Talk:Toilet roll holder

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Originally intended to hold a stock of replacement rolls, the vertical pole has become the only paper holder in some households. It is particularly useful in homes where the family has mixed handedness.

I don't get it. How is a vertical pole better than a horizontal pole in terms of handedness bias? The roll is still oriented and it's even more difficult to use it one-handed than a horizonzal one (with or without a holding mechanism, like a metal plate with a spring).

I don't see how a horizontal pole's toilet roll orientation (upward/downward) could be more biased towards handedness than a vertical pole's (left/right). The only factor biasing against one handedness or the other is the (vertical OR horizontal) toilet roll holder's position relative to the toilet seat (left, right or in front/behind/above it).

Left-handed people have a lot of reasons to complain, but I don't see how horizontal toilet roll holders qualify. Especially when considering that fetching toilet paper off a roll doesn't exactly require high levels of manual dexterity (wiping your butt may, but you don't have to use the same hand to fetch the toilet paper AND wipe your butt -- especially when the toilet roll holder lacks some kind of holding mechanism and you have to use both hands anyway). — Ashmodai ^{(talk · contribs)} 18:00, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I suppose the charges of bias were supposed to be aimed at the kind of holders that are attached to the wall on one side and face the seated with the side of the roll. I've never encountered any of these in real life (they might just not be very popular in any part of the world I've been to so far: Germany, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands, France, England and Wales) but possibly they are so common somewhere that the original author figured comparing the vertical ones to these implicitly would make sense. I've only ever encountered the version with the surface of the roll facing the seated (the roll being impaled on a pole of a holder that may be recessed into the wall or reside in a wall-external box) and the one with multiple rolls on a vertical pole, although I've never seen that one used for dispensing (probably because you'd usually need to bend down a bit to reach it and the used roll would be placed on a bathtub wall or window sill for convenience in the absence of a proper dispenser pole).

Do I smell cultural bias here or have I somehow only ever been to places representing a toilet roll holder and dispenser counter-culture? Not to start any toilet roll holding wars here… — Ashmodai ^{(talk · contribs)} 18:13, 24 April 2006 (UTC)