Shit’s Getting Real: A Cultural Analysis of Toilet Paper

Abstract

Since its first detection in China in December 2019, COVID-19 has spread with alarming speed and lethality, thoroughly transforming daily life around the world in ways that few could have foreseen. As of late 2020, millions have been infected and hundreds of thousands have been killed. There is little doubt that this decade will be defined by the pandemic. But while COVID has caused much confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, it has inspired little bemusement. Except for what it did to toilet paper. Soon after the disease began breaching international borders, the internet was inundated with photos and videos of store shelves emptied of toilet paper by harried customers. The shelves were empty not just in the places where COVID had become established but also in places such as New Zealand, where I am based and where the disease had yet to materially impact the day-to-day lives of most people. Almost overnight, there was an explosion of memes ridiculing the irrationality of toilet paper hoarders and of blog posts and news stories addressing the strangeness of the phenomenon. To be sure, toilet paper was not the only item in short supply. Surgical masks and alcohol-based hand sanitizers were also difficult to find. But a run on those items was understandable. For toilet paper, it was less so. What was the meaning, then, behind this flurry of attention, talk, meme-ing, writing and photographing focused on toilet paper? Much of the early academic commentary came from psychologists, who suggested that the run on toilet paper was a combined consequence of herd behavior and people’s need for psychological security during deeply uncertain times. But little of it addressed the basic question, Why toilet paper? It turns out that toilet paper has many layers. Some have to do with the symbolic meanings that modern societies (or at least their Western versions) have assigned to it. Others have to do with the particular political and psychological security that toilet paper gives people. And of course, toilet paper is very useful. These layers considered together begin to reveal why toilet paper should become what the anthropologist Sherry Ortner once called a “key symbol” during troubled times.1