It's A Wipe

How America's bathroom habits resemble its political ones

Credit: Ian Hooton/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: Have a question about why we’re all here, and what this all means? Don’t ask Matt. He knows. But he’s not saying. Not until pledge week, the proceeds of which might help him buy the 1988 Pontiac Fiero (with a spoiler!) of his dreams. Not because he loves crappy faux-sports cars. But because 1988 reminds him of a simpler time, when he watched The Wonder Years, and his mom served Shake’N Bake pork chops and apple sauce, and the President of These Here United States didn’t say “Quiet, piggy” if journalists asked him something he didn’t like. Any less ambitious questions? Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com

Dear Matt,
For years I’ve heard the comments, concerns, and confusion about Trump’s will to power being un-American. Given the mixed moral history of America, Trump’s derangement is in line with the Trail of Tears or internment camps. The examples of American immorality are legion. Yet we’ve attempted to become what the Founding Fathers aspired for us — to be fair-minded and moral in our dealings with people. What is apparent is the daily, intentional offense to morality, conspired by and committed by Trump and his legion of cultists. We know this cadre of moral deviants is un-American. Are they also enemies to what most consider sacred — morality itself?
Best,
Z.M.

Let me answer your question with a few more questions. Do people consider morality sacred? Can they even agree on the meaning of “sacred,” or, for that matter, of “morality”? Now that concrete, observable facts are mere suggestions, or intimations, or are reductively regarded as alternative-reality-preferences, can we even collectively settle on what these things look like?

As an editorial rule of thumb, if you have to ask questions such as these in your lede, the answer is usually “no.” (Or else you have nothing to write about.) But it’s always a dicey proposition to paint a population as idiosyncratic and vast as the American people with a broad brush. So let’s cut things down to size a bit — and I apologize in advance for going scatological, but nothing illustrates the human condition quite as readily as basic human functions. Which is why I have turned to a survey on the under-explored subject of ass-wiping.

If you’re like me (and many of you are, or you wouldn’t be here), you look with befuddlement and horror at the last ten years generally, and the last eleven months specifically. You witness the daily atrocities committed by our leadership — just look at our Secretary of Memes, Pete Hegseth, and his Xitter page alone, which should see him getting cornholed in a Hague holding cell by one of the already-imprisoned strongmen that Trumpsters tend to fetishize. And you ask yourself: how could anyone — no matter their party affiliation — who considers themselves even a semi-decent person, be in favor of what is going on now?

Which brings us back to ass-wiping.

Or, pelvic-wiping, more loosely. The other day, a spirited discussion broke out among a group of my confederates — alcohol admittedly might’ve been involved — as to which way Americans mostly wiped themselves. Front-to-back? (The correct way, especially if you’re a woman.) Or back-to-front? (The correct way if you’re a savage.)

Being a civilized gentleman of taste and refinement, I advocated for the former, obviously. But when I got a little pushback, I settled this argument as most arguments get settled these days. Not by taking my combatants behind the outhouse for a good-old-fashioned donnybrook. But by hitting our Google machines.

There, at the top of my search pile, I found an unimpeachable peer-reviewed scientific source — Boston’s Hot 96.9 radio station website — which ran the headline, “One in Three Americans Can’t Even Wipe Their Butt Right.” It claimed that after a TikTok video went viral, with a woman claiming that it was impossible to wipe her tuchus from front-to-back, as doctor-recommended for hygiene reasons, since that required too much flexibility, she went the other way. The article then went on to claim that a follow-on Buzzfeed survey, in which 25,000 people participated, showed that 54 percent of people went front-to-back, as you’re supposed to do for reasons of minimizing anal/fecal bacterial infection. But that a full 34 percent said they wiped back-to-front. (Seven percent said they used a bidet, and five percent said they wiped in a different way, prompting the confused author to offer: “I’m not sure what that would be. Side to side? Possibly a swirl?”)

As is often the case these days, a bit of disinformation was involved here. When I fell deeper down the research hole (so to speak), it seems the Buzzfeed piece that our Hot 96.9 scholar was referring to actually only dealt with women’s frontal wiping habits. (Though at the risk of causing myself a divorce, my mother-in-law, when my wife and her sisters were small children, used to refer to their female region as their “front butt.”)

But in what was perhaps the first and last useful act of journalism that Buzzfeed ever committed, they talked to a pelvic health doctor who assured the confused Buzzfeed audience — their brains likely scrambled from taking in too many cat memes — that it was indeed important to wipe from front-to-back, especially as a woman, since it “minimizes bacteria being introduced from your anus into your urethra. Even if you clean really well after a bowel movement, there is still a chance of bacterial contamination, which can lead to urinary tract infection.”

Though in fairness to Hot 96.9’s general gender-wide butt-wiping claims, according to a 2023 YouGov poll on “Toilet Talk: Polling Americans’ Potty Preferences” (no, I’m not making that title up), 20 percent do indeed wipe from back-to-front.

Why am I discussing all this crap (to stay with the theme)? Well, to make the point that if one-fifth-to-one-third of the population can’t even wipe themselves correctly, why would you expect them to recognize/run from the shit that cakes our political system? Yes, Trump’s favorability rating is now sagging with his demented middle-of-the-night social-media rants, his unhealthy swollen cankles, his perpetual norm-destroying, his war-crime committing, and his inflation-stoking. He is logging near-historically low approval ratings, just a bit higher than Richard Nixon’s shortly before he resigned after Watergate. And yet, as an anti-Trump buddy of mine pointed out the other day: “So what? Over a third of the country still approves of the guy no matter what he does, and will forevermore.”

In other words, even as Trump covers our country in disgrace on a daily basis, a solid third of the country will wipe back-to-front no matter what the Buzzfeed science says. Fecal contamination be damned!

We are already infected. And yet, insist on sustaining more infections.

I would be lying if I said I’m forgiving of the people who know not what they do, as we Christers believe our Lord said even while he was hanging on a dead tree. Because I actually believe a lot of these people know exactly what they’re doing. Even many of the purported Christians among them, who I hold in special contempt, as a fellow believer. They often seemingly keep subscribing not just out of fear or political allegiance or fixed habit, but because — in contravention of everything Christianity purportedly stands for — Trump hates the same people that they do. And as my old profile subject Roger Stone (who I documented well before Trump became a viable candidate, but who has long been a Trump consigliere) correctly put it years ago: “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.”

But just because hate is easier than love, doesn’t make hate right. So as much as we detest it in others, we should do the same in ourselves. I don’t say this as someone who has hate licked, but who struggles against hatred most days. In fact, considering the current headlines, I’m struggling with it today. Because again, soul-curdling hatred is easy, especially when there are so many proving themselves worthy of it. And additionally, I am both disappointed and despondent concerning a good third of my country — and with many old friends — for not recognizing and rejecting the most obvious fraud(s) of our lifetime. So mine is not a candyass/Kumbaya admonition. But merely a reiteration of what we at least wish to hold true, even if it isn’t always true in us. Which goes: Love your neighbor as yourself. And forgive them, even if they haven’t asked for it, or don’t know that they need it. For I have to remind myself that they’re as afraid of their country failing as we are, just in different ways. Even if I genuinely believe their dereliction of moral duty is precisely what is contributing to that failure.

They might not be the better for your forgiveness. But you will be. So if you wish to think selfishly, maybe forgive them not to save them. But in order to save yourself. A country is only as healthy as its least-sick participants. So let those be you.

Bonus Tracks: Like the Fiero, here’s another eighties classic (technically released in early 1990), one that allows for forgiveness. Don Henley’s “Heart Of The Matter”:

And one that allows for being wrong altogether, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “If I’m Wrong”: