RETHINKING GREEN | TECHNOLOGY - Hottest seat in town - Stop that giggling. Fans of the bidet are coming out of the water closet as acceptance of the fixture spreads.

MAYBE the problem is the name. Bidet. Rhymes with ballet. Sounds altogether too French, fussy and feminine.

Or maybe it's the shape, the low profile that can look like a miniature tub for washing the feet or an infant -- a silly and ultimately extraneous bathroom fixture.

Whatever the reason, Americans have remained suspicious of the 300-year-old invention whose name is derived from the old French word for "to trot," a reference to the fact that one straddles the apparatus. The very idea still makes some people giggle.

But hold onto your toilet seat. With the introduction of high-tech bidet seats that can be retrofitted to existing toilets, products such as Toto's Washlet and Brondell's Swash are gradually becoming standard equipment in high-end homes.

One of the selling points: environmental friendliness. Though the bidet does increase water usage slightly, it can reduce the use of toilet paper by 50% to 90%, according to Brondell. That may not seem significant until one realizes that Americans use more than 3.2 million tons of toilet paper annually, cutting down 54 million trees in the process. The production of each roll requires an average of 1 1/2 pounds of wood, 37 gallons of water and 1.3 kilowatts of energy, and it involves toxic chemicals such as chlorine.

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'BY every objective measure, it's better to clean yourself with water than paper, but objectivity doesn't always fly in this realm," says Dave Prager, author of "Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped By Its Grossest National Product." "There's more at work here than logic."

Indeed, the bidet's acceptance hasn't been quick or easy. Toto developed the retrofitted toilet seat-bidet combo in 1980. The product found its way into nearly 70% of Japanese homes, and even onto JAL and ANA airplanes.

Only recently have Toto Washlets been installed in any significant number in the U.S. Among the earliest adopters were high-end lodgings: Four Seasons, W Hotels, the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. Now dancers backstage at the Lincoln Center have them. So do the desk jockeys at Google's corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Americans are simply reluctant to change their habits, says Scott Pinizzotto, the mechanical engineer who co-founded Brondell with Internet entrepreneur David Samuel. He had been working for Sony in Japan in the 1990s and wondered why a fixture that was standard in that country was used so infrequently in the U.S.