(What is the World Toilet Summit? Find out here.)

Today I’m going to talk about how the flush toilet negatively shapes attitudes towards sanitation. And I’m going to tell you what you need to know in order to counteract the ideological influence of the flush toilet.

But first, a bit about me. In 2003, I started writing what I expected to be a humorous look at the world of toilets. But the more research I did, the more serious the book grew.

As you can see by its title, my book still has humor — but the humor is for a purpose: I use humor to diffuse the taboo so that people feel comfortable enough to take the subject seriously.

In my research, I’ve discovered something about the toilet that everyone attending the World Toilet Summit needs to know: the toilet was NOT invented for sanitation. It was invented for ideology.

Here’s the brief history. The toilet was invented in the 18th and 19th century to help rich Victorians in England differentiate themselves from the lower classes.

This was during the industrial revolution, when wealth began to spread beyond the most elite members of society.

The most elite Victorians didn’t like it that so many people were becoming rich like them, and so they adopted elaborate customs and morality to differentiate themselves in ways mere money couldn’t.

So to them, sweating, burping, having sun-darkened skin, showing sexual desire or strong emotion — all these were taboo to the elite Victorians, because they identified all these with the lower classes.

But the problem was, whenever they felt the need to evacuate, they left behind in their chamber pot a disgusting reminder that they were no different than anyone else.

Even if no one heard or smelled what they were doing in their private bathroom, there was still this disgusting THING left in the chamber pot, and the servants would know who put it there.

The toilet appealed to their ideology because it enabled fecal invisibility. The water would contain the smell, and then with a press of a button, every reminder of their shared humanity would disappear down the drain.

The toilet is a tool of ideology. It only became a tool of sanitation after science linked cholera with fecal contamination of water. THAT’S when people decided the toilet had a sanitary purpose.

This isn’t to say the toilet is a bad thing. Of course it isn’t. It’s one of the most lifesaving inventions in the history of man. But if we’re going to attend the World Toilet Summit, it’s important to know where the toilet came from. This knowledge will help your work.

Because clearly this ideological influence is at work today.

Surely you’ve met people who refuse to even talk about the toilet, to even think about it, whether it’s as a joke or in discussing the importance of sanitation in the developing world.

Like it or not, when you talk about toilets, many people think you’re talking about making feces invisible. We know that our goals are sanitation, but there is an ideology that comes with it.

But here’s the good news: by recognizing this ideology, we can use it to our advantage!

I gave a lecture at the University of Iowa about the way the news media covers bathroom-related subjects. In it, I examined some of the headlines that ran worldwide about this very event: the World Toilet Summit. Here are some of the headlines that ran:

- World Toilet Summit lifts lid on public hygiene (Reuters)

- World Toilet Summit more than a wee bit important (Irish Examiner)

- Summit flushes out smelly toilets (AP)

Obviously the World Toilet Summit does not “flush out smelly toilets.” Why does the media feel the need to use puns, or place stories about the World Toilet Summit in the “news of the weird” column?

It’s because in American culture, at least, and I suspect in many other cultures, human waste is taboo.

And when you treat human waste in any other way than the taboo dictates, many people will be horrified — horrified by the subject, and horrified by you for bringing it up. It’s contamination by association.

If the media thinks some of its readers will think the World Toilet Summit is disgusting, then the media will do what it takes to distance itself from the subject. Hence, headlines like those.

There are also people who will think that someone who takes toilets seriously is contaminated.

That is the ideological barrier to sanitation.

It’s imperative to break down this barrier. And it can be as simple as acknowledging the absurdity of the subject, making a joke to break the taboo– as Jack Sim does when he introduces himself as Toiletman.

It’s important to recognize that you see the taboo and show that you’ve moved past it, if you’re going to get people receiving your message to do the same.

Sanitation is critical for both the developing world and the developed world. I don’t need to tell that to the people in this room.

But it does need to be communicated to the people outside of this room, and to the media.

So whether you’re on the floor of the UN talking about the Year of Sanitation, or introducing people to their very first toilet, you need to keep this in mind: the toilet has an ideology, and this ideology speaks as loudly as the facts and statistics that we’re working so hard to change.

If you have any questions, my email address is in the book. Thank you very much.

As at any other conference, delegates arriving at the 2007 World Toilet Summit in New Delhi are handed a tote bag full of schwag. Unlike any other conference, however, our bags contained two small plastic containers of human waste.

Composted human waste, of course. In one, a few powdery ounces of “human excreta-based manure” (2.0% nitrogen, 6.9% phosphorus, 0.4% potassium); in the other, a “hard ball” of composted humanure mixed with adhesive. I don’t know what one does with a “hard ball” of poop, but I do know that it has absolutely no smell.

