A Plea For Women To Sit Down on Public Toilets

In public restrooms, I usually have to try a few stalls before I can find a toilet seat that isn’t spattered with pee. I do not enjoy this. While I realize pee on the toilet seat is not a world hunger-level problem, it is an unnecessary one to have to endure with any amount of regularity, so I feel entitled to complain about it. Pee on the seat is gross and unseemly and ladies? It is beneath us. But my mamma told me I shouldn’t complain about something unless I was prepared to offer a solution, so that’s what I’m doing.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t we all just go ahead and sit down on public toilets? Wild idea, huh? (I’m talking to you, squatters!)

WATCH: Can You Get an STD From a Toilet Seat?

I empathize with the debilitating anxiety of having one’s thighs and partial butt-cheeks touch a place that was recently touched by a stranger’s thighs and half of her butt-cheeks. I understand how icky that is. Nobody loves swapping dead skin cells with strangers, and especially not butt skin cells.

I also deeply understand the crippling fear of potentially sitting in stranger-pee. There is definitely a special corner in hell reserved for baby teasers and puppy kickers where they have to sit down in a puddle of someone else’s urine over and over again for all eternity.

So if you’re a squatter, I get it. I really do.

But if you’re squat-peeing in an effort to avoid maybe smearing your thighs in the dead skin cells of strangers, you are not part of the solution; you are, in fact, THE PROBLEM. Not “part of” the problem. But THE problem.

YOU are ruining peeing sitting down for everyone else. Because you, my friend, are the one who is pissing all over the seat.

The tricky thing about squatting is that we women can’t really control where our pee goes, which is kind of the reason toilet seats were invented in the first place. A woman’s anatomy is such that, in squat position, our pee is virtually guaranteed to hit everything but the intended target. We’re not like men, who are armed with what basically amounts to a water gun made of flesh. (Super not-fair, Mother Nature.) When squatting, a woman’s pee could just as easily spray like the “mist” function on a garden hose attachment as squirt straight down into the toilet. It could get on her clothes. Her shoes. The floor. And it will definitely get on the toilet seat.

Also? Squatting is exercise. Do we really want to mix exercise with excrement? And don’t even get me started on trying to do a number two while squatting. I’m already feeling a little stabby as it is.

Dear phobia-encumbered squatters, if you enter a bathroom stall equipped with an unblemished toilet seat and you squat instead of sitting down, you just totally screwed everyone else’s chance at getting to sit down and take a luxurious, exercise-free pee on that particular toilet for the rest of the day, or at least until the cleaning people come and wipe up your nasty mess. (And by the way, I know it’s “their job” to clean the toilets and everything, but do you really need to make the task even more disgusting than it already is just because you’re afraid to sit on the stupid toilet? Come ON.) When you squat-pee—a.k.a. pee all over the toilet seat—everyone who uses that toilet after you sees your foul yellow droplets on the toilet seat and has to either A) choose another stall, B) clean your pee with a wad of toilet paper or C) squat like you did. All of these options suck.

WHICH IS WHY WE JUST NEED TO ALL AGREE TO SIT.

And I mean all of us, as in, all. Of. Us. This plan only works if we agree all together to do it as one—it’s like herd immunity for public toilets. And as an added bonus, let’s also agree to keep our thighs and butt-cheeks clean, mkay ladies? If we can confidently rely on each other’s non-funkiness, it will be that much easier to “take the plunge,” so to speak. If we all agree to sit down on the toilet seat because, HELLO, that’s why it was invented, we will never again have to worry about sitting in someone else’s pee or getting our own pee all over ourselves in an attempt to avoid sitting in someone else’s pee. Everyone wins and nobody has to touch pee. This is feminine solidarity at its finest.

So what do you say, Squatters? And please decide quickly. My kid needs to pee.

P.S. It should go without saying that my awesome solution to the toilet seat problem does NOT apply to porta-potties. In porta-potties, you never sit down no matter what, even if it means peeing all over yourself.

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