A little though experiment. Imagine you got poop on your fingers. You take toilet paper and wipe your fingers clean. Are you now ready to continue with your business or does it feel a bit unsanitary? Then why do this to your butt?
Social inertia. Toilet habits are very hard to change due to the taboo-ish nature of the topic, and the social expectation that toilets are more or less the same everywhere you go (at work or school, in restaurants, visiting friends or family, etc.).
Anyone who spent a year is in a country like Japan or South Korea will have experienced that toilet paper is down-right barbaric compared to a jet of warm water appearing at the touch of a button gently rinsing the nether regions. You still use toilet paper, but only two sheets or so to dry up.
But when you go back to a country that uses only toilet paper you either have to go out of your way (and pay a lot of money to renovate your bathroom) to find the kind of modern automated toilet seat that does add the features you've just left behind, or you just do as everyone else does.
> But when you go back to a country that uses only toilet paper you either have to go out of your way (and pay a lot of money to renovate your bathroom) to find the kind of modern automated toilet seat that does add the features you've just left behind, or you just do as everyone else does.
Having gotten use to the bidet, I now bring a bottle of water with me, and wet the toilet paper before wiping. It leaves me about as clean as with a bidet.
Because very little waste collects on the outside of my body - almost all of it passes directly to the toilet bowl. And because I wear underwear and because the only function of that part of my body is shitting so it doesn't have to be as clean as my fingers.
