What your toilet bowl says about you

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the evil shelf toilet that our house happens to have. Apparently, a lot about Dutch society can be deduced from the shelf toilet. In last week's News of the Weird, which I have delivered weekly to my inbox, there was a story about what a country's toilet design says about them:

In a September issue of the London Review of Books, trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zisek made the point that the essential ideological differences in German, French, and British-American societies, as noted by G. W. F. Hegel and others, can be represented by their countries' respective toilet designs. The German toilet's evacuation hole is in the front, facilitating "inspection and analysis," but the French design places the hole in the rear, so that waste disappears quickly. The British-American toilet allows floatation, which of course signals that society's "utilitarian pragmatism." Zisek described his theory as an "excremental correlative-counterpoint" to a framework identified with French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss.

Nothing is mentioned specifically about the Dutch, but it sounds like the Germans have shelf toilets as well, which doesn't really surprise me.

I found the full article which the News of the Weird is referring to, and I can't claim to understand it, but I did like this quote: "No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that 'German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.'"

I understand that these toilets probably developed to combat disease, since the feces could be easily examined. But why are they still needed then? Surely we don't have to worry so much about food poisoning these days? Again I ask, would anyone with plumbing skills like to come and rid me of the Third Reich horror that has taken up residence in my bathroom?!