This is the chance you’ve all been waiting for my European veterans in the fight against ignorance. Please enlighten this American in the use of Bidets.
I know what they are for and I understand the basic concept, but how excactly does one use a bidet? I ask not to get cheap potty humour laughs (although these will be welcomed with a hearty guffaw) but in an honest attempt to understand.
I’ll give a brief overview of my understanding of the process and post several questions at the end.
From what I can tell, one first uses the conventional toilet in the conventional manner. Then one must mosey over to the nearby bidet.
The next step seems to be the washing step. This involves letting the water wash over the nether regions.
Question one: Are there a lot of accidents during the journey from toilet to bidet? I refer to both tripping (due to pants around the ankles) and what I’ll call “spillage.” If so, what is the best method for preventing this?
Question two: Does one actually sit on the bidet or squat above the bowl?
Question three: How does the washing process work? Does the rushing water do all of the work? Is there soap involved? If so, is scrubbing (with either a hand or a wash cloth) involved?
Question four: Is there a method for post bidet drying off?
If I can get these answered then perhaps on my next trip to Europe I can use the bidet for something other than shaving my legs. Which by the way is a very handy use of a bidet. Just prop your leg up on the bowl and use the warm water to rinse the razor.
Good question. Not that this really answers it, but…
A female friend discovered bidets in South America and found them useful for “self-entertainment.”
If your Dog is like mine and many others, it finds the potty to be a neat source of nice cool water. Bidets could thus be a drinking fountian for Dogs.
You can do as someone I know did and have one installed in your American bathroom. It thus impresses guests with how “European” you are. Tip: The effect doesn’t work unless you dust the thing periodically to make people think you might actually be using it.
Thanks for the link and the comments! However I think there is still a great deal of how-to information that our European counterparts could be sharing with us.
I do find the idea of having a bathroom fixture that is entirely devoted to cleaning up after sex intriguing and delightful.
Yesterday on the web I found a site that has a bidet adapter for american toilets. You can put a bidet attachment on your toilet. Cool. But I couldn’t bring up the website.
Maybe you can try HomeDepot. Ask them for a bidet.
The water-fountain toilet thingey in the bathroom always made a (admittedly small) amount of sense to me - it’s pretty obvious how the thing is generally supposed to work and get the water where it needs to go, although in practice I’m sure I’d have additional questions. However.
Last time I was in Europe, in both northern Italy and Switzerland, I saw in my hotel room a whole different kind of bidet. This one was like a little toilet-shaped sink. It had a faucet and hot and cold taps. Yes, the faucet pointed downwards. No, I couldn’t figure out any way to bring the water stream in contact with anything other than my feet, although it was pretty darn handy for shaving my legs.
Am I just stupid? Am I missing something? Maybe it’s not a bidet after all but a leg-shaving toilet-looking thing? I brought several friends to my room to consult on this thing in my bathroom, and no consensus was reached. I double dog dared said friends to call down to the desk and ask, but we went from slightly tipsy to incapable too fast to put that plan into action.
Protesilaus,
Thanks for the mailbag answer link. I still have some questions, thougn (see OP) and I think I may open this topic again in IMHO to get some first hand accounts of bidet usage.
Zsofia,
Yes! I saw those exact same kinds of bidets in Italy and was wondering the same thing myself. That was one of the contributing factors in my decision to start this thread.
I imagine the double fauceted, nozzle pointing downwards type bidet must involve scrubbing of some king. I was also too timid to try it but it truly was great for shaving my legs.
Thanks for pointing that out. I made a funny and I didn’t even know it. I seriously laughed out loud!
Of course I meant “scrubbing of some kind” but for all I know scrubbing royalty may indeed be involved. This is why I need information! What if I were to use it and not scrub royalty? It might provoke some kind of international incident.
What I want to know is, assuming your ass is getting all wet, how do you keep water from trickling down your legs and getting your pants (which are presumably around your ankles) wet?
If you squat over it, this seems impossible to avoid unless you squat so low that your knees are higher than your butt (water won’t run up your thighs). If you sit on the thing, this seems avoidable, as the water will run down your cheeks until hitting the part where your cheeks contact the bidet, and then run down the inside of the bidet. However, that would mean that your ass makes direct contact with a part of the device which poo-poo-flavored water dribbles down, which seems, uh, suboptimal, to put it lightly.
My dad used to say “rough as a cob” in reference to turbulence in his Cessnas and while referring to “washboard” roads in the car. While I could see that a cob is rough, I wondered why something would be rough as a cob as opposed to something else. He told me that “in the olden days” people used corn cobs in the outhouse. (I guess that was before the Sears catalog arrived.) Another thread in the forums brought about a couple of e-mails with one of the posters. Somehow we got off on a tangent and the other poster confirmed the story. Oh, am I glad there’s always been toilet paper!
