Back in the eighties, my grandparents went to China — “To the Orient,” as they always said. They walked the Great Wall, visited Tiananmen Square, and saw how the people both struggled and thrived under the hardcore Communist regime. But when you ask Grandpops for details about his trip, the conversation almost invariably ends up on one subject: “Oy, the bathrooms!”

Bathrooms are what people remember when they travel. And bathrooms are what everyone at home wants to know about. “What are the bathrooms like in Italy?” “In Egypt?” “In India?” “In China?” “Were they gross? They were gross, weren’t they?” “Eww… were they squatters?”

They WERE squatters, in Grandpa’s time. And they WERE gross. But not any more. The Chinese government has recognized that, in accordance with Symbolic Meaning of Poop #1 (”poop exposes the lowness of the high”), the memory of a disgusting toilet will always overshadow even the most serene tourist experience. So to ensure purity of memory for the half-million Westerners soon to descend on the country for beauty, serenity, and the love of sport, China has been frantically modernizing their bathroom infrastructure, spending over US$57 million to build or renovate 5,333 public toilets in Beijing alone.

And now that they’ve built all the toilets, they’re focusing on maintaining them. Just yesterday Beijing announced that they’ve dispatched an army of 8,000 men and women specially trained in the fine art of bathroom maintenance. These brave soldiers will ensure impeccable standards dung shui during the Games and, hopefully, in perpetuity.

In 1994, a survey of foreign tourists found that more than sixty percent were dissatisfied with Beijing’s toilets — “a revolting experience.” Even the locals were unhappy. “Zhou Jiang, 76, lived in a siheyuan, or courtyard home, with no modern amenities for decades. He used his nose to locate a public toilet when he was a child. ‘I would squat over a huge pit, and would feel dizzy if I looked down because I could be hovering over a two-meter pit with no water to flush to it,’ he recalls.”

That was the Beijing that Grandpops experienced, and never forgot. If the Chinese government has succeeded — and if the bathroom army accomplishes their mission — that Beijing will no longer exist.

Wrenches, spare parts for an oxygen generator, and a microbe-killing device: three things that, in space, are less important than a functioning toilet. Each of those items have been removed from the cabin of the Discovery Space Shuttle to make room for a pump needed to fix the urine collection device aboard the International Space Station.

For the past week, astronauts aboard the ISS have been alternating between their only other civilized option — the toilet on the Soyuz return capsule — and a “back-up bag-like collection system” NASA engineers developed for just such an emergency. Given the challenges surely presented by peeing in zero-gravity (picture splashback droplets floating around the cabin like plankton in a poorly-maintained aquarium), the mechanical toilet surely involves some sort of negative air-pressure device that sucks urine into a receptacle; I’m hard-pressed to imagine how a non-mechanical device can properly function.

On Earth, sanitary waste management relies on two forces: the muscles of the body, which physically propel liquids and solids at velocity through one of two apertures; and gravity, which we trust to ensure that-which-is-no-longer-us goes into the toilet and stays there. Our bodies evolved to rely on gravity as a constant; there’s a reason these excretory apertures function best when aimed downward. But in space, while the muscles of the body continue to function, the lack of gravity means that streams of effluvia will not simply drop with a satisfying plop, but instead ricochet about an enclosed area with an equal and opposite velocity to that at which it was expelled (allowing for friction caused by viscosity, of course; but in zero-G, you shouldn’t place your hopes for a particle-free oxygen on your waste’s penchant for stickiness).

So on Wednesday, a NASA employee left Russia (where the ISS’s toilet was built) with a thirty-five pound replacement pump packed in a diplomatic pouch and carried onto a commercial airliner as hand luggage. The galaxy’s most important plumber’s assistant is en route to Florida, where Discovery is set for launch on Saturday. The shuttle will dock with the ISS on Monday, at which point the three panicked astronauts aboard the ISS will presumably rush the airlock and head straight to Discovery’s bathroom.

