French Bathroom Culture
"In American bathrooms you can always expect the bare minimum: a toilet seat. In French bathrooms, that is just not a given."
The French Toilet
The dirtiest place in America is a humble gas station bathroom.
It’s not the bathroom in a Buc-ee’s or a QuikTrip or anyplace that also serves hot chicken sandwiches and allows truckers to sleep in the parking lot. This type of gas station either has a forced pun in the name like “Stop-a-Minit” or is simply labeled “Gas Station” on Google Maps. Inside the building itself, you won’t find any kitschy merchandise or useable slushie machines. You’re limited to snack cakes, energy drinks, Pepto Bismol and beer. The humble gas station bathroom isn’t divided by gender, a side effect of there only being one toilet. Inside it’s dirty, faintly ammonia-smelling walls, we are all equal. Whether you stand, sit or fearfully hover over the porcelain throne, you share with those who came before you a mutual feeling of disgust and degradation.
A nondescript gas station’s bathroom is expected to be dirty and there’s a social code of conduct you’re expected to follow upon entering. You are expected to hold your nose when you walk inside, fight urges to look too closely at the toilet bowl and dodge mysterious puddles on the floor as you shimmy back into your pants. You should definitely wash your hands with soap, if there is any left in the dispenser. If not, settle for water. The paper towel dispenser is empty so, naturally, the door handle will stay in a permanent state of wetness. You should use your elbow or the sleeve of a shirt you don’t care about to open the door and make your escape.
In America, you can go about the rest of your day knowing that — come what may — the chances of you encountering another bathroom as undignified as this one are slim to none. The humble gas station station bathroom brings you down to your lowest and from there, you have nowhere to go but up. When you leave, the sun shines brighter, the birds chirp louder and the air outside smells cleaner.
If you’ve never been to France, the idea of a French toilet has probably never crossed your mind. The online discourse I’ve seen about French bathroom culture has, for the most part, been overwhelmingly positive. (Bidets, entire rooms dedicated to the toilet, scented pink toilet paper, etc.)
While it is true that the “stalls” are actually rooms, with doors and complete and total privacy, you’d be surprised to find out how many of these rooms are outfitted with toilets that have no toilet seat.
That’s right, no seat. Where do you sit? That’s your problem. Better yet, I’ve visited several bathrooms that did have a toilet seat but it was clearly two sizes too small. If the basic function of the toilet seat is to keep one from falling, ass-first, into a toilet then this might be acceptable. But, if you, like me, believe that a toilet seat should also serve to keep your unclothed bottom half from touching the edge of the toilet bowl, then you will be deeply disappointed by the child-sized toilet seats fixed to adult-sized toilets.
As is true in America, there are many bathrooms in France that you expect to be disgusting (e.g. gas stations, public parks, bars, night clubs). However, France is unique in that there are so many more bathrooms that you don’t expect to be disgusting but are (e.g. nice restaurants). In France, you never know if the horrifying toilet you’ve just seen will be the worst or best bathroom you visit all day. It’s like Russian roulette but the gun is full of bullets.
In American bathrooms you can always expect the bare minimum: a toilet seat. In French bathrooms, that is just not a given. There are a mandated five weeks of paid vacation in France. There is government-funded healthcare. The French have, notoriously, very high expectations for food and wine. But when it comes to relieving themselves of all this food and wine, there seems to be no nationwide consensus on a minimum standard of acceptability.
Worse still, some of France’s most disgusting toilets are pay-to-pee. It’s not uncommon to find a bathroom in the train station that asks for one euro in exchange for popping a squat over a wet, metal prison toilet while you pray that you can keep your lunch down long enough to get through the experience.
Truly public bathrooms are few and far between. Sometimes you can find a decent-enough public toilet in large department stores like Galeries Lafayette in Paris or Bordeaux. Most of the time, you’ll want to visit the bathroom at any café you happen to stop by even if, as when you were six years old, you don’t have to go just do it anyway. In France, you never know where your next bathroom might be or what horrors it might contain.
The French Shower
Another lesson in humility, taught by the French bathroom, is the French shower.
In America, showers are synonymous with basic human comfort. A hot shower is akin to a hot meal or a dry place to sleep. We take great national pride in our showers, as evidenced by numerous “shower routine” TikTok videos that show self-care in the shower taken to new extremes (e.g. expensive soaps, multiple body scrubs, meticulous eight-step hair washing rituals). A similar style of the “shower routine” video has trickled over to French TikTok but, markedly different from their American counterparts, French content creators are not showing you their shower during a video.
My best guess for what’s driving this shower obfuscation is the lofty standard of living that needs to be met to be considered a traditional “influencer.” Many American influencers only show pristine, tiled showers with rainfall shower heads and matte-black modern fixtures. This style of shower has become increasingly popular in new and recently renovated apartments and houses in America, but this style of bathroom hasn’t made its way across the pond.
You’d be hard pressed to find a shower in France that meets the American definition of luxury. In France, most houses have a handheld shower. Sometimes the shower is part of a tub, but often it stands alone. If the shower is part of a tub, you will likely find a small sheet of glass shielding half of the tub which, in theory, replaces the function a curtain would normally serve. In practice, it only serves to allow half of your bathroom to get wet while the other half gets damp. Some shower/tub combinations have neither a curtain nor a glass shield, at which point the entire bathroom becomes your shower in that everything inevitably gets wet. I call that showering en pleine air.
Okay, but at least you can flush toilet paper (?)
It was the same in Greece! 🤦🏻♀️