Squatting versus sitting: cultural differences in toilet postures
I recently went to a public toilet with a sign instructing users not to squat on the toilet seat. Such signs are increasingly common in restrooms around the world. I have seen them in London, Cairns and Sydney at a variety of locales, including airports and university campuses. I find the signs fascinating because they speak to the fact that defecation, like urination, is practiced rather differently around the world.
To those of us who have grown up exclusively with pedestal toilets, it seems obvious how they should be used, but I have learned that what is intuitive to one pedestal toilet user is not intuitive to another. The fact is that pedestal toilets are not the same from country to country. Take Australian and North American toilets, which differ subtly but significantly in design—as any Australian who has visited the US or Canada can attest1 (and vice versa).
For example, when I was living in Colorado, the toilets on the university campus where I worked were enclosed in cubicles with open bottoms, which meant that you could see the feet of people in the other stalls. After a while, I realised that fellow toilet-goers often lifted their foot when they flushed. Curious, I asked my colleague what was going on. Surprised, she responded, ‘Don’t you flush the pedal with your foot?’
I was completely gobsmacked, because never would it have occurred to me to flush a toilet with my foot. Armed with this information, I went to inspect the loos. Sure enough, I could see that the shape and position of the flushing mechanism (a metal lever positioned adjacent to the toilet seat rather than a button on top of the cistern) meant that they were potentially designed with foot flushing in mind. At the very least, it became clear that such an action was possible without the flexibility of a contortionist and the toes of a chimpanzee. Still, until my colleague informed me of the practice, it was simply outside my comprehension.
Of course, the result of this habit is that in addition to signs telling users not to squat on the toilet, a growing number also instruct them not to flush with their foot. However, I’m not convinced that the people the signs are directed towards are unaware of how pedestal toilets are ‘supposed’ to be used. Instead, they are simply choosing to use the toilet in the way they are most comfortable with. And it just so happens that pedestal toilets enable users, or at least those with the flexibility and balance of Spiderman or a ninja, to perch on the seat rather than sitting on the loo, and to flush with their foot.
The squatting pans common throughout Asia are another matter entirely, because they require the user to employ them in the way they were designed. However, what I quickly realised during my fieldwork in South Korea was that I didn’t have the right muscles for squatting.2 It turns out that a lifetime of sitting on loos had given me the quad strength of a discarded rubber band, which I discovered around the same time I learned the Korean word for constipation (byeonbi).
But squatting is not just a position for doing one’s business in Korea; it’s also commonly employed as a means of sitting on the ground—I would readily back an 85-year-old Korean women over a 35-year-old London gym rat in a game of competitive squats. Indeed, recent research suggests that Asian adults have significantly greater hip flexion and rotation motions than Westerners due largely to cultural differences in sitting positions.
Despite the limits that physiology and anatomy place on human postures, anthropologists have long observed differences in the postures habitually employed around the world. The first anthropologist to systematically study this was Gordon Hewes in his research on global postural habits. Drawing on a variety of sources, including ethnographic data, photographs and archaeological finds, Hewes compiled a list of global postures—as illustrated below.
Hewes was particularly interested in the distribution of human postures, including both culturally specific ones and relatively universal ones. Postures he characterised as falling into the former category include the classic Nilotic stance (numbers 23-25.53—first row), made famous by the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer. Others are very widespread, such as sitting cross-legged, although there is some cultural variation in the form this takes (numbers 80-88—third row).
Interestingly, Hewes suggested that the deep squat (numbers 54, 58, 114—second row) is very widely distributed throughout the world, except in European and Europe-derived cultures. The only European examples he found were ancient Greek depictions of a ‘daimonic’ being (i.e., supernatural creature) playing a Pan’s pipe. Hewes speculated that this context ‘suggests that the original Greek artist regarded the posture as uncouth or primitive’.4
Hewes argued that there were two reasons why the deep squat is so rare in Western cultures. First, he pointed to the fact that because it is a near-universal position in which to defecate, this may cause it to become tabooed in other situations. ‘It is altogether possible that the rarity of the deep squat in our culture is due to this kind of repression’, he observed. Second, he noted that a quarter of humankind ‘habitually squats in a fashion very similar to the squatting position of the chimpanzee’, and the rest of us might sit this way too ‘if we were not trained to use other postures beyond infancy’.
It’s these associations with defecation and animality that appear to be the source of the European view of the deep squat as uncouth and primitive. As I’ve discussed in numerous posts, Europeans have long been preoccupied with ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ behaviour, especially in matters of personal comportment and hygiene. The German sociologist Norbert Elias has famously argued that there was a growing threshold of repugnance around natural bodily processes and functions between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries that filtered down from the European nobility to the middle-class.
