Toilet equality
Seat up or seat down. Women want it down. Men want it up (ooo-err missus).
Feminists have made a huge issue out of toilets seats. They say that men who don’t care about their fellow earth passengers are inconsiderate lazy misogynists. For a man to be a real man he would always have the wishes of woman to the fore front of his mind and he should always put the toilet seat up during use and put it back down after use. For a man to really love his wife he will always think about the position of the toilet seat before he finishes in the loo.
However from my male point of view I think of the situation in a different way. I think women are lazy and irritating for forcing us to put the toilet seat down. In the middle of the night (and how many of us men have the need to go during the night) having to life the toilet seat up can be awkward when you are half asleep.
Women use the loo in the middle of the night too. Their problem is sitting on cold porcelain, which when half asleep will definitely wake you up. Though I gather (I have very limited experience of women’s usage of the loo) that many women crouch over the loo rather than sit on it. Something to do with the quality of the female toilets in pubs, bars, and clubs. I’ve even heard that women can use urinals too with some gymnastics.
For their to be true sexual equality in the john it shouldn’t be the seat that is down but the lid. That way both sexes have to lift part of the toilet apparatus to use it.
There is also the libertarian aspect to the problem. You should take personal responsibilty for your use of the toilet. You should not rely or force someone else to leave the toilet seat in a state to your preference.
Another inequality is the number of toilets. Why is there always a queue for female loos but hardly any for men’s. I know it’s to do with the average length of time that men and women take to have a tinkle. It’s also due to urinals being placed on the wall whilst toilets are always in cubicles which take up a lot more room. So for a given space, there will be more urinals than cubicles. So why after all these years of sexual equality have the building regulations not been brought up to date.
In some places, Edinburgh for example, the council has stipulated that it’s more important to have equal number of toilets even if the clientèle are mainly male (or female). So an old pub frequented mainly by men will have to spend lots of money to revamp the toilet facilities for the non-existent women to keep their license and that if they don’t the place will be closed down.
Why do newly built shopping centres still have queues for the women’s? Don’t they realise that even in this age of sexual equality that on average there are more women than men in a shopping centre.
One other point. Toilet rolls. Do you have it hanging at the front or back? Is it true that men have it hanging at the front and women at the back. Is it a sex related thing or just down to personal preferences.
SBML
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May 7, 2011 at 16:51 -
At least we can be sure that it will be of no interest to the socialists.
For some reason, every form of inequality is fine with them, except inequality of wealth.
http://www.libertarianview.co.uk/the-importance-of-equality-questions-for-socialists/
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May 7, 2011 at 16:56 -
This calls for some serious toilet humour. I feel many of the readers will be bowled over by what they have read.
Also I am now in mind of that lovely song by Julia Fordham – “Porcelain” -
May 7, 2011 at 16:57 -
Men are born equal but everywhere they are in chains. Smash the cistern!
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May 7, 2011 at 17:21 -
May 7, 2011 at 17:33 -
” So why after all these years of sexual equality have the building regulations not been brought up to date.”
Indeed. They should mind their P’s and Q’s.
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May 7, 2011 at 17:56 -
I am sure there is an EU committee studying these questions, please do not think for yourselves these problems will be solved by the experts.
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May 7, 2011 at 18:04 -
The EU experts? They’re all p*ss and wind.
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May 7, 2011 at 17:58 -
I do not understand why there needs to be seperate toilets for men and women. Here, in France, most bars have only one toilet for all their clients. It causes no problems.
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May 7, 2011 at 21:46 -
France. Enough said
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May 7, 2011 at 18:00 -
Having written the article I find that someone else has been thinking about toilet seats. Another view of the toilet seat problem by MarkyMark at his blog.
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May 7, 2011 at 23:42 -
You’re both getting too bogged down in the subject…
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May 7, 2011 at 18:26 -
Hanging at the front. If it hangs at the back it easily unravels without stopping.
Lilith x
(a woman)PS. If the seat is up and the loo is flushed then it creates anxiety in some women. Ie. all the spray of urine and shit flew further than it would have had the loo lid been shut at the time of flushing.
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May 7, 2011 at 18:43 -
“One other point. Toilet rolls. Do you have it hanging at the front or back? Is it true that men have it hanging at the front and women at the back. Is it a sex related thing or just down to personal preferences.”
Back in January I did a little research on this. Results here and here.
Answer: dunno.
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May 7, 2011 at 19:32 -
Or as the Aussies would say “In the Dunny”
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May 7, 2011 at 20:09 -
I’ve long put the lid (not just the seat) down. It originally started after I knocked something off the shelf and had to fish it out of the (fortunately clean) water. Now it would land on the lid and bounce.
The follow-on reason for putting the lid down is having a dog who would drink from the toilet bowl if it was accessible. This is despite having a big bowl of fresh water readily available.
Toilet paper should hang at the front because that then leaves space to get one’s hand behind it. If it’s at the back then I find myself discommoded.
