Why Are Bidets Weird in America?
A friend talked me into getting a bidet years ago and I wish I had done it sooner. So why does America still treat it like a joke?
I have had a bidet for five or six years now.
A friend of mine in New Zealand had one and talked me into it. Nothing fancy. It replaced the regular seat and hooks into the water line that was already there. Just cold water.
My only complaint is that I did not switch sooner.
Bidets are normal in a lot of places
The bidet showed up in France in the early 1700s. Since 1975,
Italian building regulations have included a bidet among the required bathroom fixtures. In Japan,
80% of households have a toilet seat that washes you. They are normal across southern Europe, parts of South America, and the Middle East.
Britain and Australia mostly skipped them too. America has been especially slow to adopt them, and often treats them as a joke.
Why America skipped it
There are a few theories. It was French, and Britain wanted nothing to do with French habits, so neither did the colonies. A lot of American soldiers in World War II only ever saw bidets in French brothels, and they came home with that association. And Americans do not like talking about the bathroom at all, which makes it hard to sell anything that goes in one.
None of those are about whether it works.
An American helped develop the modern bidet seat
In 1964, Arnold Cohen from Brooklyn patented a toilet seat that sprayed warm water. He designed it for his father, who had a medical condition, and tried to sell it in the U.S. Almost nobody would even run the ads.
He eventually licensed the design to the Japanese company Toto. In 1980, Toto released the Washlet, helping make that kind of seat common in Japan.
An American helped develop the modern bidet seat, but it found its audience in Japan.
It is just cleaner
Americans go through an estimated 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper a year. Estimates of the water used to make one roll vary:
one online estimate puts it at 6 gallons, while a
2009 estimate puts it at 37. The same 2009 source says a bidet uses about an eighth of a gallon each time. By volume, that makes one roll’s manufacturing water equivalent to 48–296 bidet washes. The estimates may not count the same things, so treat this as an illustration, not a full lifecycle comparison.
Graphic generated with GPT-6-Luna.
The numbers vary. But the basic argument is simpler: if you got mud on your hand, you would not wipe it off with a dry paper towel and call it clean. You would wash it.
Get one
It was cheap, it went on the toilet I already had, and I would not go back. So this is me doing what my friend did for me.
Us Americans are fucking weird. lol
until next time