Coronavirus,the great toilet paper panic and civilisation

Abstract

Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus.

Keywords

Australia civilisation coronavirus panic buying toilet paper

The first week of March 2020 in Australia saw the panic buying of toilet rolls. As the novel coronavirus approached, other countries had a similar experience. The use of toilet paper, along with pedestal toilets, is a foundational aspect of Western civilisation. In spite of toilet paper being so integral to life in Western countries, it has a history that only stretches as far back as the second half of the 19th century. This article discusses the connection between toilet paper and civilisation, and the different cultural ways the United Kingdom and the United States have inflected the importance of toilets and toilet paper, the one in terms of hygiene and the other in terms of cleanliness. Australia followed the United Kingdom until around the 1970s, since when the country’s attitudes to toilet paper have been more influenced by the United States. The link with civilisation means also that for people brought up in Western culture it is taken for granted that using squat toilets and cleansing with water is considered shocking and disgusting and, indeed, uncivilised.

Biosecurity officers in Australia started testing passengers for the novel coronavirus on flights from Wuhan to Sydney on 23 January 2020. On 25 January a Chinese citizen who had arrived from Guangzhou six days earlier tested positive in Melbourne and three people coming from Wuhan tested positive in Sydney. On 13 February the Australian government imposed a ban on all non-Australian residents arriving from China. At this point most Australians seemed unaware of the potential impact of the virus. By 1 March, Australia had identified 29 cases of infection, and on that same day a 78-year-old Perth man, a passenger off the Diamond Princess cruise ship, became the first Australian to die from COVID-19. On 27 February the Australian government activated its emergency health response plan in anticipation of the coronavirus spread becoming a global pandemic. Two days later the government announced a ban on non-residents flying into the country from Iran. The Australian public was beginning to realise that something very significant was happening. On 5 March non-residents from South Korea were banned from entering Australia.

Toilet paper, panic and cakes

It was during this week, the first week of March, that the panic buying of toilet rolls started. On 3 March, a report in The Guardian noted that: ‘Supermarket shelves have been stripped bare as coronavirus and the fear of being caught without a domestic essential led to dozens of people panic-buying the tissue’ (Guardian, 2020a). Woolworths announced that it was limiting purchases of toilet rolls to four packs per person. On 8 March things had got so bad that Coles reduced its limit to one pack per person, ‘saying it was still seeing toilet paper stock sell out completely within one hour of delivery despite last week “reluctantly” introducing a four-pack per person limit on the product’ (Powell, 2020) At the same time, Woolworths reduced their four pack limit to two packs. On 4 March an article in The Daily Mail included a map of Australia with photos of empty shelves from supermarkets in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and of panic buying in Adelaide. Describing the panic buying as a ‘bizarre trend’, Alison Rouse (2020) reported that: ‘Supermarkets from the upmarket Perth suburb of Claremont, to Devonport in Tasmania and Penrith in Sydney’s west have all been left with bare aisles’. It was not only toilet rolls that were selling out, so worried were people that they might run out of toilet paper that tissues and even kitchen paper towels were being panic bought. The NT News, Darwin’s newspaper, always up for a joke, helpfully added an eight-page lift-out of blank paper on 8 March with the paper’s editor saying it was ‘certainly not a crappy edition’ (Smee, 2020). This use of newspaper for anal cleaning harks back to the time before toilet paper became common. In Australia, as we shall see, for some people this was as late as the early 1950s.

There were more than enough toilet rolls for everybody. However, the apparent shortage had anti-social effects beyond the panic buying. In Sydney a 30-year-old man was charged with stealing around 400 toilet rolls (Levy, 2020). In Hong Kong, which also had an outbreak of panic buying of toilet rolls, but a month or so earlier than Australia, corresponding to the earlier arrival of the virus in the city, armed robbers ‘made off with hundreds of toilet rolls worth more than HKD 1,000’ (BBC News, 2020a), that is, around $A200. We shall see that the panic buying of toilet rolls was pervasive in countries of the West and places which had been impacted by colonisation. It may be that one reason for the panic buying was that in Western countries few people now keep stocks of items. Supermarkets are open almost every day of the year and shortages are rare. Up until the establishment of sophisticated stock replenishing systems it was usual in middle-class households to keep back-up supplies of food in pantries and other household necessities in linen or airing cupboards, sculleries and basements. Without such a storage system, when a crisis occurs, people now rush to stock up on items they consider necessary. It seems toilet paper is at the top of the list.

Some people started advertising toilet rolls for sale on eBay at exorbitant prices. By mid-April, as the panic buying died down, one man who had attempted to profiteer from the apparent shortage, but had had his site on eBay closed down, tried to sell his stash back to the supermarket from which it had been bought:

The man headed to a Drake’s supermarket in Adelaide, Australia, to try to return 150 packs of toilet paper which he had bought at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. Director John-Paul Drake branded the panic buying situation ‘absolutely ridiculous’ as he recalled how customers are faced with empty shelves when they arrive. He said his store had sold eight months’ worth of loo roll in just four weeks. (O’Callaghan, 2020)

The rolls had cost about $10,000 and the man had used a team of people to avoid the rules on maximum sales to one person. Drake refused his request.

There have been some attempts at interpretation of the panic buying. Charis Chang (2020) asked Dr Paul Harrison, a human behaviour expert at Deakin University, for his insight. Harrison suggested that:

research shows that in capitalist countries like Australia, you deal with problems by buying things.…Through times of trouble we are encouraged to spend our way out of it.…Buying toilet paper doesn’t make sense but it does. It’s something people do buy weekly and you do need toilet paper, you just don’t need 100 rolls.

Harrison’s argument is founded in a psychological understanding of consumption capitalism. It offers an explanation behind the purchasing of consumer goods but does not address the reason why people in Western societies, and it would seem particularly in Australia, focused on toilet rolls. Toilet paper, I will be arguing, should be understood as an expression of Western civilisation.

We need to pause here and briefly unpack this concept. Civilisation is a vexed term, and particularly vexed when linked with the idea of the West, an idea founded in assumptions of European superiority. As John M. Hobson (2004: 183) notes in his examination of the importance of Eastern ideas on Europe, in the modern era ‘Europeans…pronounced the West to be the embodiment of advanced rational civilisation while the East was dismissed as an inferior civilisation that was but an irrational intellectual wasteland’. We should also remember Stuart Hall’s (1992: 185) admonishment that when utilising the terms East and West: ‘Our ideas of “East” and “West” have never been free of myth and fantasy, and even to this day they are not primarily ideas about place and geography.’ The concept of Western civilisation is a marker of difference and a claim to uniqueness. Norbert Elias (2000 [1939]: 3–4), whose discussion about the development of civilisation shall be referred to later, asserts that:

this concept expresses the self-consciousness of the West.…It sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones.

