You’re Doo-ing It Wrong

So here’s a jarring news flash: you’ve been pooping wrong for your entire life (if it makes you feel better, as a baby born with meconium aspiration, I have been screwing up pooping since before I even left the womb). Kevin Roose, as part of his series of “bettering” himself, decided to tackle his favorite room in his house: his bathroom, this week on Matter.

The result is the equivalent of Consumer Reports for your loo. Roose’s tested products run the gamut from soap bars and bidets (“The first squirt of the Swash 1000’s bidet attachment shocked me — I jumped off the seat in surprise.”) to toothpaste and razors (“The straight razor… made me so frazzled that I had to lie down afterward.”), as well as a bizarre device that reads his Twitter feed aloud to him while he showers. As for pooping, he tries the Squatty Potty, a device that makes our contemporary iBowel movements mimic the poos of our ancestors in two ways: to prop up your feet while you’re sitting on your toilet, closer to the defectory squat of humans past and toddlers present, or to use… as a potty. Though he favors the latter, Roose tries both, and now I want to, too.

I used to dawdle on the toilet, finishing long New Yorker articles and completing tough Candy Crush levels. But with the Squatty Potty, that’s impossible. After 30 seconds of deep squatting, your quads start to burn, so you learn to finish your business, wipe, and move on.

Hmm, maybe not.

Not a bathroom enthusiast? Don’t consider this project indulgent — it does really make a difference if your toilet paper is one or two-ply — but in our hyper-connected world, where people don’t take vacations or turn off their screens, the bathroom really is, as Roose notes, “a small-scale spa visit” that you can take whenever you’d like. I think I’ll go now.

Illustration by Giacomo Gambineri, courtesy of Matter.