Status: 16.01.2024, 12:10 p.m.
By: Marc Dimitriu
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A toilet sign in a swimming pool causes astonishment. But there is an understandable background.
Munich – "Swimming pool thinks we're chickens and lay eggs," is how one user prefaces his post on Reddit. You can see a photo of a sign that shows two people going to the toilet. Once provided with a green hook, the correct variant: sitting. The wrong one, marked with a red X: crouching on the toilet bowl.
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For many who come from the West, this sign causes confusion. Sitting on the toilet incorrectly? Why is there a sign for this at all? Who does that wrong, after all, we all learned it properly as children? But if you know anything about foreign cultures and the anatomy of the body, it is clear why the sign hangs in the swimming pool.
Another Reddit user wrote in a comment: "Squatting to defecate is completely normal in various cultures. But then they have the right sanitary equipment, or make do with a stool if sitting toilets have been installed."
And he's right. In many cultures, business is done by squatting instead of sitting. In large parts of Asia, the Islamic world, parts of Africa and even sporadically in southern and southeastern Europe. In these places, so-called squat toilets are also common. They don't have a seat, just a hole in the floor over which you bend your knees. For most Europeans and North Americans, this sounds very familiar.
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From a medical point of view, however, this way of going to the toilet is better than ours while sitting. "From a purely anatomical point of view, the squat toilet is better suited for relaxed bowel emptying," Birgit Terjung, chief physician of the Department of Internal Medicine at the GFO Clinics in Bonn and spokeswoman for the German Society for Digestive and Metabolic Diseases (DGVS) told RND.
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"When you squat, the angle at which the rectum and rectum are in relation to each other increases." The distance between the torso and the thighs also decreases, which causes the pelvic floor to relax and the intestines to run straighter. "Excretions can come out of the intestine like a downpipe," says Terjung.
Public squat toilet in Italy. © IMAGO/Michael Bihlmayer
Back to the sign in the swimming pool: Presumably it was hung up because people who are used to it differently from their culture did their business crouching on the sitting toilets. Logically, this leads to more soiling, especially if the toilet brush is not used to clean afterwards. This is also not common in the squat toilets. One Reddit user commented angrily: "And then they shit next to it and some poor pig has to clean it up. Because, of course, the fine shit doesn't clean up the shit himself." (md)