First published in 1939, Elias’s master-work, The Civilising Process, was written in German after the Nazi accession to power but before the depredations of the Second World War and the Nazi importation to Europe of the genocidal violence which previously Europeans had reserved for those considered uncivilised who lived beyond the bounds of ‘Western civilisation’ (see Stratton, 2003: 507–27). Elias was himself Jewish and his elderly mother was murdered in Treblinka. The two volumes of The Civilising Process have become a battleground for those who think that the work itself is an expression of Western civilisational superiority and those who read it as a sophisticated critical description of the evolution of Western civilisation (see Pepperell, 2016: 3–21). It is not appropriate here to enter this argument. It is sufficient to acknowledge that Elias wrote The Civilising Process before the claims of Western civilisation became profoundly contested. Nevertheless, in the everyday, as the panic buying of toilet rolls shows, those who live in countries identified as Western still consider themselves civilised. We should remember that this panic buying occurred across many countries associated with the idea of the West, not just Australia. These included the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Ireland, the United States and Japan. However, recent research suggests that the panic buying was worse, more desperate, in Australia than elsewhere (see Zhou, 2020).

Panic buying has also occurred in places where Western-style toilets, and the preoccupations that are connected with these, have become a part of the culture. In Singapore an account in the Straits Times published on 14 February reads: ‘Last Friday, just as supermarket shelves began being emptied of rice, instant noodles and toilet paper, our social media accounts started filling up with images of trolleys heaped with those very items’ (Bouffanais and Sun, 2020). In this article it is argued that the density of Singapore’s population, and its close-knit social networks reinforced by social media, triggered the panic buying of goods including toilet paper. In Hong Kong the singer Kathy Mak gave new lyrics about the social impact of anxiety related to the coronavirus to ‘Torn’, the song made popular by Natalie Imbruglia. Mak sings: ‘There’s panic in the air cuz there’s no toilet rolls no more.’ Like Singapore, Hong Kong’s sanitation system was radically transformed by the British occupiers:

In the early days of the colony of Hong Kong, people would go to the toilet in sewers, barrels or in alleys. Once Hong Kong opened up for trade (1850–1880), the British Hong Kong government determined that the appalling hygiene situation in Hong Kong was becoming critical. Thus, the government set up public toilets (squat toilets) for the people in 1867 (Wikipedia, 2020: this information comes from sources in Chinese).

The colonial government made a number of innovations to toilets in Hong Kong, introducing the first public flush toilet in 1940 and in the 1970s providing all public housing with individual pedestal toilets. A key element in this Westernisation of sanitation was the addition of toilet paper. Certainly rolls of toilet paper were common by the 1970s, and necessary for the new flush toilets where water for personal cleaning was unavailable.

The preoccupation with toilet rolls – perhaps it would be better to write of their fetishisation – had other effects. People started making cakes that looked like toilet rolls. In Australia, Kate Pritchett from Sydney ‘created the cake as she says she has had toilet paper “on the mind a lot lately” amid the coronavirus outbreak’ (Brent, 2020). Pritchett’s husband’s tweet, including a photo of the cake, had been liked over 116,000 times in the three days between his post on 1 April and the publication of the article on 3 April. In early April in Milton Keynes, in England, Lisa Jamieson baked a chocolate-fudge sponge cake and iced it to look like a toilet roll. She then auctioned it off to make money for her local hospital. She raised over US$2681. Jamieson wrote ‘STAY HOME’ on the cake’s base. She is quoted as saying ‘I just can’t believe how crazy it all went. To say I’m amazed is an understatement’ (Fox News, 2020). Also in England, Ben Cullen, from Chester, who specialises in cakes that look like everyday objects, made a four-layer vanilla sponge and chocolate toilet roll cake (Skelley, 2020). In Dortmund, Germany, a baker named Tim Kortuem started making cakes that looked like toilet rolls as a satirical comment on the panic buying of toilet rolls in Germany and found there was a market for them. He started making eight a day, and at the time the article about him was published his bakery was turning out 800 a day. Kortuem said, ‘people are prying them out of our hands just like real toilet paper’ (EuroNews, 2020). We should think a little about this equation between toilet rolls and the edible representations of toilet rolls.

There are various ways we could approach this phenomenon of toilet roll cake making and consuming but here I want to put it in the broader context of consumption. Toilet paper is associated most closely with defecation. As a consumer good it is purchased to wipe away the detritus of defecation. It is, if you like, consumed at the point where the residue of what a person has consumed, that is eaten, is deposited. We can acknowledge Sigmund Freud’s argument here in his discussion of the child’s psycho-sexual development. He writes that:

the original erotic interest in defecation is, as we know, destined to be extinguished in later years. In those years the interest in money makes its appearance as a new interest that has been absent in childhood. (Freud, 1908: 175)

Freud makes an equation between money and faeces. The toilet roll cake closes the loop, especially when it is purchased. It is itself consumed, enabling the production of the detritus that will consume the toilet paper of the civilised consumer, purchaser and eater, at a later date. There is here a kind of Rabelaisian return of the repressed, the premodern haunting the modern. All this has come to the surface, and is being acted out, during a time of great anxiety manifested in the toilet roll panic when many people feel civilisation itself is under threat from the coronavirus pandemic.

Coronavirus, guns and the apocalypse

Extrapolating Harrison’s argument, we can suggest that the panic buying of toilet rolls was linked to anxiety. In the United States, while there was panic buying of toilet rolls there was an even greater panic buying of guns. On 12 March, when the World Health Organisation had just declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and there were 1323 cases of COVID-19 identified in the United States, Ryan Broderick (2020) reported that: ‘Bracing for the worst, Americans are stockpiling face masks, nonperishables, hand sanitizer and toilet rolls.’ Furthermore: ‘Stores across the country selling ballistic body armor, tactical gear, and firearms are seeing a huge increase in sales due to the worsening coronavirus outbreak in the US.’ Reinforcing this development, Les Steed (2020) wrote on 15 March that: ‘People have been queuing around the block for weapons and weed as gun shops report a 68 per cent rise in business due to coronavirus.’ Breanna Lucier, the spokesperson for the Herbarium, a marijuana shop in Los Angeles, suggested why there was a run on marijuana sales: ‘People don’t want to care about coronavirus or watch upsetting news about it on television. Instead they just want to chill out to Netflix and some weed’ (Steed, 2020).

