Compared with every other household chore, progress in bum-wiping has been glacially slow. It’s only in living memory that schools and institutions stopped using something called Izal, a box of medicated toilet wipes similar in texture to greaseproof paper, and thus spectacularly ill-suited to its purpose. It was characteristic of the Britain of my childhood, where things were made gratuitously unpleasant on purpose, since to do anything nice was seen as effeminate.
The Muslim world is far ahead of us here. In most Islamic countries a toilet cubicle comes with a bum gun — a kind of handheld spray. Yet in the supposedly enlightened Anglophone world we think dry paper is fine. As I have repeatedly argued, you wouldn’t come in after an afternoon’s gardening with mud on your hands and then attempt to clean them using dry paper: you’d use water. And yet, when it comes to the rectum, this sensible instinct deserts us.
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