I received this over the e-mail today. Have a good read! :)
Rating: M18 (Mature 18, for sexual-content)
The Jakarta Post
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Op-Ed
Papering over the cracks: A cheeky column
By: Julia Suryakusuma, Melbourne
A few months ago I wrote a column about Indonesians' obsession
with bodily functions (The Jakarta Post, Nov. 8, 2007), but now
I want to really plumb the depths of cultural differences and
get to the bottom of the matter. This is one column that
definitely should be read while sitting on the toilet (although
any Westerners reading should be prepared to turn the other
cheek!).
People talk about cultural differences between East and West in
terms of dietary habits: People in the East eat rice as their
staple, while people in the West prefer potatoes and bread. But
the really important difference I now realize is a little
further south, below the belly: in the West, dry bum/wet vagina;
in the East, wet bum/dry vagina!
Let me explain. In the West, wet vaginas are considered sexually
desirable, but in Indonesia women are brought up believing that
dry vaginas enhance sexual pleasure, for men at least (read the
coming February issue of The Jakarta Post Weekender for more on
bizarre local traditions for producing a fraction more
friction). But when it comes to bums, it's wet, wet, wet all the
way in Asia!
Indonesians, like many other Asian cultures, use water to clean
the anus after what in Indonesia we call buang air besar
("throwing out big water", i.e. a bowel movement, as opposed to
buang air kecil, "throwing out small water", having a pee). Pee
or poo, we cleanse ourselves with water, and often soap as well.
This is called cebok and there is no equivalent term in English,
mainly because there is no equivalent activity in the
Anglo-Saxon world. Unfortunately.
The French of course, have the bidet, often the butt of jokes,
but since they never quite managed to rule the world, it's
Anglo-Saxon custom that prevails. Forget about Napoleon, who
admonished Josephine not to wash herself as he was coming home
in five days time and yearned for "the scent of a woman". He was
after all "a barbarous Corsican" (the epithet he was bullied
with when at school in Brienne, in continental France) and not
really French -- and he was soundly defeated in the end anyway.
And that was at ... ah ... Waterloo, of course. The toilet paper
so beloved of the victorious British Empire came soon
afterwards, patented in 1871 (although it had been produced in
China since 1391) and colonialism spread it across the world.
Today, toilet paper is now associated with
economically-developed societies, although I'm not sure what's
so "developed" about dry wiping your dirty backside. A Western
friend of mine gained an insight into this when he accidentally
stepped in dog poo while barefoot on the beach. Think about it:
Would you consider yourself clean after wiping your feet with
paper? Chances are, you'd only feel clean after you'd washed
your sullied extremities with soap and water. So how is it
different if it's not your feet, but your bum?
In the old days, we Indonesians used a dipper (made from plastic
or before the days of plastic, coconut shells), scooping water
out of a water receptacle using the right hand, leaving the left
to do the cebok-ing. Right hand for eating only please! Nowadays
there are hand-held toilet showers, bidets or water-fountains
that squirt the water where it's needed -- providing you
position yourself strategically so it doesn't land on the
cheeks, or worst of all, your legs and clothes.
However, I've noticed that five-star hotels usually don't
provide "toilet shower" facilities, in any shape or form.
Perhaps they are afraid that -- shock, horror -- it will make
the floors wet! Do they really think that Indonesians or French
never stay in five-star hotels? The result is that in order to
really get clean after using the toilet, we water babes have to
strip to the waist, get into the bathtub and use the handheld
shower.
And what if there's no bathtub, just a fixed showerhead? Get a
bottle, fill it with water and pray for eyes in the back of your
head! Before the days of toilet showers, that's what people did
(and I once saw a sign that helpfully warned that inserting the
bottle can be dangerous!). And I'm happy to report that now even
the victors at Waterloo accept that some people use more than
paper: the British Council toilets in Jakarta used to have
bottles in neat, stainless-steel baskets (hopefully they've kept
up with times and replaced them with toilet showers now).
And why are Westerners so afraid of water anyway? Whatever
happened to washing away your sins? In Islam there is the
practice of doing ablutions before praying five times a day, and
in Christianity there is the saying that cleanliness is next to
godliness. I accept that if you live in the West, it might be
...er ...a wee bit cold in winter, but it is certainly not
unhealthy. I recently read a Western academic paper on
Indonesian hygiene issues that condescendingly dismissed the
Indonesian custom of cebok as "innocuous", because it "likely
has a benign impact on health". Come on! It's a lot more than
innocuous -- in a tropical climate like Indonesia where bacteria
breed like rabbits in that damp, warm Bermuda Triangle down
under, it's an absolute necessity!
So I was flushed with excitement to discover yesterday there's
now even a WTO. No, no, not the World Trade Organization, the
World Toilet Organization (www.worldtoilet.org)! Seriously!
Dedicated to issues involving toilets and sanitation it was
founded by one Jack Sims in 2001. Its headquarters are in
Singapore, it has 44 members and, believe it or not, it has set
up a Toilet College to educate people on sanitation, considered
by some to be a dirty word.
I may not have a Doctorate in Bottom Hygiene but if they offer
an honors course on cebok, I think I might be qualified to teach
it!
The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation.