One of the groups buying guns is Asian-Americans who feel threatened by the rise in racism related to the Chinese origin of the novel coronavirus (see Palmer, 2020). The general fear here is about the possibility of social breakdown. Many people may be at home, stoned, watching Netflix with their pile of toilet rolls, but they are anxious about other people rampaging on the street and possibly invading their home. Judith Plaskow (2008: 59) suggests that: ‘Urine, feces, blood, spit, vomit, and milk, all traverse the boundaries of the body and thus represent its dangerous vulnerability, symbolizing the vulnerability of the social order.’ It is toilet paper which we use to clean the body of these dejecta. Correspondingly, lack of toilet paper is related to a fear of social breakdown. If we run out of toilet paper we feel that a key moment of etiquette has been breached. If we visit a home where there is no toilet paper we think that the person/people living there has failed, for whatever reason, to keep a proper household. A lack of toilet paper is worse than a sink full of unwashed crockery. It is a signal that civilised behaviour, manners, has broken down, and the next step is the breakdown of social order.

In late March the most downloaded film from the iTunes site was the 2019 addition to the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The second most downloaded film was the Steven Soderbergh directed Contagion, released in 2011. Contagion was premised on the global spread of a highly infectious virus. Wesley Morris, revisiting the film in March 2020 for The New York Times, wrote that, for him, ‘watching Contagion was fun, until it wasn’t.’ He goes on:

In the best of times, we civilians are unlikely to have a clear sense of what to expect from our leaders and government agencies. So in addition to looking to Washington for clarity in these stressful times, lots of us have turned to Soderbergh. Contagion offers gymnastic catastrophe – it kicks, glides and throbs. (Morris, 2020: emphasis in original)

While not on Netflix, it is likely to be the film being watched by many of those stoners hunkered down at home in the United States hoping that their supply of toilet paper doesn’t run out. Simon Weaving, watching the film for The Canberra Times, also in March 2020, insightfully writes that it is ‘reimagining the disaster genre of the 1970s’. The virus appears virtually unstoppable and has a mortality rate of between 20 and 30 per cent. For comparison, the Black Death, the worst global pandemic in the last thousand years, had an estimated mortality rate of 25 per cent. As the film progresses the backdrop is increasing social breakdown. John McDonald (2020) accurately describes it:

Soderbergh’s pandemic generates widespread social unrest, as panic buying gives way to riots, looting, home invasions and kidnappings. Uncollected garbage piles up on the streets while sporting venues are turned into makeshift hospitals with thousands of sufferers lined up in camp beds. This inevitably gives way to mass graves in which the dead are arrayed in neat rows and covered in quicklime.

Here, played out, is the social breakdown that Americans fear and which underlies the panic buying of guns.

Perhaps understandably, given the American preoccupation with guns, the coronavirus pandemic has been figured in terms of a war. We might remember here the long running War on Drugs begun by Richard Nixon when he was president and continued by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Asked if he thought the country was on a war footing, the American president Donald Trump answered: ‘It’s a war…I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president’ (BBC News, 2020b). However, this war is complicated because the enemy cannot be seen. As Trump went on: ‘It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy’ (BBC News, 2020b). Trump might be thinking of the 1986 film Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this film the enemy is an alien with an invisibility cloak. He is a hunter. This time the predator preys on an elite ex-army group who have been sent into a Central American jungle with the mission of rescuing two hostages. Finally, Major ‘Dutch’, played by Schwarzenegger, is the last one left alive. He disables the creature in one-on-one combat. The alien then blows himself up in a massive explosion which he expects will also kill Dutch, who survives. In a review of Contagion in 2011, the respected film critic Roger Ebert made a similar analogy between the virus and an alien: ‘The virus in Contagion is a baffling one, defying isolation, rejecting cure.…In a sense, it is an alien species, and this is a movie about an invasion from inner space.’ Here we have an image of the virus as an invisible, invading alien but from inner space – not, like the alien hunter in Predator, from outer space.

If the fear is that the coronavirus will destroy the world we have known, then toilet paper is a bulwark against that apocalypse. In the 1970s disaster films the disaster was limited: an airport (Airport, 1970), a capsized liner (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972), a burning skyscraper (Towering Inferno, 1974). In Contagion the disaster caused by the virus leads to social breakdown which stops short of the apocalyptic destruction of American society. In 1954 Richard Mathieson published I Am Legend, a novel in which a virus wipes out most of humanity while transforming the remainder into a version of vampires. One man remains, Robert Neville. Neville struggles to find a cure for the virus while being hunted by the vampires. At the end he is captured and in dying realises that he will become a legend for the new vampire society. There have been three films based on the book, the most recent being I Am Legend, released in 2007 with Will Smith playing Neville. Typically, reflecting the American ideological emphasis on individualism, Neville is the last man alive. Social breakdown leads to complete destruction.

The most popular Australian apocalypse film has been Mad Max and its sequels, Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road. In these films Max, a member of the Main Force Patrol, an arm of the federal police, in the first film, engages with gangs and rudimentary social groups in the post-apocalyptic world. Sometimes he helps them, sometimes they attempt to capture or kill him. It is, then, a slightly different apocalyptic world that haunts the toilet roll shoppers in Australia than that which haunts Americans. Nevertheless, in these films, we never see the characters urinate or defecate, but what we can be sure of is that in this world there will be no toilet paper. In early March, in a Woolworths supermarket in the Sydney suburb of Chullora, a mother and daughter got into a fight with another women who desperately wanted one of the packs of toilet rolls the pair had piled on their shopping trolley. The fight was filmed on a mobile phone and posted to YouTube where, across a number of postings, it has been viewed nearly three million times. A Woolworths staff member had to separate the women and police were called. A New South Wales police acting inspector, Andrew New, said: ‘We just ask that people don’t panic like this when they go out shopping, There is no need for it. It isn’t the Thunderdome, it isn’t Mad Max, we don’t need to do that’ (Guardian staff, 2020b). Perhaps New identified with Max as a policeman. New was referring to the fights that take place in Thunderdome in the third Mad Max film. The apocalyptic connotations of toilet rolls, and lack of them, are clearly present in the Australian imaginary.

