Meditations on Toilet Paper

It is so nice to have my wife back! Since she has been gone, it has seemed like my life has been full of smelling stinky kitty litter that I haven't cleaned or discovering most of the blankets on the floor after several days of not making the bed. One of the beautiful things about being married is that your mate compensates for your many weaknesses ... for instance, I cannot inhabit the same room as styrofoam without shuddering. Several rooms of the house would be entirely off limits if my wife were not so gracious as to respond to my scrunched up face of pain by removing the styrofoam. Anyway, thinking about all of the things my wife helps me out with reminded me of an old essay I wrote and a friend of mine asked me to post ages ago ... it is comforting to know that, when the toilet paper becomes just too disturbing to bear, I have a wife who can purchase it for me. But without further ado, here it is in all of its repetitive glory:

When you and your roommate share certain things (e.g. dish soap), each of you tends to gravitate toward replacing certain items. Paper towels hold a special place in my heart, for instance. My roommate often supplies the toilet paper. I ask no questions, and he has been "on a roll," as it were.

Well, since he has moved out, it has become my personal responsibility to supply toilet paper for myself. A few days ago I went shopping for toilet paper, and was disturbed to see row upon row of several companies who featured baby models in various degree of ecstatic rapture as they clutch toilet paper rolls. It just seemed ... I don't know ... morally wrong somehow. The following reflections are my attempt to articulate what Kurtz, in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, could only call, "The horror! The horror!" Though the narrator does not specify what the "image" or "vision" that Kurtz saw is, I can only presume that it was a baby clutching toilet paper, for the reasons that follow.

My disturbance is in no way due to wondering if any babies were harmed in the making of the toilet paper products: perhaps there was no child labor law supervision, and the babies were forced to slave away unendurable hours at posing and practicing their gurgling, I do not know. I prefer to grant White Cloud, Charmin, and the others the benefit of the doubt in this regard, though we must never forget that they are a part of the oppressive hegemonic system, and we do not know what has happened to the baby models who were not so gleeful and gurgly upon command.

No, I do not know what sick practices they conducted on these baby models in order to get them to seem so happy clutching toilet papers: I can only speak on the undeniable effects of such poses on their audience. First, the pictures are unnatural aberrations. We can see how aberrant they are by comparing them to all of our experiences with babies in the past. For instance, let us say that there are two rooms: one in which there is a man with a cellular phone, one in which there is a lion with a cellular phone. If the lion were to pick up the phone and dial CALL-ATT, would we not insist that something unnatural had transpired? If such an action were accompanied by supernatural revelation, perhaps we would say it was like Baalam's ass ... OR LIKE THE COUNTERFEIT MIRACLE OF THE BEAST OF REVELATION! The point is that it would be highly unnatural. So too would it be highly unnatural for a BABY to use toilet paper. Babies are renowned for NOT using toilet paper! The picture is ultimately an undermining of the creational order; if it is evidence of God's wrath for man to love man (Romans 1), so too is a baby's love for toilet paper indicative of unnaturalness. Note that rather than these toilet paper companies representing such a relation as unnatural, they _celebrate_ it! "Be like the baby," they seem to say. "Clutch the FORBIDDEN FRUIT," as it were, the UNCLEAN paper product of a TREE--like the serpent deceiving mankind in its INFANCY. The picture clearly fails to present any message like, "Use toilet paper to make yourself clean so that you can be pleasing to the Lord." Instead, it revels in dirtiness; you would have to pry the dirty toilet paper from the sinner baby's grasping wicked hands, and it would probably cry afterwards, lover of depravity that it is.

I can already hear the apologists of wickedness or those devoid of wisdom and/or spiritual perception saying, "That's not the message at all! They're just trying to say, 'Try our brand, it's so soft, it can make babies happy.'" Typical. Just typical. I suppose Jesus said, "Take up your baby-soft toilet paper and follow me?" Rather than this toilet paper reminding us of the way of the cross, the advertisers inspire us not with a picture of our heavenly reward, but a secularized "easy life" here on earth. Clearly, when we use super soft toilet paper, like Esau, we are in effect renouncing a heavenly birthright for a mess (quite literally) of earthly pottage. Lest you think the Esau analogy does not hold up, realize the situation is even _worse_ than Esau's sin, because sin/uncleanness is most connected not with what goes into a man, but what comes out of him ...

Last, not only does the picture undermine creational norms for babies and support a "health and wealth" gospel devoid of Christian suffering, it also serves to alienate/emasculate men. (I shall not mention that there are some disturbed men out there who read too much Foucault and are scatologically fixated who would enjoy watching babies hugging toilet paper for immoral reasons.) But the very toilet paper undermines the concept of masculinity for _all_ men. Not only does our culture bombard the modern male with messages, "Cry at movies, girls think it's sexy"; he is now supposed to associate his sexiness with a baby clutching toilet paper. Would any woman really, ultimately, find the sight of a man hugging toilet paper sexy? No, but it is just more of the way our society tries to snip off what makes a man a man, trying turn him into a geeky crying wimp pansy, and when girls turn him down for dates, tell him just to go cry some more, and maybe then he'll get a woman. Does the male bachelor searching for toilet paper see any pictures that inspire him to manly feats? We see "Brawny" paper towels, but where have all the brawny TOILET paper rolls gone, long time passing? When will we ever learn ... where is the toilet paper that seems to say, "Try me, assert masculinity, you will cry out your barbarous yawp!" It seems these toilet paper companies envision males making a pleasant, subdued trip to the restroom. Guys know better: the trip to the bathroom is a battle, a scene of struggle and mastery, of groans of pain and cries of triumph. The male, after subduing his vanquished foe, victoriously surveys his handiwork before flushing. All this, and more, of the toilet experience that is masculine is lost with these cutesy toilet paper pictures. The shopping bachelor is reduced to a poor shell of a man who tries to figure out how to position his 12-roll bag of Charmin so no one can see the giggling baby in his shopping cart. Even when he has torn off the wrapper hiding his guilty shame, he still feels that every time he uses the toilet paper, he loses a little piece of who he is as a man--quite literally. Other males know what I am talking about. Regardless of who are my supporters and who are my detractors, I hope they can agree that the issue is of fundamental import, even if I am full of crap.