During this period, posture itself became the focus of considerable attention and concern. According to the historian Sander Gilman, the idealised ‘upright static and mechanical posture’ (evident in both the classic military bearing and twentieth-century deportment lessons for girls) originated in the late sixteenth century. Good posture was expressed in an invisible ‘“plumb line” from the top of the head to the feet’, which was seen to separate ‘primitive’ from ‘advanced’ peoples. Nor was sitting itself immune from injunctions to ‘straighten up!’
That people were forced to employ the deep squat while attending to calls of nature was presumably a case of adding insult to injury, especially as the ‘bourgeois faecal habitus’ took hold—the sociologist David Inglis’s term for the growing pretence that we do not defecate. After all, until the invention of the commode, the wealthy, like peasants themselves, had to make do with the chamber pot.
Indeed, chamber pots provided a constant reminder of our uncouth and primitive animal natures, a fact occasionally satirised on chamber pots themselves, as the above motif, which was in widespread use on English chamber pots in the nineteenth century, attests. A seventeenth-century English poem called ‘On Melting down the Plate, or the Pisse-Pot’s Farewell’ quoted in The Scatalogic Rites of All Nations5 puts the matter rather more plainly: ‘Presumptuous pisse-pot, how did’st thou offend? / Compelling females on their hams to bend? / To kings and queens we humbly bend the knee / But queens themselves are forced to stoop to thee’.
It was only with the rise of the plumbed water closet in the Victorian era that those wanting to empty their bowels could reliably abandon the deep squat.6 Sitting enabled more ‘civilised’ acts of excretion, facilitating the pretence that users might be reading a philosophical treatise as opposed to emptying their bowels. In other words, if, as David Inglis argues, the water closet is ‘the sine qua non of a society that denies the existence of the human body’s excreta making capacities’, I think that a considerable part of its attraction is that it enabled the user to sit to shit.
Of course, one of the effects of denying the existence of our excreta-making capacities is that we have made it more difficult to efficiently rid our bodies of waste, given that sitting complicates the process of defecation. As the gastroenterologist Vincent Ho discusses, squatting rather than sitting allows for a ‘clearer and straighter passage for stools to pass through the anal canal’. Research suggests that squatting significantly decreases the average time of bowel motions (51 seconds in a deep squat compared to 130 seconds on a high toilet seat) and produces less abdominal straining7 and fewer rectal tears.
So the next time you do a poo, take a moment to marvel that even this most natural of acts has been moulded over the course of hundreds of years into something rather different from the way your bowels were designed to empty. And while that might not be much consolation if you’re backed up,8 well, there’s always the option of a toilet stool.
Related posts
Consider yourself lucky if you manage to avoid putting your hand in the toilet water at least once while wiping your arse. The water level in North American toilet bowls is startlingly high to Australian eyes and we have to quickly learn to adjust our angle when wiping to avoid drenching our hand (and the toilet paper) in bodily refuse.
In either my legs or, it turns out, my urethra, which made it difficult to avoid spraying my clothes.
Not being a symbologist* of Robert Langdon’s calibre, I can’t make head nor tail of Hewes’ numbering system, but it probably involves the Fibonacci sequence.
*Not an actual profession, despite what Dan Brown and Google’s AI overview would have you believe.
Interestingly, the first plumbed toilets in the Roman empire were the kind you sit on; conversely, the first flush toilets in China were the squatting kind. In the event that the Chinese empire had become globally dominant in the nineteenth century as opposed to the British Empire, I predict that our toilets would now look like this.
An 1891 book by John Gregory Bourke, a US Army captain and amateur anthropologist, its full name is The Scatalogic Rites of All Nations: A Dissertation Upon the Employment of Excrementitious Remedial Agents in Religion, Therapeutics, Divination, Witchcraft, Love-Philters, etc., in all Parts of the Globe. I doubt this is the last time you will find it, or ‘excrementitious’, referenced on this Substack.
Except, obviously, when camping. Writing this post has resolved a lifelong mystery, which is why my childhood bowel movements were so easy* when we went out our annual two-week camping trip to Magnetic Island.
*From a physiological standpoint at least, because the fear of being bitten by a poisonous snake was ever-present.
Given that straining during defecation increases the risk of cardiac arrest, it’s not much of a stretch to speculate that squatters are less likely to experience the mortification of dying of a mid-shit heart attack, although Ho suggests that the jury is out on whether you’re more likely to die of a stroke, as squatting slightly, albeit temporarily, increases blood pressure.
As Count Ruben counsels Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride, ‘If you haven’t got regular bowel movements, you haven’t got anything’. I’m pretty sure that’s the line…