The importance of toilet rolls to civilisation and the fear of apocalypse when there are none left has been played out in a different Mad Max scenario. Somebody (or some people, calling themselves Hired Goons) has remade the official trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road to make it about finding and fighting for toilet rolls, and posted it on YouTube. They have titled it: ‘Mad Max: Fury Roll…Coronavirus Toilet Paper Crisis’. Revising the byline, we are now offered: ‘As the world fell, each of us went crazy in our own way. Now desperate warriors wage war across the Australian wasteland over the most precious resource of all: toilet paper.’ The card ‘A World Without Mercy’ has mercy crossed out and Toilet Paper added. Max, narrating: ‘Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell…each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy. Me…or everyone else.’ Max’s cause is now the protection of toilet rolls. Toilet roll packs are inserted at various points in the clip and in one scene there are empty supermarket shelves. The narrative of the film has been altered to be about hunting down the group who have taken the toilet rolls. This parody was posted three days before reports of the Chullora supermarket fight.

Toilet paper

There are two strands in the modern history of toilet paper. One links it to hygiene, the other to cleanliness. Both are brought together under the rhetoric of civilisation. Freud, for example, in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1994: 25), writes that:

Beauty, cleanliness and order obviously occupy a special position among the requirements of civilization.…With regard to cleanliness, we must bear in mind that it is demanded of us by hygiene as well, and we may suspect that even before the days of scientific prophylaxis the connection between the two was not altogether strange to man.

For Freud, then, cleanliness, a necessary aspect of civilisation, is a consequence of hygiene. Often conflated, cleanliness and hygiene are very different discourses. We find this distinction on an instructional course in ‘Hygiene and Environmental Health’ (Open University, n.d.):

The term cleanliness should not be used in place of hygiene. Cleaning in many cases is removing dirt, wastes or unwanted things from the surface of objects using detergents and necessary equipment. Hygiene practice focuses on the prevention of diseases through the use of cleaning as one of several inputs.

While hygiene and cleanliness are very different, the one related to medicine, and thought of in scientific terms as having an absolute quality, the other related to culture, as Freud suggests they do overlap in practice.

Mary Douglas pursued this distinction in Purity and Danger. She argued that: ‘If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966: 35). She explains that: ‘if uncleanliness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order. Uncleanliness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained. To recognise this is the first step towards insight into pollution’ (Douglas, 1966: 41).

In modern society this pattern is what we call civilisation. Douglas is making a distinction between cleanliness and hygiene where hygiene is related to medical matters and cleanliness has a social/cultural quality. Cleanliness ensures that what is constructed as dirt stays in its place. It is only dirt when it is out of place in the civilised order ensured by cleanliness. Dirt is given an absolute quality when it is understood in terms of hygiene. While the spread of the coronavirus is related to hygiene, it is thought of in everyday life as having a cultural aspect. In that overlap between cleanliness and hygiene the threat of the coronavirus is thought of in terms of uncleanliness, and as such is a threat to social order. Consequently, the spread of the virus has an implicit apocalyptic quality related to social breakdown and the end of civilisation. Toilet paper is the means to keep the uncleanliness, and the pollution it causes including the coronavirus, at bay. From this point of view the hoarding of toilet paper is an attempt to save civilisation. The distinction between hygiene and cleanliness is important to understand because it lies at the basis of the difference in the way that historically the British and the Americans have thought about toilets.

Flush toilets and toilet paper history

Although there were precursors, for our purposes we can recognise that the flush toilet was invented in England by the mid-1850s. The 1848 Public Health Act, the first governmental attempt to deal with issues related to public health, required all new houses to include a water closet, a privy or an ash pit (Moore, 2005: 56; conflating the fitting with the room, Moore uses the more current term ‘flush toilet’, while the Act stipulates water closet.). A privy was an outside toilet not connected to the sewerage system; an ash pit speaks for itself. The term water closet, now often abbreviated to WC, was coming into use for plumbed indoor toilets. Barbara Penner (2013: 33–4) writes that Britain was the leader in the development of indoor, plumbed toilets placed within water closets and that, ‘from the nineteenth century it would be not only specific British bathroom products and technologies but also the country’s entire sanitation model that were adopted by, and exported to, cities across Europe and to its colonies’. We have already seen this exportation to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Implicit in this development was that the toilet was placed in a room of its own. In Britain it is often euphemistically identified as the smallest room. Writing from an American perspective William E. Schmidt (1992) comments:

Indoor toilets were not uncommon in English houses by the late 19th century but the emphasis on bathing as a matter of general hygiene was much slower to catch on. Over the years, the relatively spare, compact British bathroom has attracted the curiosity of foreigners. They have marveled at the absence of a bidet or shower, at the fact the toilet is often sequestered in a tiny room all its own, and at the plumbing of sinks, which invariably have separate taps for dispensing hot and cold water.

As indoor plumbing evolved in Britain the water closet, increasingly known by the most important object within it, the toilet, was kept separate from the other new room which contained a sink and a bath, the bathroom. In the United States the two were put into the same room:

For all intents and purposes the bathroom – with its sink, tub, and toilet – was an invention of the 20th century. By 1910, house plans in almost all publications generally showed a bathroom, much as we see them now. (Antique Home Style, n.d.)

This difference between Britain and the United States was, as Schmidt indicates, not just one of building architecture. In the United States having the toilet in the bathroom gestures to an emphasis on cleanliness. In Britain, the concern has been with hygiene, specifically the hygienic disposal of waste matter. In the American feminist author Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, she writes this about a man with whom Isadora, the protagonist, is in love: ‘I sensed that Charlie was more snobbish than he was intelligent. I knew he never bathed, never used deodorant, and wiped his ass inadequately (as if he were still hoping his Mommy would come to the rescue), but I was crazy about him’ (Jong, 1973: 52).

The concern here is with cleanliness rather than hygiene. Charlie is a dirty man and not cleaning his bottom properly is an expression of that lack of care over his personal cleanliness. Jong suggests he might not have been properly toilet trained. That Isadora loves him nevertheless signals the quality of that love. Charlie would be disgusting to most Americans. In the United States the toilet is subsumed into the bathroom. When one is looking for a toilet it is polite to ask for the bathroom. Conversely, in Britain, where historically there was no shower, and until well into the 20th century often no bathroom in working-class houses, Americans have been shocked at the irregularity of bathing. Australia used to follow the British rule of having a separate room for the toilet, but since around the 1990s it has become more common to have the toilet in the bathroom.

