The Real Reason You Should Own A Bidet

A video by Business Insider observes that the word 'bidet' is French for "pony" or "small horse." And much like horses, you can lead a butt to bidet water, but you can't make it drink. Atlantic contributor Maria Teresa Hart notes that Americans and Brits have long guarded their derrieres against the ambiguous scourge of bowl-based spray cleanings. In fact, back in 1936, Aussie sexologist and early birth control advocate Norman Haire asserted, "The presence of a bidet is regarded as almost a symbol of sin." Contemporary experts considered douching a form of birth control, linking bidets to boot-knocking by extension. Furthermore, during WWII, US servicemen who got serviced at brothels saw bidets in the bathrooms, making them synonymous with prostitution in troops' minds.

More recently, toilets haven't been sitting as heinie and mighty as they used to. Amid the great toilet paper drought of 2020, the US has seen a flood of demand for bidets. Perhaps your hind parts feel thirsty for one right now. Should you quench your butt's thirst?

Obviously, the real "real reason" to own a bidet is that you want and can afford one. Your butt is your business, and nobody should stick their nose in it, especially while you're going. However, as the bidet business booms, you might want a bowl of bidet for your own backside. In a 2020 piece for the Guardian, Brittany Frater says she "had been 'bidet curious' for years." Refusing to let a good toilet pun go to waste, she writes that she "finally decided to take the plunge" after toilet paper sold out like hot cakes at a fire sale.

She found the bidet to be easier on the cheeks than TP, and it's better for the environment. Citing Scientific American, Frater explains that it takes 37 gallons of water to produce a single roll of toilet paper. Plus, hundreds of thousands of tons of chlorine are used to whiten the paper, and the packaging creates plastic waste. Flushing a bidet, on the other hand, might use as little as an eighth of a gallon of water, and you reduce pollution. Or you re-deuce it, if you poop twice.