Paradoxes of Privacy

Americans lavish love and money on their bathrooms - like the living-room they are an expression of individuality and taste. For a bathroom make-over you call in an architect and an interior designer, and you invite your friends over to see the results. But although the bathroom is a public demonstration of good taste, it is also a temple of privacy. And shitting especially is one activity you don't share with your friends, colleagues or relatives in the US (unlike say in China).

So here's the challenge: the shit-pot is in the middle of a tastefully decorated room - how to eliminate its distasteful dimensions- How to disguise the fact that people urinate and defecate in the bathroom? We use extractor fans and perfumed sprays to eliminate odors, fans or running taps to cover noise, crochet covers to disguise the pretty print toilet rolls. Toilets like basins and baths are often in attractive colors or designs, though not many have the chutzpah of Kohler's ad for its Prairie Flowers range, whose purchasers will have the distinction of shitting onto a pattern "inspired by 18th century dinnerware created for Catherine the Great ".

So are Americans the world's cleanest people? They scent their toilet-paper and decorate it with flowers, but unlike the Japanese they are not "a people who like to wash their bottoms" and neither the French bidet nor the Japanese Toto toilet finds many customers in the United States. We think taking cleanliness so far is dirty.