How does this distinction between a culture that thinks in terms of cleanliness and one that thinks in terms of hygiene relate to toilet paper use? We can look at how much toilet paper is used in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The average American uses three toilet rolls a week or about 160 a year (National Resources Defense Council, 2019: 16). In the Australian edition of the Daily Mail, Matilda Rudd (2019) reported on a discussion on the Mumsnet website sparked by a woman saying that her family of three uses nine toilet rolls in a week and asking if this was excessive. Rudd clearly thought it was because she capitalised week in the headline. Rudd (2019) writes: ‘A number of women replied almost instantly, saying they couldn’t believe that amount only lasted a week.’ Australians use about 88 toilet rolls each a year, which is rather more than one and a half a week (Grace and Sakkal, 2020). The British each use around 100 toilet rolls a year (Fryer, 2020). The high American usage can be read in terms of the preoccupation with cleanliness. The Australian usage fits more with the British usage, suggesting a continuing concern with hygiene.

However, the story doesn’t end here. There is a difference in how toilet paper is used. Jane Fryer (2020) explains: ‘Most Brits (68 per cent) are folders. More men than women are folders. Older people are more likely to fold. Americans tend to scrunch.…Folders tend to look down on scrunchers (“It’s just plain grubby,” says one friend accusingly) and consider them unhygienic.’ Folding toilet paper to use it is thought of as hygienic. This may well relate to the lengthy British history of using medicated paper which, it was thought, would wipe away germs. Scrunching up toilet paper for use appears to enable a person to more thoroughly clean the area thought of as dirty. The reference here is to Douglas and the idea of matter out of place. What we are seeing here is the intimate relationship between toilet paper and civilisation.

This, too, is not the end of the story. Americans began using soft toilet paper, often called toilet tissue, much earlier than the British or Australians. If the English are responsible for the flush toilet, the Americans pioneered toilet paper and later toilet tissue. Joseph Gayetty started marketing his toilet paper in 1857. He advertised it as a hygienic solution to a medical problem. It was, his advertisement read, ‘the greatest necessity of the age! Gayetty’s medicated paper for the water closet’ (see Picryl, n.d.). The paper contained aloe and was sold as an anti-haemorrhoid treatment. We should notice that for Gayetty toilet paper was a specialised medical product to be sold in drug stores. Water closets were very new in the late 1850s, as we have seen, and still limited to wealthier homes. Gayetty was targeting a new market, people with indoor toilets.

At this point we should take a step back. Up to this time people used a variety of objects to clean themselves. Writing from an Australian perspective Margaret Simpson (2018) tells us:

In colonial America corn cobs were used to cleanse delicate areas but once newspaper was invented, yesterday’s news and even old telephone books, were commonly used. In Australia, these were cut into sheets by the householder and held together with a piece of fencing wire or string and hung on a nail inside the dunny. Another source of paper were the thick department store catalogues like Anthony Hordern’s sent out to householders.

The spread of newspapers in the 19th century had enabled the use of something more easeful than corn cobs or plant leaves, which were used in country areas. However, before Gayetty there was no special item for cleaning oneself after defecating or urinating.

While people had sat on wooden seats in privies, it was only with the advent of the water closet that the pedestal toilet became normal in Britain and then the United States. Previously people would mostly squat, and we should note Richard Smyth’s (2017: 7) insight that: ‘What’s certainly true is that, whatever is going on inside, those who squat, rather than sit, wind up with substantially less wiping to do. We in the west choose, as a rule, to sit – and, thus, to wipe’ (emphasis in original).

What this suggests is that some means of cleaning the anal area became more important when people started sitting on toilets and, as we shall see, sitting immediately came to be seen as a characteristic of civilised behaviour. Nevertheless, until the discovery that infection could be spread from anal detritus cleanliness was not considered important. On voyages to Australia:

As people did not understand the basic rules of hygiene, and toilet paper had not been invented, rags or cloths were soaked in vinegar and hung on the back of the toilet door to be used by all. This led to the spread of diseases like dysentery and typhoid. Deaths at sea were common. (Museums Victoria, n.d.)

We can assume that such practices were also usual in homes across the classes when newspaper was not available. It is in this context that we can understand how significant Gayetty’s invention was. The discovery of the links between cholera, typhoid and dysentery and faecal matter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enforced a greater emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness when using the toilet and helped to transform the activity of anal cleaning, increasing its importance.

This recognition of the connection with infection also reinforced the use of disposable paper. By this time toilet paper was being manufactured for the general market. In the United States around 1890 the Scott brothers started making toilet rolls. Their paper was unmedicated, and cheaper. Although toilet paper linked to the Gayetty name continued to be sold until the 1920s, it had been supplanted by toilet paper that had a broader, general market. The Scott Paper Company had been selling toilet paper since 1879 but: ‘At this time they did not market the toilet paper as Scott Tissue since they did not want to soil the family name with such a “lewd” product’ (Earley, 2010). This changed in 1903. By the 1920s Scott Tissue was being advertised as ‘soft as old linen’ and it was starting to be sold in grocery stores as well as drug stores. By this time the selling point of toilet paper in the United States for a mass market was no longer its specialised medical attribute but rather comfort and cleanliness. This fitted well with a culture that situated the toilet and the bath in the same room where, from its name, bathing was prioritised. In 1928 the Hoberg Paper Company began selling an even softer toilet roll they called Charmin. Where previous toilet paper had had masculine connotations, probably linked to Gayetty’s medicinal purpose, Charmin was aimed at the female market. The packaging of the rolls was light blue and included a head and shoulders silhouette of a respectable-looking woman, the Charmin lady. Charmin rapidly became one of the biggest selling toilet rolls in the United States.

By contrast, in Britain hard, medicated toilet paper, toilet paper that emphasised hygiene, remained the most popular choice until well into the 1960s. In 1793 George Newton and Thomas Chambers started what became a highly successful colliery in Thorncliffe Valley near Sheffield. Over time they diversified into ironware, heavy machinery and, in the Second World War, tanks. They made coke out of coal. This process created carbolic acid as a by-product. This is a disinfectant. Around the turn of the 20th century Newton and Chambers trademarked the name Izal, and Izal disinfectant was sold in Britain and throughout the colonies. One early advertisement told readers that Izal ‘Guards Against Infection’. There was a picture of a British soldier and underneath: ‘IZAL disinfectant is in daily use in British hospitals throughout the Empire’. Joan Jones (2016) writes that: ‘It was, basically, a hugely successful marketing campaign – orchestrated by chief salesman Joseph Godber who was said to possess a “missionary zeal” – to sell any product that could be made from or with carbolic acid.’ One of these products was toilet paper. Jones (2016) explains: ‘The scratchy toilet paper, impregnated with Izal disinfectant and every sheet printed with the legend “Now wash your hands”…was at first given away to local authorities who bought bulk supplies of hygiene products, before being marketed as a commodity in its own right.’ The packaging of each roll carried a cross, mostly green but sometimes white, suggesting the hygiene qualities of the toilet paper.

Izal’s main competitor was Bronco, made by the British Patent Perforated Paper Company, which also started production around the turn of the century. Bronco toilet rolls were similarly made of hard paper and the rolls were also marketed in terms of hygiene. As late as 1960 an advertisement for Bronco told female readers:

But Bronco is not designed just for men: it is specially made to give you the gentle care you demand – the gentle care that combines, in an ideal form, both comfort and hygiene. That’s why doctors and nurses use and strongly recommend Bronco – it’s safe, strong, won’t ‘fluff’ or disintegrate.

Izal and Bronco toilet rolls were first sold in chemists as a medicinal hygiene product and in newsagents as a paper product.

The competition that the advertisement envisaged was not Izal but the soft toilet paper being sold by Andrex. First sold in 1942, Andrex was designed on the model of gentlemen’s disposable handkerchiefs, what we think of now as tissues, found in Harrods. In the 1950s Andrex was advertised as a way of aiding toilet training: ‘Teaching of modern bathroom habits made easier’ read one advertisement, and it went on to describe Andrex toilet rolls as ‘The most civilised toilet tissue in the world.’ Hygiene here is fundamentally associated with civilisation. It describes Andrex as: ‘the complete difference of Andrex is s–m–o–o–t–h comfort’ and ‘so absorbent…so kind…so pure’ (the ellipses are in the advertisement). We should understand pure here in the context of Douglas’s distinction between purity and danger. Andrex has no dirt, no matter out of place, but is available to take on the task of removing dirt not only from babies’ bottoms but those of adults also.

Andrex had an uphill job in Britain to get accepted. In 1956 the makers of Izal commissioned a report from psychologists at the Tavistock Institute on British feelings about toilet paper and whether the company should introduce a soft paper toilet roll. The psychologists conducted 400 interviews. They found that: ‘In Glasgow…many people still used newspaper. In Yorkshire, “soft” papers were viewed with great distrust and anxiety because they were not “reliable” (White, 2019). The psychologists also discovered that: ‘In London, Birmingham and Manchester, women and young couples were making the move to soft paper. Men were more accustomed to “rubbing or scraping” and would need to be trained to use soft paper without dirtying their hands’ (White, 2019). Asked about the American liking for soft toilet paper, ‘the psychologists reported that Brits thought Americans were “extravagant” and prone to “crazes” that would pass’ (White, 2019). The British civil service continued to use Izal toilet paper into the 1970s.

That some Glaswegians were even in the 1950s still using newspaper should not come as a surprise. Hester Lacey, in an article in the British newspaper The Independent in 1993, interviewed a man who recalls:

There were six of us kids and it was our job to cut the paper into squares, make a hole through one corner with a skewer, tie the sheets with string and hang them behind the loo door. Yes, you did get newsprint on you. But so what? No one else was going to see it. And anyway, they all had it too.

We can remember here the protagonist of Jong’s novel and American disgust of uncleanliness. The use of toilet paper moved down the social order from middle class to working class. The continued use of newspaper in Britain as a normal way of cleaning the anal area in spite of the advertising campaigns of Izal and Bronco signals the lengthy time it took for toilet hygiene to become important in Britain.

In Australia the use of newspaper also lasted into the 1950s. The journalist Gerard Thompson (2013: 51), who grew up in West Hobart, at that time a respectable working-class suburb, writes in his memoir: ‘In many-a-home (ours included) in those early years the daily delivery of The Mercury newspaper in Hobart had a two-fold purpose. The newspaper would be printed, read, cut into squares, forced onto a hook and then became toilet paper.’

Thompson (2013: 51) goes on, echoing in part the man quoted by Lacey: ‘Thank God for those first rolls of “Gentlest Tissues” and those first Sorbent commercials: “What’s the gentlest tissue in the bathroom you can issue, new new new new Sorbent”. No more black print in unthinkable places.’

Sorbent, a soft toilet paper, began production in Melbourne in 1952 and started advertising on television when that became possible in 1956. As in Britain, until the early 1950s toilet rolls were thought of as a personal product and sold in pharmacies and under the counter in newsagents (Asaleo Care, 2018). Sorbent broke with this tradition. The success of Sorbent, like the later shift from a separate room for a toilet to a bathroom that included the toilet, is part of the shift in Australia from British influence to American influence. By the 1960s toilet paper, and increasingly soft toilet paper, like the flush toilet, was an integral part of Western modern, civilised life.

Toilet paper and its other

Broadly speaking, the West divides the world up into a dichotomy: civilised and uncivilised – in Stuart Hall’s (1992: 185–227) words, the West and the Rest – and in excretory terms, those who sit and use toilet paper and those who squat and use water. The world is, of course, not that simple. In France, for example, there has been a lengthy resistance to pedestal toilets, especially in the south of the country, probably due to an influence from North Africa. This perhaps relates to why squat toilets in French are known as toilettes a la turque, most likely referring back to the Ottoman Empire. The bidet to wash oneself has survived even longer, long enough to become the butt of jokes about uncomprehending Americans and British who use it for other purposes such as washing their feet. Nevertheless, civilisation is equated with pedestal toilets and with toilet paper. This connection is very strong. Toilet paper is, if anything, considered more important than the pedestal toilet. This is because in Western thinking paper cleans better than water. Yet, as Christine Ro (2019) comments: ‘The penchant for wiping after using the toilet – rather than rinsing off – is a source of puzzlement around the world. Water cleans more neatly than paper.’ Alison Moore (2009: 105) has discussed her experiences of her travels outside the West where she saw:

multiple examples of the construction of codified attitudes towards toilet practices embedded in the politics of cultural difference. The most overwhelmingly common examples of this consisted of travellers who identified as ‘Western’ experiencing disgust and discomfort at having to use squat toilets and having to go without toilet paper.

