This may be the site of the initial battlefield of the Battle of the Sexes. It is surely nearby. I am not sure who decided that the default position of the toilet seat is in the “down” position, but I was not consulted and despite any and all protestations I may present, it never goes unnoticed in my household. Since I am not the only male in the house, and my son often has friends in tow, I am sure it is not always me. I however ALWAYS get blamed. I must have protested too much and hence lost any credibility on this matter.
The toilet seat is a marvelous invention. It raises and lowers depending on who needs to use it, and it even includes a lid, which inconveniences both sexes more or less equally. Hence, when I put the toilet seat down, I always include the lid…it requires no extra effort, and restores the toilet to a sense of neutrality. My wife refers to the bathroom as the “men’s room” when the seat is in the up position…I guess implying it is, or should be, the “ladies room” when restored to its normal state. Lowering the lids is my silent protest against that arrangement.
The primary reason I forget is that, as I work primarily at home, I am the one who uses the toilet most often during the day, hence I figure, if I am going to be the next user, I ought to be able to leave it as I will need it to be, my so called coffee mode. I am frankly surprised at how often my estimate fails to produce accurate results. My wife often walks into the bathroom before I have switched over to afternoon/evening mode. This of course has gained new importance now that I am drinking in excess of 100 ounces of water every day. That does not come without a price… all day long. No more coffee mode.
I am told that it is disgusting to have to touch the toilet seat before using the facility, and I wonder if raising the lid is any less so. I am guessing this stems from the use of public bathrooms, and perhaps one of the basis’ for same sex bathrooms. Women, apparently do not like to touch toilet seats. Men apparently do not either, since they can use urinals, and if everyone plays by the rules, the only person to ever touch a toilet seat is the janitor, and he would likely be wearing rubber gloves. This arrangement has carried over into my house, and though I suppose I could suggest we install a urinal, for now it appears, the seat needs to be adjusted.
My wife has an even more extreme idea than the installation of a urinal. She suggests that I sit down to pee. She intimates that many husbands of her friends do the same…I stop to wonder how comes by this information. I wonder if this is really the type of thing that women discuss when they get together for tea or a glass of wine…the urinary habits of their husbands. I can assure you that men NEVER discuss the urinary habits of their wives, unless it is to complain about the number of stops they have to make on a road trip. We discuss women, just not in that way.
Aside from the obvious suspicion about the veracity of the claim that some men are sitting down to pee, I ask myself, “why?” One of the notable good things about being a man is that you can essentially pee anywhere. With barely a fuss. Unzip and you are ready to go. Literally. In a field, behind a bush, against a wall, even in a toilet. In fact, I had occasion in my early teenage years to walk aside two friends down the main street of a small mountain town late one evening, peeing. All three of us, in unison. “A walking leak”, we called it, right on Main Street, for any and all to see…no one much cared, or even saw, or understood. Still, we added it proudly to our resume of places we have peed. And most men, I daresay, have utilized this flexibility to pee in various places at some point in their life time. Only to give up eons of evolutionary advantage to sit on a toilet? To avoid having to raise or lower the seat?
This does run counter to my intuition. Inventors have spent countless hours trying to perfect devices that would allow women the same ease and utility. I never hear women suggest that peeing sitting down affords them a chance to relax for a few moments. No way. It is a burden, depending on how many layers of clothes they are wearing at the time. NO one in their right mind would trade the convenience of standing up, unzipping, peeing and being done. You don’t even have to touch anything but your own body if you opt not to flush.
There is also the matter of sitting on a toilet unnecessarily. As I mentioned earlier, my house is entering its second century of service. Our toilet seems to be one of the early prototypes of toilet technology, and hence the seat is a scant 13” off the ground. It takes me a good 3 minutes to summon the strength and courage to stand up from a toilet that low. My knees simply do not enjoy that sort of thing unless nature demands that they cooperate. To sit on the toilet when there is another option is simply out of the question. Perhaps if the house was fitted with those newfangled “high-boy” toilets.
I can understand the seat position debate if in fact the problem was that I never raised the seat when going pee. My aim is not that good to reduce the target area by 25%. In fact, I have argued (unsuccessfully) that by leaving the seat up, I have offered proof that I have not attempted to “pee through the seat”. It is a signal that the seat, when lowered will be clean and ready to use. If it is left down, how can you really tell? What assurance do you have that the last person that used it did not pee all over the seat. This problem was surely a more pressing issue when my son was much younger. He definitely had no problem working on his target practice, and often seemed to treat the seat as a part of the target. In that context, raising or lowering, much less using the seat had a less appealing slant to it.
A subcategory in this debate is the issue of leaving the seat up at night. I am told that one of the worst feelings is using the toilet and feeling cold porcelain on your rear end just prior to slipping downward into the water. I cannot say from first hand experience how this might affect me, nor can I really prove that it has happened. I must confess that it sounds dreadful…uncomfortable, disgusting, and really not at all the kind of thing you want to happen to you in the wee hours. I can say, though, that one of the solutions is quite simple. The light switch.
However, after some 20 years of having this discussion, I will relent. I will change the sign on the door from “Water Closet” to “Ladies Room” (at least in my own mind) and I will keep that seat (and lid) in the down position, and wonder why, if this is so important, they don’t have toilet seats self lower upon flushing. If that is truly the default position, why does the toilet not have a self actuating reset button, to return the toilet to neutral following each use? Like windshield wipers, or the refrigerator door? They could have a very slow acting spring hinge, and the seat and lid would descend almost imperceptibly once it was raised…and then, perhaps 3 or 4 minutes after each use, the toilet would be back to the closed position.
Of course, if peeing was taking a long time for whatever reason, the seat might eventually descend enough to get in the way. This might actually add pressure, and make peeing even more difficult. In this case though there is an easy solution: You can simply sit down to pee.
Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Nine):
Feeling a groove sort of take over. Got the exercise, the water, the right kind of milk in my coffee. And you know what? I do not recall uttering any expletives. A miracle after only 9 days…of course, other than to drink coffee and water, I elected to go with the gag all day, so I couldn’t utter any words at all….not really, but it did cross my mind. I have made now 9 changes, and have fit all of them into my daily regime with little difficulty, other than the occasional word that slips out. But even there, I seem to be swearing less.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment