I had always heard that people in some Middle East cultures used their left hand to wipe their ass. Is that true?
Cecil’s column on the subject: In the Third World, do people wipe with their left hands?
If you wash your left hand at all, though, wouldn’t your right hand then become involved as well?
According to training guides I got before I was prepped to go to the gulf some still do and it’s bad form to use your crappy hand for anything other than crap. No offering it, not touching people with it, no eating with it. Much food is served in a communal bowl style and you sccop and ball rice out of the main bowl (three whole pages of text on how to properly “skim” hot rice and roll it into a ball before popping it into your mouth).
Am I alone in wondering why people find this weird/shocking/disgusting?
Having been to places where the usual set-up is a jug of water in the corner (or, as in Turkey, a hosepipe protruding from under the seat) I can vouch for the fact that it’s a lot easier to get clean this way than it is with paper (especially if the local cuisine leaves things a little less, ahem, solid than you might like…)
As long as you wash your hans thoroughly afterwards (which I should hope you do after using paper too!) then what’s the problem?
Or is there an element of “Them filthy Ay-rabs, they’re not like us decent folks” about this? Just a thought…
It’s certainly much cleaner to use water for this purpose. When you think about it, wipping with just paper is quite gross. Nobody would ever think he’s clean if he washed any part of his body without using water, but for some weird cultural reason, it seems to us that it’s OK for our ass, which is not exactly the cleanest part of our body.
The only problem with this theory is that it’s much more important that your hands are clean than your anus; I don’t know of anyone who uses his butt to pick up his food or rub his eyes, for instance. (And, if you do know someone who can do these things, please don’t tell me.) I find it hard to see how avoiding contact between the hand and rear is any less clean than using water, especially soapless water, especially especially when the norm here is to wash one’s hands afterwards anyway.
RR
In the late 60’s in Detroit one of the papers ran an opinion article by a man who considered it indecent to defecate at any time you couldn’t shower fully afterwards. He proposed posting signs on all public toilets which stated that “these facilities are intended for those people who suffer from temporary bowel irregularity. Decent people defecate at home, where they may bathe immediately afterwards”.
His idea never really caught on.
Some '60s comedian, Allen Freeburg or Allen Sherman or someone said “Americans will pee anywhere but there’s no shit like home.”
Cleanliness is next to Godliness so I got a Petit Bidet after seeing a post here about it.
Considering the abundance of pulp trees throughout the Middle East…
I recall reading an interview once with a female singer from India. She spoke about performing at a concert hall in London, and not being able to get it out of her head that all those people in the audience wiped themselves with paper - an incredibly gross concept.
Qadgop, that was a very famous newspaper column, originally in a Toronto newspaper, by the late great McKenzie Porter, one of the old school of Ontario Orangemen. The entire column was about his disgust at men moving their bowels in public washrooms. It got global attention including re-printing in National Lampoon. If it’s available anywhere on the net I know some journalists who would sell their souls for a copy.
Is it true that arabs and others consider it rude to shake hands with their left hands because of the toilet connection? How would they feel when shaking ours hands to know that most westeners wipe with their right hands?
I had Indian neighbors that when returning to India for their annual visit took large amounts of toilet paper and sometimes a toilet. They would never use their left hands to eat food and this was the reason. You have to use the tools at “hand” when necessary.
Thanks for the info, fyodor. I think I read it in NatLamp originally. Didn’t they do one by him later about the necessity of legislating sexuality and decency to protect society?
I’ll have to go thru my old NatLamps
I recall hearing that the Romans had a different word for each different finger, the word for the second finger (after the thumb) had some scatalogical connection. And this is why, when we “flip the bird” to someone, we use this particular finger.
Apparently this is the finger that does most of the “clearing out” job.
What I don’t understand is the following scenario:
Presumably wiping with the hand originated because people would find themselves out in the countryside with no proper toilet available so they would just shit wherever.
Now I have, myself, often found myself in this situation - I urgently need a poo when I’m in the middle of nowhere. Usually I will look for an isolated spot near a bush or a tree with lots of big leaves.
I will then use said big leaves in order to wipe the Jojo bottom. And make some attempt to bury it afterward (whilst retaining such dignity as I can muster).
Now trees and bushes are a lot more common than water. The chances of you finding a river or stream nearby when the poo-urge hits you is small.
The chances are even smaller in hot countries like India and the middle east.
So my natural instinct (when I need a poo and I’m away from civilisation) is to find a bushy area not a watery area. To find a tree not a river.
So I would have thought that Man’s natural instinct would be towards wiping rather than washing since washing is a luxury that cannot always be found. Washing facilities are scarce but wiping materials are freely available throughout the land.
(ps I think that either method is perfectly hygienic as long as you wash your hands afterwards)
India is a hot country ? I thought it had plenty of water and was tropical in nature.
You actually get the full range, from tropical and humid, to alpine, to hot and dry desert ( Rajathan and the Sind in particular, though much of the Deccan plateau is pretty dry as well ). Its description as a “sub-continent” is pretty accurate in this respect :).
- Tamerlane
That would be true only for hunter/gatherers. As soon as you’ve villages and agriculture, there would be some place where you would go for this purpose. Human wastes were used like animal wastes as fertilizer, in particular in gardens, not buried and forgotten.
Now, in villages, water would be easily available, but probably not very convenient to bring to the place you would use as “toilets”. Probably stacking leaves, etc…nearby would be easier. The only reason I can think for using water would be when the culture becomes elaborate enough to consider that just wipping with leaves is really gross and that the added inconvenience of bringing/using water is necessary for a civilized man (like we consider that taking a shower on the morning is worth it despite the inconvenience).
Of course, it depends on the place. If you’re a nomad living in the desert, I assume both water and leaves couldn’t be used for this purpose. So I guess sand would be used in this case. The whole thing depends probably a lot on the environnment and way of life (human shit being valuable for a farmer, but of no use for a hunter) as much as culture.
It’s not just the Middle East, it’s also South-East Asia. I ‘went native’ with water and the left hand in Thailand and Vietnam, and found that I felt much much cleaner in the anus department. You get used to it very quickly, and you instinctively stop
I recall an Indian character in The Satanic Verses warning her son about how filthy English people are because “they only use paper to wipe their B.T.M.s”.