“Never mind modern technology,” said the residents of San Diego, as I discussed back in August of 2006. “Never mind science and reason. Never mind the billions of dollars of research that have gone into developing filtering and cleansing equipment capable of purifying water down to the atomic level.

“Poop,” said the residents of San Diego, “is glue. It’s a special kind of glue that sticks to water and creates a bond that, no matter what science says, no man can tear asunder.”

San Diego has three million people living in a city with enough water for three hundred thousand of them. Nevertheless, forced to make a stupid decision by a superstitious constituency that believes poo love is strong enough to defy physics, San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders took to his desk last November and vetoed the city’s toilet-to-tap water recycling program. The city council overturned his veto, but the fight continues.

But while San Diego bickers over the nature of romance and feces, reason and logic have triumphed in Orange County. This January, officials opened the world’s largest water purification project. Wired News has a cool pictures of the systems that will provide clean water to 100,000 Orange County residents at rates lower than most other municipal sources. The plant cleanses and purifies the water and then flows it into nearby lakes, where it slowly trickles down into the aquifer and then, months later, back into the taps of the residents.

Slate Magazine provides a brief look into the water crisis facing California and the world. (And it points out the irony in Orange County’s system: “Although putting water into the ground, rivers, or lakes provides some additional filtering and more opportunities for monitoring quality, the benefits of doing it that way are largely psychological. In its 2004 report on the topic, the EPA concluded that Americans perceive this water to be ‘laundered’ as it moves through the ground or other bodies of water, even though in some instances, according to the report, ‘quality may actually be degraded as it passes through the environment.’” In fact, supertreated wastewater “is clean enough to drink right after treatment.”)

More American cities need to follow Orange County’s example. It collects sewage and, in accordance with the laws of nature and the State of California, allows poop and water to divorce. The poop is physically removed from its mate, forced to watch its true love move on with life, enjoy a brief marriage with microfilters and disinfectants, and then return to the water cycle to eventually work its way back into a toilet and find a new piece of poop to mate with. Poo and water have a strong relationship, but nothing lasts forever. If only San Diego would get the message.

In the bathroom utopia of the glorious future, pristine municipal facilities will await on every corner, their stall doors wide open to all comers and goers. This utopia will come into being only when the golden brown rule (”Doo unto others…”) is held sacrosanct — until then, as long as public toilets provide a respite from prying eyes, there will be those who use them less wholesome acts than that for which they’re designed.

This is the problem confronting authorities who want to provide for their pooping populace: the more open and accessible toilets are for those who need to go, the more open and accessible they are for those with other things on their minds. Drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, arsonists, and turd terrorists thrive in the surveillance vacuum created for the benefit of the emboweled. But most measures taken to add security come at the expense of usability.

Take the new public toilets in New York City: in the quest for an undefilable public toilet, they’ve created an unusable one.

The solution to this problem, as Finland’s Road Administration has shown, may lie not in prevention but in deterrence. Their problem was theft and arson in highway toilets and an inability to institute appropriate surveillance. Their solution was to encourage self-policing by trading surveillance for accountability.

Pulling into a rest-stop on Finland’s Highway 1, you’ll find the bathroom door locked. To unlock the toilet, text “open” to such-and-such number. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of who’s been pooping, so if anything unsavory (aside from last night’s Mämmi) happens, the police will have the mobile number of the culprit.

Assuming the company protects their users’ privacy (a non-trivial assumption, I admit), and assuming the mobile numbers aren’t passed to telemarketers selling portable toilet seat covers, I see no problem in this approach. If people know they will be identified, they’ll be less likely to cause trouble.

It’s obviously not a foolproof system — stolen mobiles will be a problem, as will friendly people who hold the door open for people waiting. But there’s no such thing as a foolproof system. The goal should be to find the balance between privacy and security that maximizes the period between incidents of excretory malfeasance.

