Because your Facebook feed leads you to believe that it’s a commodity more precious than gold. Because you use the cardboard tubes for crafting. Because you like to wet it and then hurl it in a wad at annoying people in your coronavirus bunker.
The possible explanations for toilet-paper hoarding are myriad. Unlike hand sanitizer and test kits, toilet paper is not a commodity subject to increased need in the current crisis. Nevertheless, shoppers continue to express a panic mentality over bathroom tissue. The fallout: a newspaper in Australia recently ran eight mostly blank pages for its readers (“Run out of loo paper?” the tabloid asked. “The NT News cares”); determining your fair share of Cottonelle at your local Costco can now feel like Yalta.
What’s fuelling all this obsessive-compulsive shopping? Randy O. Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College, who has written widely about hoarding, said that most hoarders are motivated by a combination of three factors: emotional or sentimental attachment, aesthetic appreciation, and utility. But hoarders of toilet paper, Frost said, are compelled by only the third motivation. “One of the underlying characteristics of utility is an intolerance of uncertainty,” he said over the phone. “The individual needs to feel absolutely and perfectly certain that some kind of negative outcome won’t occur.”
But let’s dig deeper; let us ask the toilet-paper-stockpiling patient (in a calm voice), “Vot ees trobbling you?”
“Controlling cleanliness around B.M.s is the earliest way the child asserts control,” Andrea Greenman, the president of the Contemporary Freudian Society, said. “The fact that now we are all presumably losing control creates a regressive push to a very early time. So, I guess that translates in the unconscious to ‘If I have a lifelong supply of toilet paper, I’ll never be out of control, never be a helpless, dirty child again.’ ”
Freud believed that human beings subconsciously equate feces with gold or money. In “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism,” the father of psychoanalysis wrote, “Since his faeces are his first gift, the child easily transfers his interest from that substance to the new one which he comes across as the most valuable gift in life.” The turning point in a child’s so-called anal phase is when he learns to relinquish his “gift”—which, in turn, occasions a loss of self. Toilet paper is inextricably bound in our minds with defecation, and is one of our few public acknowledgments of it. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that a café in Australia recently decided to accept toilet paper as currency (three rolls for a coffee, thirty-six rolls for a kilo of beans).
Is the panic-buying of toilet paper primarily egoistic? Not according to Susan Signe Morrison, the author of “Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics.” “Jesus’ corporal acts of mercy include caring for sick people. Wiping someone’s bottom is not specifically mentioned, but when you think of tending to infants or old people who can’t control their fecal production . . . ” Morrison said, trailing off with a delicacy befitting the subject matter. “If we don’t have toilet paper, will we revile our family members who aren’t clean in the way we expect them to be?”
According to one anthropologist, an outer-directed motivation for toilet-paper hoarding might even skew political. “The places we see toilet paper mentioned are often tied up with politics, especially in the movies,” Grant Jun Otsuki, a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, said. “The turning point of the movie ‘V for Vendetta’ is when Evey discovers a letter written on toilet paper by someone oppressed under the totalitarian regime. Evey becomes politically awakened.”
In a recent blog post subtitled “A Cultural Analysis of Toilet Paper,” Otsuki teases out a hierarchy of household paper goods, from Bibles and diaries, at the top, to old newspapers, to paper towels and plates, down to toilet paper, noting that this lowest item on the chain could fairly smoothly perform many of the functions of items higher up on the list, but not vice versa. He concludes, “While we may use fancy paper and pens to write the basic laws of a nation, in some way those words have no meaning unless they could also be written on toilet paper and potentially carry the same force. Without the possibility of a constitution written on Charmin, modern democracy would be unthinkable.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
