Dear John

Ladies and gentlemen, please forgive me, but there's just no polite way to say this: I haven't wiped my ass for more than a month. Since installing a bidet in my bathroom at home, I no longer have to rub myself raw with toilet paper. Instead, I direct a bubbling fountain of cool, soothing Sonoma County tap water toward my nether region. In seconds, I'm clean as a whistle. Thanks to my new bidet, keeping clean down there is no longer a problem.

But it definitely was a problem at one time, and I know I wasn't alone in sharing it. Who among us has not experienced the nagging itch caused by an inadequately cleansed bottom? Yet serious discussion of the topic is strictly taboo and rarely occurs in our culture, even within academic circles.

Instead of asking whether wiping has failed us as a hygienic technique, we point the stained finger of shame and ridicule at ourselves. I once knew a man nicknamed Skidmark because someone had seen his soiled underwear while he was changing for work in the company locker room. What role, if any, did toilet paper play in his humiliation? No one dared to ask.

It's as if all alternative solutions have been flushed from our minds. Bidets are for sissies like the Japanese and the French. Here in the good old U.S.A., we wipe. We wipe harder, we wipe faster, and most of all, we wipe more. According to toilet-paper industry estimates, it takes 15 million trees annually to satisfy our voracious appetite for butt-wipe. Toilet paper production reached 100 million rolls per day in 2001. One of the latest marketing trends is larger packaging, like the 96-roll bundle offered by discount toilet-paper company ShitBegone (www.shitbegone.com). The company's motto speaks for us all: "Wipe your mind and your ass will follow."

All of this merely compounds what Jorge Rebagliati has come to call our "problem." The Santa Rosa resident and entrepreneur grew up using bidets in his native Argentina, and upon emigrating to the United States, found our culture's custom more than a little abrasive. On a visit back home, a relative introduced him to a product that has been manufactured in Argentina for the past 20 years, an easy-to-install plumbing fixture that turns any standard toilet bowl into a bidet. Rebagliati had a revelation.

"This is the answer to your problem," he tells me in his Santa Rosa living room, proudly holding the device, called the Bidematic, up for display. Rebagliati has become its sole U.S. importer, hoping to mainstream use of the product via his one-man company, Quest. Tall, gangly, with gray-tinted red hair, Rebagliati began appearing at local trade shows last December with a banner proclaiming the device to be "the solution to your problems."

"I didn't know I had a problem," more than one person commented snidely. Others skittered away from the Bidematic as from a chrome spider waiting to spring out of the bowl. "Come closer," he'd tell them with his lilting accent. "It's not going to hurt you." He realized he had a hard sell on his hands when even his progressive friends shied away from the bidet. So far, he's only sold about 60 of them.

"It's a paradox," Rebagliati explains. "Here, there are so many gadgets, you can get a gadget for anything you can think of . . . yet the bidet is still something of a hurdle."

It was a hurdle I felt compelled to leap. With little urging, Rebagliati loaned me a demo model, a cold-water unit that retails for $129 (a hot-and-cold-water model retails for $147). Unlike the standalone bidet most people are familiar with, the Bidematic is easily installed on your existing toilet, saving space and actually making the whole operation more efficient, since you don't have to get off one commode to squat and clean yourself over another.

The Bidematic is a simple enough device, composed of a control valve and a hinged wand that swings out to the center of the toilet bowl for use and folds neatly back under the rim out of sight afterward. It attaches to the bowl using one of the seat-cover bolts; a braided stainless-steel line attaches to the toilet's water-supply valve. After installing the demo, I opened the unit's control valve, and a small fountain of water bubbled straight up out of six tiny nozzles in the wand's tip. I eagerly anticipated the next morning's constitutional.