Backing up Ro’s point in more detail, Moore (2009: 105–6) goes on:

I also heard complaints from locals about the toilet practices of foreign travellers – namely, bemused or horrified attitudes towards the use of toilet paper, since it does not clean as effectively as the water used for postexcretory cleansing in a range of non-industrial and semi-industrial societies…These locals associated toilet paper with the polluting and wastefulness of the West and foreign toilet practices generally with the hypocrisy of Western attitudes of superiority towards their cultures.

Here we see the extent to which, for Westerners, sitting and the use of toilet paper are totally taken-for-granted expressions of civilisation and, as Moore writes, superiority.

One aspect of this distinction between toilet paper and water is the idea that toilet paper keeps a person apart from the remaining waste that the individual is cleaning away whereas water, used with the left hand, puts a person in closer contact with the waste. Julia Kristeva (1982: 2) describes abjection as:

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck.

However, what we regard as the abject is not absolute – it varies culturally. We are here returned to Douglas and her description of dirt as matter out of place. That which people in the West find abject, such as faeces, are not so experienced in other places in the world. Indeed, the abject quality of faeces is a learnt aspect of modernity.

In The Civilising Process Norbert Elias uses etiquette books to demonstrate the transition to civilisation because they show a moment of change, a time when something previously considered acceptable is now acceptable no longer, indeed might be experienced as shameful and disgusting. Elias (2000 [1939]: 131) quotes from the Florentine author Giovanni Della Casa who published Galateo in 1558. It was subsequently translated into five European languages. Della Casa tells his readers:

Moreover, it does not befit a modest, honorable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people, nor to do up his clothes afterward in their presence. Similarly, he will not wash his hands on returning to decent society from private places, as the reason for his washing will arouse disagreeable thoughts in people. For the same reason it is not a refined habit, when coming across something disgusting in the street, as sometimes happens, to turn to one’s companion and point it out to him.

It is far less proper to hold out the stinking thing for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, ‘I should like to know how much that stinks,’ when it would be better to say, ‘Because it stinks do not smell it.’

Here we find that in this premodern, precivilised world it had been acceptable, if not normal, to at least urinate publicly and to have such a close relationship with faeces, including those of others, that somebody walking down the street could casually pick one up. This should further remind us that in that time people would defecate publicly in the street. To find bodily waste abject is a modern phenomenon and an expression of civilisation. Taking this understanding further, Della Casa’s point of etiquette also enjoins a person not to wash their hands when returning to the table after leaving to defecate or urinate. This is precisely the opposite of that hygienic characteristic of civilisation, what every child is taught and what was printed on every sheet of Izal toilet paper, ‘Now wash your hands’. For these precivilised people, as for the people Moore was writing about, bodily waste is not abject.

In order to better grasp this shift to experiencing bodily waste as abject we need to appreciate the transformation in the way the body has been thought about. Mikhail Bakhtin discusses the shift from the open body, the body of the world before modernity, connected with its environment by way of flows into and out of orifices, to the closed bodies of the modern world where flows occur in private and are highly regulated. Bakhtin (2009: 26) calls the former body grotesque:

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications or offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation.

In the world of the open body defecation is a part of life. The orifices, the mouth and the anus most particularly, connect the body with the world in which it exists.

For Bakhtin the closed body was the classical body, the body of classical statuary. However, it is also the body of modernity, of civilisation. The world which emphasises the closed body fantasies a body without orifices, certainly a body without an anus. In this context cleaning the body where the flows take place becomes of great importance. Dirty bodies, still carrying excreta, become objects of disgust, of abjection, because the openness of the body is emphasised, as is the connection between the body and the external world. In this context we should recall the American preoccupation with hiding women’s nipples. It is these, which provide milk for babies, more than breasts that disturb Americans. It was only in 2018 that the last two American states, Utah and Idaho, changed their laws to protect nursing mothers from fines for public indecency. The Free the Nipple campaign was founded in 2012 to highlight the discrimination against women not being allowed to show their nipples in public, unlike men. Women’s nipples, it would seem, are associated with abjection.

The closed body is the body of the individual. The inhabitant of this body, and here we can remember the Cartesian claim of a split between the mind and the physical body, is preoccupied with keeping it clean, keeping a clear boundary between it and the natural world in which it lives. Toilet paper helps create that boundary both by keeping the body clean and by being a material which is placed between the excreta and the hand. We can remember the fear of those Yorkshire people interviewed by Izal’s psychologists was that soft paper would split and their fingers become soiled. This signals the hellish world feared by those who panic buy toilet paper. Without toilet paper they would have to more directly connect with the body and its detritus.

The anus is the key moment of bodily interaction with the natural world. Defecation happens regularly, in a healthy body once or twice a day. The closed body is a body that is controlled. Vomiting is associated with sickness and is uncontrollable and exceptional. It shockingly emphasises the mouth as a site for the bodily expulsion of unwanted matter. Thus we have the common image of the drunken young person, head over the toilet bowl, regurgitating the alcohol they have recently imbibed, and anything else in their stomach. The connection of mouth and toilet reinforces the abjection of this picture. Generally speaking the mind decides when defecation should take place. This is a key aspect of toilet training. Anybody who has had diarrhoea or who lives with Irritable Bowel Syndrome or a similar intestinal problem knows well the feeling of having an uncontrollable body. Lacking toilet paper reinforces this feeling of being out of control of our bodies. Without toilet paper the uncontrolled body cannot even be cleaned. The anus is the site of feared devolution into the grotesque, indeed into the apocalyptic world beyond modernity.

The colonial world, and indeed, more generally the world outside of modernity, is a world of uncontrolled bodies without toilet paper. Penner (2013: 34) again:

In 1927 the Columbia University political scientist Parker Thomas Moon described such infrastructural interventions (approvingly) as ‘sanitary imperialism.’ As American and European sanitary models reshaped cities from Mumbai to Manila, colonial subjects were themselves ‘modernized’ through their encounters with new sanitary technologies and theories of hygiene.