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May 8, 2011 at 07:36 -
Cats, sadly, are no better in that regard…
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May 7, 2011 at 20:19 -
May 7, 2011 at 20:27 -
Does any one else remember the story of the “muslim” toilets in a Rochdale shopping centre? What become of that? It drove round the bend…
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May 7, 2011 at 20:28 -
May 7, 2011 at 20:54 -
@Gildas
Is that where you go when you have explosive diarrhoea?Lid down every time. She leaves it up. Daft – you can lose a telephone, a watch or a ring quite easily.
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May 7, 2011 at 21:44 -
I now feel the need to discuss Big Bang Theory
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May 7, 2011 at 22:02 -
Discuss this Big Bang Theory.
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May 7, 2011 at 21:15 -
After much research I have acquired a vertical toilet roll holder similiar in design to this. A vindaloo may require more than the full nine yards on a roll and it’s always wise to have reserves close at hand in the event of a sudden counter attack.
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May 8, 2011 at 09:29 -
That’s it! An entrepreneurial breakthrough to make me rich! A refrigerated bogroll dispenser for the curry lover. And to return to the original question, a servo-operated toilet seat and lid system, linked to sensors which determine the gender of the person entering the bathroom, and configure these movable parts accordingly. (A daft idea, but no dafter than the perennial whining on this subject.)
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May 7, 2011 at 21:37 -
I read something a while ago about how many bacteria are released into the air whenever you flush, and how far they travel. I now a) always put the lid down, and b) for an emergency hankie at work, take a paper towel from the canteen next door rather than from in the Gents’.
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May 8, 2011 at 07:35 -
Sadly, I suspect there’s far more bacteria in our canteen than in the loos!
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May 8, 2011 at 16:54 -
Every three weeks or so a survey is published that finds more bacteria on computer keyboards, phone handsets and bombay mix dishes than toilet seats. And then in every other advert break I’m informed of the benefits of drinking “Good Bacteria” . Apparently, if one adds up the bacteria in one’s gut, on one’s skin and between one’s cells, the weight of them actually exceeeds one’s own weight.
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May 7, 2011 at 22:17 -
I like it up the back. Just saying
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May 8, 2011 at 01:29 -
I have fixed a few toilets recently and me not being a plumber I asked one why the hinge on the right was the one that always is the one that is rusted. he said all blokes hold in with their right hand so it splashes that way.
In the past i couldn’t decide what what was the best thing to do, should I put the seat down in case a woman used it after me or or leave the seat up incase a man used it. I decided that it was best just to put the lid down with the seat. That way it would give the next person a decision to make…
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May 8, 2011 at 01:48 -
In this part of Australia the local councils are installing unisex toilets in the parks. The yobs pee over the toilet seat in a very democratic way. And for unknown reason people steal the toilet paper. The best laid plans of men etc.
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May 8, 2011 at 05:07 -
In this part of Australia they seem to be known as ‘trees’.
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May 8, 2011 at 05:03 -
As a bona-fide chap, I always like to leave the lid down after use of the toilet. I see no problem with seat down issues. But of course the feminists like to invent all sorts of bizarre blames and shames.
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May 8, 2011 at 05:18 -
About the bog roll holders, I recommend anyone who gets the chance to check out at the bogs in Auckland airport. The toilet roll holders have a mechanism a bit like an inertia reel seatbelt so that once you pull the paper too far the roll hits a cam or something and stop rotating, and since you’re still pulling the end of the paper it tears off at one of the perforations. Clever idea as it means that you don’t yank the paper downwards only to find out the perforations have the strength of mild steel and end up with a spinning roll throwing paper all over the floor. The downside is that it only lets you have one sheet at a time unless you pull the paper out slowly enough that it doesn’t tear off when the roll stops and then repeat until you’ve got enough. I suspect minimising the number of Gaia’s precious trees that need to be turned into bog roll might be behind that decision.
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May 8, 2011 at 07:33 -
Almost certainly!
Still seems like a better method than our staff loo, which replaced the inefficient toilet roll with tissue dispensers, but unfortunately hired a dimwit to restock them.
She crams them in with such force that attempting to get one or a couple of sheets results in a handful of confetti as they tear off against the weight of their fellows pressing down…
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May 8, 2011 at 08:33 -
Heh. We have two dispensers on opposite sides, each surrounded on the floor by the confetti of frustration, and next to the loo a good old roll of proper paper. Loose, untidy, but used by everyone. The old ideas are sometimes the best.
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May 8, 2011 at 08:21 -
I had a loo roll holder shaped like an airplane once. had to explain but it was really cool
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May 8, 2011 at 15:54 -
Re numbers of loos and waiting times.
It’s called “queueing theory” (no, really this has been extensively studied) and you need something like 2:1, maybe 3:1 female to male facilities to equalise queueing times in a 50/50 female to male crowd.
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May 8, 2011 at 23:58 -
You should put the lid down (yes, the lid, not just the seat) before flushing, otherwise the Toilet Aerosol Effect (yes, really, see here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16033465 ) carries small droplets of wee and poo all over the bathroom, including onto your toothbrush.
Sorry.
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May 8, 2011 at 23:59 -
And apparently the reason dogs like to drink out of the loo is that in most houses the loo is actually cleaner than the kitchen (because we disinfect the loo more often).
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