100% uptime can be guaranteed only if a) privacy is completely surrendered or b) society is fully assimilated into the bathroom utopia. Finland has made a good compromise: mostly secure, and mostly private. That’s a bathroom I’m willing to poop in.

Last week, New York City unveiled the first of twenty futuristic new public toilets intended to give desperate citizens a choice beyond waddling to the nearest Starbucks or crouching behind the nearest trashcan. The city is relying on state-of-the-art technology to avoid the crack addicts, prostitutes, and green puddles of god-knows-what that have plagued the public toilets of New York City’s past: these toilets are self-cleaning and designed to operate safely and sanitarily without a human attendant.

But while I’m proud of the city for finally considering its citizens’ most basic needs, it looks like their quest for automation has detracted from what should have been their goal: building toilets people would actually want to use.

From the New York Times review of the facility: “When the green light marked ‘vacant’ is lit, 25 cents — coins only, no bills — starts the visit. What follows is possibly the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there.”

Let’s consider the user of a New York City street toilet. A street toilet is by definition a toilet of last resort, used only by users who don’t have time to make it anywhere nicer. And as we all know, bowels in a state of panic are notorious for discharging when the eyes spot a toilet — not necessarily when the butt actually sits on it. Imagine the desperate user who digs out his quarter, opens the door, dashes inside, and then has to make eye-contact with passers-by for thirty seconds before he can even loosen his belt.

“The toilet itself {is} an imposing, metal, cold-looking receptacle in the corner … There is no seat to raise or lower, just the wide rim of the bowl, with covers made of tissue available in a dispenser to the side.”

A cold toilet seat? A squared toilet seat? A seatless toilet seat??? No one will want to sit on this thing. American butts prefer porcelain horseshoes. This unfriendly, unfamiliar, sure-to-be-uncomfortable steel apparatus will drive people to hover instead of sit — which will lead to a lot of spray-painting.

“{The black button} dispenses toilet paper. One will quickly familiarize oneself with that button, because the designers have deigned a little 16-inch strip the standard helping of paper. A word to the wise: There is a maximum of just three helpings.”

Sixteen inches = four squares. Again, consider the user. He’s only using this toilet because he’s minutes from eruption. Eruption implies diarrhea. And diarrhea implies the need for a whole lot more than twelve squares of toilet paper.

“The floor is rubber and, more strikingly, very wet … {the seat} too, is quite damp, for perfectly good reasons: when the visitor steps out, the door shuts again, but the “occupied” light stays lit. Strange hisses and spraying sounds come from within — did someone slip past? No, actually, the room is cleaning itself. A robotic arm swings out over the toilet bowl and hits it with disinfectant, while similar jets spray across the sink and the floor. Then, dryers fan hot air over everything.”

It’s great that it’s cleaned after every use. But you don’t assume a wet floor or wet seat is due to cleaning — you assume it’s due to urine, and you guard your pants cuffs and butt cheeks accordingly.

“After 90 seconds of cleaning, the green light outside comes back on.”

Let’s again consider the users of this toilet. While our first hypothetical user has been resolving his situation, imagine a second who has been outside doing the waiting dance. The door finally opens and the second user’s sphincter slackens in anticipation; but when the door slams shut, will the second user’s sphincter do the same?

I believe that public conveniences are the mark of a civilized society, which makes me feel guilty to criticize New York’s long-overdue effort to this ideal. But this toilet was not designed with users in mind. Instead, with its metal seat, its twelve-square paper limit, its thirty-second open-door policy, it was designed primarily to maximize the time between maintenance visits. Which results in a facility that actually works against the very people who need it most.

The primary goal should have been to give users a place they’d want to poop; the form of the facility should have followed this function. Based on the Times’ review, if I’m stuck short anywhere near Madison and 23rd, even if I’ve got a quarter in my pocket, I’m going to duckwalk it to the Starbucks a few blocks away.

