Don't Try This at Home

From Menletter March 2004

By Tim Baehr

Ah, the perennial problem and battleground for countless couples: You leave the toilet seat up after peeing. She, without looking, sits down and (1) gets the cold, seatless, dirty rim on her behind and (2) might even dip her behind in the water. Loud recriminations ensue. If the seat-up condition is chronic, nagging gets underway, leading to hard feelings and general unhappiness.

The sure cure, of course, is to always put the seat down and apologize profusely for occasional lapses. But some of us resent this concession. We may see it as just another part of the male/female power struggle, a legitimate reason for a backlash against feminism, or just another goddamn thing to remember.

Then there's the fairness issue. We arrive having to pee. We have to put the seat up before we go. We have to put the seat down after we go. She expects to arrive without having to mess with the seat at all. So there's not only a power gap, there's a fairness gap.

How can we close the fairness gap? Here's one way.

Putting a toilet seat up or down involves actually handling it -- an unpleasant prospect at best and an unsanitary one at worst.

I propose the following rule:

Each person using the toilet should have to handle the seat only once, if at all. If it's already in the position you need it to be in, you get a free pass. If it isn't, you move it once and leave it there when you've finished your business. In any single visit to the bathroom, you have to handle the seat only once, if at all.

Simple, huh? What could be more fair? The only fairer thing I could think of would be to collect data by gender of the frequency and purpose of visits, and then to determine some kind of complex formula for when a person had to handle the toilet seat twice. Not very workable, that.

I've adopted this zero-to-once-per-visit practice in any public bathroom I use, including a unisex one where I work. Of course, no one's complained, at least to me: visits to public bathrooms are largely anonymous.

What about at home, where you're not anonymous? (If you are, you have bigger problems than toilet seats.)

Here are a few scenarios.

1. You have a calm, reasonable discussion with your female partner about the fairness doctrine, and you both agree it's a good idea. Problem solved.

2. You have a calm, reasonable discussion with your female partner about the fairness doctrine, and (a) she laughs you out of the room; (b) she asks where you got this crazy idea -- from Maxxim, Playboy, Penthouse, or Men's Health, or from that goddamn men's newsletter you read -- and then launches a multi-hour or multi-day diatribe about the selfish insensitivity of men in general and you in particular; (c) she agrees to it but pouts and starts burning your dinner -- but only yours; (d) you get the picture.

3. There are more males than females in your house. You could claim majority rule, but the fairness doctrine isn't very fair. The seat will be up so often that the females will never agree to the plan.

4. You have a wife and one or more daughters and no sons. Although the fairness doctrine works in favor of the females (the seat will be down most of the time), you're clearly outnumbered, and you might as well just put the damn seat down.

5. You share a house or apartment with more women than men. See (4) above.

Sigh.

If you achieve scenario (1), by the way, you do have one further obligation: Wipe up any splatter on the rim before you flush. C'mon -- you don't want to look at dried-on pee any more than anyone else does. And why invite further recriminations, nagging, etc.?

OK, now it's fair of you to ask which scenario I managed to achieve.

Well, my situation's a bit different. We have this cat that thinks he's a dog. Louie plays fetch, catches things in mid-air (we haven't gotten to Frisbees yet, but...), and drinks out of the loo. So in our house we put the seat AND the lid down. Most of the time. When we remember.