Squat: It's What God Wanted

While trumpeting one toilet over the other in my last post, it seems I was exhibiting a case of cultural elitism, for as the literature of evacuation tells me:

Just as each country has developed its own culinary specialties, each country is silently aware of its cultural tradition of how to most comfortably evacuate the bowels.

In other words, don't knock the squat; it'd be as unseemly as frowning on the Chinese just because you don't like Kung Pao Chicken. And if you listen to these hippies, "Western Man" has been paying the price ever since switching to the sitting position 150 years ago:

Two-thirds of humanity use the squatting position to answer the call of nature. In those cultures, appendicitis, diverticulosis, hemorrhoids, colitis, prostate disorders and colon cancer are virtually unknown.

But don't worry; now you too can squat, even if your prim and proper parents did brainwash you (while calling it "potty-training") into using a sit-down toilet. Just buy Nature's Platform, which promises to "comfortably" hold the weight of even a 300-pound man.

Created by Jonathan Isbit, who dropped out one semester shy of joining Yale's class of 1972, the Platform owes its creation to a man who is no stranger to these pages, the Maharishi Maheesh Yogi.

Thirty-one years ago when he was a junior here (at Yale), Isbit went to a lecture on transcendental meditation. Inspired, he found himself buried in the stacks on the sixth floor of Sterling Memorial Library, reading every book he could find about yoga.

One of the pages in one of the books showed a yogi, fully clothed and squatting on his Achilles tendons, he said. The caption read, "Proper yogic measure to use for elimination." For Isbit, these words were the beginning of a life's work.

To read what this Victorian dared not excerpt, go here. The life you save may be your own.

For a more pleasant experience, take a pictorial tour of The Toilets of the World, from Ancient Non-Biblical Toilets (Phrygian/Hittite) to the crapper that belonged to the man who believed in Permanent Revolution, though probably not here.