Twitter user Arnaud Mafile uploaded on 10/10/2022 a photo of a letter attached, assuming at the office, near the bathroom, stating “It is the French custom to only use toilet paper then wash your hands….. Anyone caught in the toilets with a bottle or cup of water will be severely punished.”  

This paper decree by the company is quite odd on many accounts: 1) The company is concerned about the bathroom habits of its employees, 2) tells its employees what is the correct FRENCH way to clean up one’s private parts after usingthe restroom, 3) Appearntly using the toliet needs to be a solely secular pasttime.

Many on the Twitter page were of course concerned on the enforcement of so called French bathroom habits within a office space. This enforcement is odd considering the French are known to use water in the bathroom to wash their privates. In fact the French invented the bidet in the 1600s.

The word bidet comes from the French word pony, because you would straddle the bidet to wash your privates. The United States seemed resist the bidet because many associated it with sex work, thankfully its becoming more of a norm. Even though the French, and much of Europe, had a history of using the bidet it appears the French stopped setting them up in their homes in the 90s. One figure states that in 1970s around 95% of French people had bidets and in 1993 that number dropped by half 42%.

In the article “Make sense of…. The French bidet” by author Oliver Rowland, Rowland argues that French people didn’t like the size of the bidet and essentially didn’t want them in their homes because they took up too much room. They were also associated with sex work and women’s private parts. Today there are numrous bidets that hook up to the main toliet, instead of being a separate piece – this is most common in the United States, Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

If there is a 30 year gap of people not using the bidet on the regular within France then there is an entire generation that does not wash their privates like their parents or grandparents have done. It also means that since Islamophobia is on a rise, it becomes imperative for Islamophobes to separate themselves from Muslim by asserting the French do not wash their asses. For many young people they might actually associate bidets or cleaning oneself with water, a Muslim thing and not a French one. This shows that prejudice does in fact changes one’s culture and also makes hygiene illegal if it means being able to persecute someone.

If you like my writing check out my book Demystifying the Niqab aviable on Amazon.