Dimitri Sandbeck

A Fecal Conspiracy of Epic Proportions

It’s that time of the day. You’re sitting down to a well-earned reprieve. Perhaps it’s time for the 3 o’clock break at the office, or a relaxing few minutes away from your studies at the library: just you, the toilet, and whatever was on the menu yesterday. While not everyone revels in the prospect of a bowel movement, many see it as guaranteed alone time, a meditative and productive part of the daily routine. And as with any routine, it has its own rhythms, parts, even acts and movements. The fine opera of bodily function should ideally be neither hurried, interrupted, nor restrained; it is for these reasons that I submit to the reader my belief that the automated plumbing industry is waging a covert war against the enjoyment and health of the modern toilet user.

The autoflush toilet is, at best, an unnecessary gimmick, and most often a hindrance to the natural rhythm and pleasant execution of one of man’s most personal affairs. At worst, it is an accident waiting to happen: in the mechanistic future our very toilets may become tools of subjugation for our robot overlords. While autoflush toilets do eliminate the need to touch the dreaded flush-handle, by no means do they eliminate the need to wash one’s hands before exiting the restroom. They do no more than provide a false sense of security to a public made paranoid by years of advertising from companies like Lysol, Clorox, and Purell. The disinfectant products offered by these companies not only have a negligible advantage over soap and water, but Dr. Charles P. Gerba—whose seminal study, “Germs in the Workplace” was funded by Clorox—writes in a Q & A with washingtonpost.com:

We have studied the microbiology of hundreds of restrooms over the years and the exit doorknob usually has the fewest number of bacteria on it of any place in the restroom. Why? Because half or more of the people have washed their hands before they leave the restroom. The doorknob on the entrance usually has more germs on it. So touching the doorknob to me seems fine. The tap on the sink in the restroom usually has the most bacteria of any item you are likely to touch in a public restroom.


Essentially, the benefit of an autoflush toilet is moot. A Purell pamphlet on germs in the workplace admits, “Plain, old-fashioned handwashing is effective at removing these nasty germs that you encounter every day.” Washing your hands is still the best defense against the germs you might encounter in a restroom. and even your own desk, according to Dr. Gerba’s 2005 update to his study, harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. Though www.plumbingsupply.com touts Automatic Flush Valves as “Ultimate Sanitary Protection”, science clearly exposes their hyperbole.

And the detriment to the pooping public is undeniable: anyone who has ever inadvertently leaned forward on a toilet equipped with such a monstrosity has experienced the wet bottom and interrupted reverie that have become hallmarks of the user-experience in our increasingly automated bathrooms.

The industry that causes this cacatus interruptus is destroying one of the last peaceful bastions of modern life with their gimcrack scheme to capitalize on an increasingly lazy and paranoid society. The sociological roots of this paranoia are evident in the writings of German sociologist Norbert Elias (The Civilizing Process, 1939), who according to Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim’s introduction to their recent anthology, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art, thought that the evolution of modern attitudes towards excretion was “Motivated by the rise of a ‘courtly’ and/or ‘bourgeois’ habitus, both of which became increasingly scandalized over time by that experience and, as a result, increasingly censorious of its representation,”(xv) From the same work, “Dirt hence disorder hence danger become associated with the proletariat, the proverbial ‘unwashed’ even unwiped masses, as distinct from the hygienically sound hence orderly hence safe bourgeoisie…”(xvi)

Our society, influenced not only by long-standing taboos and prudery, but also by vast and conspiratorial commercial concerns, has been swindled into the acceptance of a mechanism that deprives us of one of the true joys of life: to stand up, see what we have made, and then consign it to the primordial deep. Self-flushing toilet manufacturers are out to prevent the consumer from basking in the magnificence of his own natural by-products. To void one’s bowels is also to void the mind and cleanse the spirit, and certain elements of literary and popular culture have recognized this for many years. James Joyce glorifies the excretory act in Ulysses,

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly.


The importance and pleasure of the bowel movement is obviously gaining recognition in our own era as well, with such classics as Everybody Poops and The Gas We Pass sharing space in the cultural consciousness (and on Amazon.com) with stars such as Mr. Hanky of South Park fame. So why should our institutions and corporations pay hundreds of dollars per toilet for Automatic Flush Valves and deprive us of our right to defecate in peace, secure in the knowledge that we may flush at our own pace? Can we not be trusted to dispose of our own waste in a leisurely and dignified manner? I propose that we can, that we must, and that our very future as a sane, happy and un-constipated society depends on it.