Why Don't Americans Use Bidets?

It's Saturday, July eighteenth. A friend asked me to do an episode on bidets. I laughed. Then I looked into why Americans don't use them and stopped laughing, because the answer involves World War II brothels, a thirty billion dollar toilet paper industry, and the fact that roughly 80 percent of the world's population cleans with water and thinks Americans are the weird ones. I actually have some personal experience with this. I spent summers in India growing up, and over there it was a pail with water. Not glamorous, but it was still water. Now most places have upgraded to the hose attachment, which is better but still not ideal. And when my cousins came to visit the US and tried a bidet for the first time, they loved it. They couldn't believe Americans had access to this technology and most of them chose toilet paper instead. And when I thought about it, I couldn't really explain why either. The bidet was invented in France in the early 1700s as a standalone basin designed for personal washing. The word "bidet" is French for "pony," named after the straddling position required to use the original version. By the 1800s, it was a standard fixture in French and Italian bathrooms, and most of continental Europe followed. British culture never fully adopted it, partly because of a longstanding disdain for French aristocratic habits that the British associated with excess and immorality.

American attitudes inherited some of that British skepticism, but the real damage happened during World War II. For many American soldiers, their first encounter with a bidet was in French brothels. The bidet was a fixture associated with sex workers' hygiene, and that association stuck. When those soldiers came home, they weren't about to install a fixture in their family bathroom that reminded them of a wartime brothel. The bidet became coded as something foreign, sexual, and inappropriate for a respectable American household.

The timing made it worse. The postwar suburban construction boom of the late 1940s and 1950s built millions of homes with standardized bathroom layouts that didn't include bidet plumbing. Once those homes were built without the infrastructure, retrofitting became expensive and inconvenient. American bathroom design calcified around a toilet, a sink, and a bathtub, and the bidet never got a foothold. By the time a generation of Americans grew up without ever seeing one, the absence became self-reinforcing: nobody installed bidets because nobody had bidets, which meant nobody thought to install one. There's an analogy that bidet advocates use that I can't get out of my head: if you got something on your arm, would you just wipe it off with a dry piece of paper and consider yourself clean? You wouldn't. You'd use water. But for some reason, when it comes to the one part of your body where cleanliness matters most, Americans decided dry paper was sufficient and have stuck with that decision for over a century.

In Japan, roughly 80 to 90 percent of homes have a washlet, a toilet seat attachment made by a company called Toto that sprays warm water, adjusts pressure and angle, and finishes with a warm air dryer. The washlet was introduced in 1980 and became so ubiquitous that Japanese travelers are often shocked when they visit the United States and encounter bathrooms without them. In the Middle East and South Asia, water-based cleaning is a religious and cultural practice that predates modern plumbing by centuries. In much of South America and Southern Europe, standalone bidets are as standard as a towel rack.

The health argument is also fairly clear. Studies have shown that water cleaning reduces bacterial contamination compared to dry wiping, and dermatologists frequently recommend bidets for people with skin sensitivity, hemorrhoids, or conditions that make wiping painful. The counterargument, that bidets spread bacteria if not cleaned properly, applies equally to any bathroom fixture and hasn't prevented the rest of the world from using them. The medical case for water over paper isn't ambiguous. Americans just haven't heard it because nobody with a thirty billion dollar interest in selling them toilet paper has any reason to share it. Americans use roughly 140 rolls of toilet paper per person per year, more than any other country. Nationally, that adds up to about 37 billion rolls, which requires cutting down roughly 15 million trees and consuming 473 billion gallons of water in the manufacturing process. The US toilet paper market is worth over thirty billion dollars annually, dominated by a handful of companies that have spent decades marketing softness, ply count, and absorbency as the metrics that matter while never once suggesting that maybe water would work better.

A bidet attachment that fits on a standard American toilet costs between thirty and sixty dollars on Amazon and installs in about twenty minutes without a plumber. A washlet-style seat with warm water and a dryer runs a few hundred dollars. The switching cost is minimal. The reason Americans haven't switched isn't financial or practical. It's the same path dependency we've covered in the QWERTY episode, the daylight saving episode, and the curriculum episode: people do what they've always done because the system is built around the existing behavior and nobody has enough incentive to push for change, especially when the industry profiting from the current system is worth thirty billion dollars a year.

COVID almost broke the cycle. When toilet paper disappeared from shelves in March 2020, bidet sales in the US spiked by over 300 percent. Tushy, one of the most visible bidet brands in the American market, reported a tenfold increase in sales during the first weeks of the shortage. For a brief window, millions of Americans who had never considered a bidet suddenly needed an alternative, tried one, and realized what the rest of the world already knew. Sales have continued to grow since 2020, and younger Americans, particularly millennials and Gen Z who are more open to challenging inherited habits, are driving adoption. But the US bidet penetration rate is still in the single digits compared to Japan's 80 to 90 percent and Western Europe's roughly 50 percent.

The thirty billion dollar question is whether American bathroom habits will shift the way they've shifted in every other wealthy country, or whether the cultural inertia from a misunderstanding in a French brothel eighty years ago is strong enough to keep three hundred million people wiping with dry paper indefinitely. Based on the path dependency pattern, the smart bet is on inertia. But the COVID spike showed that it only takes one disruption to make people reconsider a habit they never questioned, and once someone tries water, the research suggests they rarely go back to paper. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Most of the world cleans with water after using the bathroom. Americans use dry paper because of a cultural stigma that traces back to World War II, when American soldiers associated bidets with French brothels and brought that bias home. The postwar construction boom built millions of homes without bidet plumbing, and the habit calcified. Americans now use 140 rolls per person per year, 37 billion rolls nationally, requiring 15 million trees and 473 billion gallons of water to manufacture. The toilet paper industry is worth over thirty billion dollars and has no incentive to suggest an alternative. A bidet attachment costs thirty to sixty dollars and installs in twenty minutes. COVID pushed bidet sales up over 300 percent when toilet paper disappeared, and most people who tried one didn't go back. Eighty percent of the world uses water. Americans use paper. And the reason is a wartime misunderstanding that nobody ever corrected.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.