[joke hijack]
A bear and a rabbit are defecating. The bear says to the rabbit, “Don’t you hate it how the shit sticks to your fur?”
The rabbit says, “I don’t have that problem.”
“Really? Great!” [Bear picks up rabbit and wipes his ass with rabbit.]
[/joke hijack]
Part of the problem has more to do with the design of the Western toilet than with any deficiencies in design of the asshole. Crapping while squatting is generally much neater than crapping on a toilet and requires less wiping. When I lived in Japan I had a choice of using the benjo that adjoined my room or walking all the way down the hall to use the Western style crapper–I generally used the benjo. I have to say I used much less toilet paper and spent much less time doing the deed than when sitting on the throne.
Same with hiking–pardon if this is TMI but when I hike it sometimes has a salutary and rather urgent effect on my bowels, such that making it home to dump is not an option. I find that when crapping out in the woods I barely need to wipe, and indeed on occasion when I’ve forgotten to bring along paper and had to use grass or somesuch I was very happy that I didn’t much NEED to expose my bum to potentially dangerous vegetation and/or wildlife. On such occasions I’ve found the biggest problem is making sure my dog doesn’t get near me because she’s kinda disgusting and will roll in it. Hey, I apologized in advance! 
Yes, but how well could our ancestral forebears really clean up, without a good supply of towels, soap, and water? Hell, in many arid desert and savannah environments, there’s no freestanding water with which to bathe or wash up.
I think I read once that in the Middle East and/or Saharan North Africa, people have traditionally used stones or just handfulls of sand.
Sounds painful to me. I’ll stick with Cottonelle.
Prehensile rectums are not all they’re cracked up to be.
And see my original post in the thread. Wanna change how you BM? Change your diet.
Humans have to wipe their butts because humans are, essentially, the only animals with butts.
The human extra-sized buttock is unique. Our simian relatives don’t stand upright – at leasy not for long. They knuckle-walk, and (except when the female chimp is in heat), don’t have buttocks anywhere near as large as human ones.
Other bipeds solved the problem of balancing upright by using a counterbalance – birds have their legs forweard, with part of the body and all of the tail behind. Dinosaurs had long tails, often with impressive tendon structure to keep it aloft and from dragging on the ground.
Only people solved the problem by putting a super-large set of muscles back there to haul us upright. One price we paid is that our anuses are deep in that gluteal cleft. It gets dirty.
It’s true that a more natural “squatting” posture would hold the buttocks away from the anus, and enable our stomach muscles to bear down easier. (The Western sitting toilet, as one critic remarked, “squeezes the jellyflesh of the buttocks together”. It’s just asking for trouble.) Nevertheless, still think that the normal human condition is to get detritus on the skin back there. This must be wiped off, because even one’s own waste is an irritant and a nucleus for germs. Believe it or not, there have been laboratory tests of this, and papers published. I’ll look them up if someone wants, but I’m lazy now.
It’s true that our hands and our nifty opposable thumbs help this. For al I know, they helped us survive to become successful bipeds, the only of our kind. But it seems a bit too neat. I’ve long suspected that humans have been partially water-dwelling. I don’t mean truly aquatic, like seals and whales. There’s too much nonsense about aquatic apes out there. But Humans have a tendency to swim and forage in water unlike any other ape. We’re littoral and riverbank dwellers, and I think inadvertent water washing helped keep us clean before people started using their hands.
I’ve seen this observation here before, and for the life of me, I can’t believe I am the only person on Earth who spreads their cheeks before they sit on the throne. My buttocks, ample as they are, do not squeeze together when I pinch a loaf.
I find that fact that this post is totally appropriate and accurate for this thread to be hilarious.
I love this message board!
Only humans cover the area with clothing, which tends to keep the crotch region moister than it would be otherwise. I imagine that’s a factor.
Wiping is half the fun!
I’m too scared to ask what the other half is.
But the Japanese, not content with the superior design of traditional squat toilets, got fashionable and adopted western-style toilets. Whereupon they compensated for the disadvantages of the inferior design by adding on a built-in washer-dryer. I spent a couple of weeks staying with my sister-in-law, year before last, and was quite sad to leave that particular luxury behind when I came home.
On the other hand, I found the squat toilet difficult to navigate with trousers. It seems to have been designed for either women in skirts, or anyone in kimono. Or else one needs a truly phenomenal sense of balance, not natural for someone who didn’t spend his life sitting on his heels on the floor.
Roddy
I’m glad I’m not the only one whose mind went straight to the “prehensile rectum.”
I’m posting this from the South Terminal of Narita Airport in Japan, where about 2 hours ago, I enjoyed my first encounter with this system. I am humbled.
I was lavaged, dried, fluffed and folded all without touching myself. I feel a lot like those girls in the 1970’s-era Kotex commercials who were dressed in blindingly pure white terrycloth tennis outfits and leapt about gaily, the very personification of cleanliness.
As an aside, after 14 hours on a jet, this method of toileting is just really REALLY gratifying.
And, what QtM said. I suspect we lost our prehensile rectums the same time we lost our large flat teeth designed to grind up raw foliage instead of gnawing into freshly killed meat.
Cartooniverse
Words to live by.
Man is the only animal that flushes - or needs to.
Why would the bear wipe his ass with the rabbit if shit *doesn’t * stick to the rabbit? That would leave the shit on the bear’s ass and the bear no better off than he was before. That joke doesn’t make sense.
Maybe it’s like the mystery of Teflon etc. If nothing sticks to it, how do they get it to stick to the pan?
It’s still funny.
Threads like this are the reason I love the SDMB.
Now I feel the pressing need for a good satisfying dump, will someone pass me a rabbit or summink