts to uncover more information on how the seashells work are foiled and the excrement extricating mystery is left to the viewers imagination.
A shape for every shart
In the parlance of our time, The Three Seashells represents the next great evolution in dingleberry displacement. Since the beginning of documented human history there have been ass-tronomical innovations with respect to where we unloose our caboose and how we dispose of our butt burritos. The bidet is our generation’s three seashells—the obvious solution that we’re too stuck in our ways to embrace.
And the math makes the case even stronger. While we Americans continue to panic-buy toilet paper like it’s the last resource on Earth, we’re ignoring both common sense and basic economics. To produce a single roll of toilet paper requires 37 gallons of water, 1.5 pounds of wood, and enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for over an hour. We use approximately 36.5 billion rolls annually in the United States alone. That’s a lot of ancient forests getting turned into ass wipes and flushed down our toilets. Meanwhile, a bidet uses about one-eighth of a gallon of water per use and never needs replacing. The environmental cost of our toilet paper addiction is staggering, but the solution has been sitting there since 1710, waiting for us to pull our heads out of our asses long enough to notice it.
I hope this insight into the background of your backdoor helps you appreciate both.
Jack Rose is the founder of REACT Premium Escape Rooms in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. When he’s not designing puzzles that reveal what people are really made of under pressure, he writes about the things we do that make absolutely no sense when you think about them for more than five seconds. Like hoarding toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic.
This post is part of the Life branch of jackrosewrites.com. The thread that connects everything starts with the manifesto: There Is No Escape Room.