A fundamental aspect of colonialism, and one still little acknowledged, has been the exportation of the pedestal toilet and toilet paper. Warwick Anderson (1995: 651) has discussed what he calls excremental colonialism by the Americans in the Philippines. He writes that in one case, ‘the post surgeon’s report on a typhoid outbreak notes that “natives are uncontrolled as to their personal hygiene and are undoubtedly a source of disease”’. Referencing Elias, Anderson (1995: 648) explains:

The colonizing process must therefore be a ‘civilizing’ process. Americans at all levels of colonial society (but especially women and public health officers) set out to train childlike Filipinos in the correct techniques of the body, ‘under the watchword of civilite,’ rationalized as hygiene.

Hygiene in the colonies had been supplanted by cleanliness in the United States, as we have seen. Both are crucial aspects of civilisation.

China has bought into the connection between sanitation and civilisation. In a 2005 article in The Washington Post Peter Goodman described Chinese public toilets:

In a public toilet – be it at the park, on a main thoroughfare, at the airport or in a train station – the air is often so foul that you limit your breathing. The smell wafts out into the surrounding neighborhood. You keep your eyes turned upward, to avoid fixing on the squalid floor. Most toilets have no toilet paper. Many lack running water. Everywhere, flushing seems optional. People with major business to attend to must typically execute it in full view of everyone else over a big gulley without privacy walls. Sit-down toilets? Rare. (cited in Washington Post, 2016)

Goodman identifies pedestal toilets, flushing and toilet paper as essential aspects of a well-designed and maintained public toilet. It seems that in 2015 China started a ‘toilet revolution’ to address the kinds of issues Goodman found. New public toilets would be built with pedestal toilets and plenty of toilet paper. This, though, would not be enough, people’s habits would also have to change:

‘Many people spend a lot of time dressing themselves, but they do not spare a second to flush the toilet,’ Li Shihong, deputy chief of the China National Tourism Administration, was quoted as saying in China Daily, ‘Toilet civilisation has a long way to go in China.’ (cited in Washington Post, 2016)

It seems China is itself taking on Western forms of sanitation. In the process, indeed in the civilising process, attitudes towards the body and its excreta are to be transformed.

In Australia the obsession with toilet paper creates a problem for observant Muslims. Not only, as we have seen, do people who use water think the use of paper both unhygienic and lacking in the ability to clean the anal area properly, but while the Koran has nothing to say about correct toileting technique the Hadith, the supplementary book of teachings, recommends that water be used. The Australian prejudice against using water is as strong as the understanding that toilet paper is the expression of civilisation. Amro Ali (2020) tells this story:

When I was nine-years-old at school in Australia, the bigoted teacher told us students of her recent Malaysia holiday: ‘Those Muslims use water to clean their bums, ewwww’ with hand on face, shaking her head. The students laughed. I was horrified by this anti-shatafa reality.

A shatafa is similar to a bidet and these days portable ones can be bought.

There are stories of how migrants to Australia used to using squat toilets and water in their toileting practice have come to terms with Western pedestal toilets and toilet paper. In universities it is so common that international students squat on the pedestal toilets, often breaking them or injuring themselves, that pictures are now placed above the toilet showing how it should be used. A man interviewed by Greg Noble and Paul Tabar (2016: 22) who arrived in Australia as a teenager in the late 1970s provides this memory:

We had a sitting toilet and neither my mother nor my dad were used to it…[we] used to squat on the seat…because we didn’t know how to use the sitting toilet…it took time to learn how to use the Western toilet…my parents were not used to use toilet papers, and if they wanted to wash they didn’t have access to water in the toilet room…so they amended the whole toilet…they installed one ‘Arab style’ and one ‘Western style’…the Arab style was ignored gradually and the Western toilet was adopted…it was comfortable but they installed a water tap in the toilet with a hose.

This man is describing the problem of using a toilet when, in British style, it is situated in a room of its own. His parents installed a squat toilet and, one presumes, a shatafa, most likely in the bathroom. However, over time, they acculturated to a Western style toilet but not, it seems, to toilet paper. The cultural pressure to make this change is embedded in the ideology that links pedestal toilets and toilet paper with civilisation. By accepting the pedestal toilet the family not only become more Australian but more civilised. However, the leap from using water to using toilet paper was too much. To that extent the parents remained un-Australian and, indeed, uncivilised.

In a study by Zulkeplee Othman and Laurie Buys (2016: 387) of Muslim migrants’ toileting practices:

All case study participants reported that water is used for perianal cleaning. However, Soraya and Farid highlighted that since Western toilet facilities were installed in their rented homes, both have adapted through behavioural change by using toilet papers but perform proper cleaning in the shower cubicle afterwards.

It appears that Soraya and Farid live in a house that has the toilet in the bathroom. This is likely to be a more recent, American-influenced lay-out, and makes compromise easier. The suggestion of ‘proper cleaning’ brings us back to the disgust at the use of paper shared by people brought up using water.

Conclusion

The legitimacy of toilet paper for anal cleaning is founded on its deep and complex relationship with the ideology of civilisation described earlier. The strength of this relationship is suggested in the fact that, as we have seen, toilet paper is less than two hundred years old and alternatives such as newspaper were used by people in the West until well into the 1950s, yet people who use toilet paper cannot conceive of toileting any other way. They behave as if toilet paper has a far lengthier history than in reality it has. For the migrants from countries that use squat toilets and water, the mark of full assimilation into Australian culture and Western civilisation is the acceptance of the pedestal toilet and toilet paper, even when religion suggests otherwise and tradition indicates that squatting is an easier position for defecation and water is a better choice for cleaning afterwards.

While in Britain, and in Australia until sometime after the 1950s, toilet paper was associated with hygiene and while in the United States it has been linked with cleanliness, in both cases it has ultimately been regarded as an expression of civilisation. As Moore (2009: 107) writes: ‘There is no doubt that from the second half of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, toilet technologies were seen by many as signifiers of a stage of progress imagined along a universal social-evolutionary timeline.’ This remains the case. At the end of that timeline is the pedestal toilet and toilet paper. As the extent of the threat to everyday life from the spread of the novel coronavirus began to be appreciated, the first reaction of Australians was to buy toilet paper. Many other countries had similar experiences. That there was a cultural basis in this response can be seen in the American reaction, which was first of all to buy guns. The panic buying of toilet paper was an expression of Australians’, and Westerners’ more generally, investment in Western civilisation as the pinnacle of human society.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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