Yes, I gave it a whiff.

At the 2007 World Toilet Summit, which runs until Saturday, 153 international delegates from 39 countries have joined 172 Indian attendees to discuss and debate issues of sanitation. This year’s theme is “Toilet for All” — a reference to the 2.6 billion people around the world who don’t have one, which contributes to 1.8 million children dying of diarrheal diseases every year. Academics, scientists, economists, bureaucrats, NGO representatives, and at least one writer of books about poop have gathered to present papers, discuss strategies, examine technologies, and kick off preparations for the U.N.-declared International Year of Sanitation, just two months away.

In a vast assembly hall straight out of every movie I’ve ever seen about the UN (headphones for listening to translations, delegates bowing their heads in conference), the event kicks off. I count two dozen photographers and at least ten video crews documenting speech after speech by dignitary after dignitary — Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International; Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization; His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange of the Netherlands; former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam; and, symbolically, a “former scavenger woman” who was “liberated” from the “demeaning” practice of collecting human waste from household cesspools by Dr. Pathak’s organization. (Their words, not mine.)

The speeches adhered to what I’ve learned to be the grand Indian tradition in which each speaker lavishly honors the people on the dais before any other words are uttered; only after flowers are given, plaques are presented, and accomplishments are praised can each speaker then move on to exhort of the attendees that everyone in the world should have a toilet. (The word “toilet” is used in a sense broader than the flushing Ferguson we’re all familiar with; here, it means simply an apparatus that accepts and stores poop in a sanitary way.)

I hear lots of statistics, but little to keep my attention. As fascinated as I am by the human waste infrastructure, and as concerned as I am about 2.6 billion of my fellow humans, toilets can indeed be rendered humorless and uninteresting.

It’s Jack Sim’s speech that brings back the excitement. And he does it by addressing one of the two common baselines at which people view toilets: they’re funny. “I think,” he said, rising to the lectern as we round out the second hour of interminable speeches, “after this long discussion, I don’t have to convince you right now of the importance of a toilet.”

Sim wants to make sanitation “sexy.” His solution to the sanitation crisis is not to deliver a bunch of toilets to a bunch of villages, but to address it as a problem of demand. To him, 2.6 billion people living without sanitation isn’t a function of poverty — it’s a function of demand. It’s less important to bring sanitation to people that it is for them to want to be sanitized. It’s not even necessary for people to know WHY toilets are important — he just wants them to want them.

His strategy is to educate suppliers — from the smallest rural plumber to the largest corporation — on the profit potential even rudimentary toilets possess when multiplied by almost half the world’s population. It would be primarily up to local suppliers to generate demand — a strategy that will position the toilet in ways far more culturally-relevant than any NGO-sponsored campaign could accomplish, and could deliver toilets far faster than any not-for-profit approach could facilitate.

He also exhorted politicians to help eliminate taboos by taking pictures next to toilets.

The next day, at the toilet Expo: the latest innovations in porta-potties. A new technology to retrofit any urinal into a waterless apparatus. A latrine that utilizes negative air pressure to suck out all smells. Composting toilets. Solar toilets. Toilets on trains. A grade-school sanitation club’s posters depicting the dangers of open defecation in the fields (which, as the crayoned drawings graphically depict, include being bitten on the ass by a cobra).

And then, at the delegates’ presentations: a call for the American government to legislate more public toilets. Tours of rural toilets from the Philippines, Africa, and Germany. Descriptions of schools toilets across India and Nepal. A debate of the benefits of sitting toilets versus the squatting kind (with the cryptic subtitle “Demedicalisation of hemorrhoids therapy/prevention”). An impassioned call for the creation of a Canadian Toilet Organization to address that country’s water resource issues that ran far over the allotted time. As the moderator progressed from polite exhortation to all-out shouting for him to stop, the speaker finally announced that Canada’s desperate need for a toilet organization has finally been met — by the speaker himself, who is now forming a Canadian Toilet Organization.

While the Toilet Summit skews towards issues affecting developing nations, the World Toilet Organization represents toilet needs of all countries. This leads to strange juxtapositions of concerns — one delegate calls for US airlines to provide more toilets for their passengers, while the next pleads on behalf of distant villages for even one toilet at all.

The air at the World Toilet Summit is one of optimism. Unlike many of humanity’s problems, this is a fight that can be won. A billion more people have access to sanitation than did twenty years ago. Jon Lane, executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, looks at the technology — affordable — and the strategies — proven — and issues a declaration: “We can achieve universal sanitation in our lifetime.”

There is one more day left in the conference. Hopefully I’ll find out what to do with my ball of composted shit.