(What is the World Toilet Summit? Find out here.)

Today I’m going to talk about how the flush toilet negatively shapes attitudes towards sanitation. And I’m going to tell you what you need to know in order to counteract the ideological influence of the flush toilet.

But first, a bit about me. In 2003, I started writing what I expected to be a humorous look at the world of toilets. But the more research I did, the more serious the book grew.

As you can see by its title, my book still has humor — but the humor is for a purpose: I use humor to diffuse the taboo so that people feel comfortable enough to take the subject seriously.

In my research, I’ve discovered something about the toilet that everyone attending the World Toilet Summit needs to know: the toilet was NOT invented for sanitation. It was invented for ideology.

Here’s the brief history. The toilet was invented in the 18th and 19th century to help rich Victorians in England differentiate themselves from the lower classes.

This was during the industrial revolution, when wealth began to spread beyond the most elite members of society.

The most elite Victorians didn’t like it that so many people were becoming rich like them, and so they adopted elaborate customs and morality to differentiate themselves in ways mere money couldn’t.

So to them, sweating, burping, having sun-darkened skin, showing sexual desire or strong emotion — all these were taboo to the elite Victorians, because they identified all these with the lower classes.

But the problem was, whenever they felt the need to evacuate, they left behind in their chamber pot a disgusting reminder that they were no different than anyone else.

Even if no one heard or smelled what they were doing in their private bathroom, there was still this disgusting THING left in the chamber pot, and the servants would know who put it there.

The toilet appealed to their ideology because it enabled fecal invisibility. The water would contain the smell, and then with a press of a button, every reminder of their shared humanity would disappear down the drain.

The toilet is a tool of ideology. It only became a tool of sanitation after science linked cholera with fecal contamination of water. THAT’S when people decided the toilet had a sanitary purpose.

This isn’t to say the toilet is a bad thing. Of course it isn’t. It’s one of the most lifesaving inventions in the history of man. But if we’re going to attend the World Toilet Summit, it’s important to know where the toilet came from. This knowledge will help your work.

Because clearly this ideological influence is at work today.

Surely you’ve met people who refuse to even talk about the toilet, to even think about it, whether it’s as a joke or in discussing the importance of sanitation in the developing world.

Like it or not, when you talk about toilets, many people think you’re talking about making feces invisible. We know that our goals are sanitation, but there is an ideology that comes with it.

But here’s the good news: by recognizing this ideology, we can use it to our advantage!

I gave a lecture at the University of Iowa about the way the news media covers bathroom-related subjects. In it, I examined some of the headlines that ran worldwide about this very event: the World Toilet Summit. Here are some of the headlines that ran:

- World Toilet Summit lifts lid on public hygiene (Reuters)

- World Toilet Summit more than a wee bit important (Irish Examiner)

- Summit flushes out smelly toilets (AP)

Obviously the World Toilet Summit does not “flush out smelly toilets.” Why does the media feel the need to use puns, or place stories about the World Toilet Summit in the “news of the weird” column?

It’s because in American culture, at least, and I suspect in many other cultures, human waste is taboo.

And when you treat human waste in any other way than the taboo dictates, many people will be horrified — horrified by the subject, and horrified by you for bringing it up. It’s contamination by association.

If the media thinks some of its readers will think the World Toilet Summit is disgusting, then the media will do what it takes to distance itself from the subject. Hence, headlines like those.

There are also people who will think that someone who takes toilets seriously is contaminated.

That is the ideological barrier to sanitation.

It’s imperative to break down this barrier. And it can be as simple as acknowledging the absurdity of the subject, making a joke to break the taboo– as Jack Sim does when he introduces himself as Toiletman.

It’s important to recognize that you see the taboo and show that you’ve moved past it, if you’re going to get people receiving your message to do the same.

Sanitation is critical for both the developing world and the developed world. I don’t need to tell that to the people in this room.

But it does need to be communicated to the