The 200 Year War Of The Washroom

The toilet seat is one of the key battle zones of modern society. This lowly appliance accessory should not even intrude into our thought processes, yet somehow it has become one of the key controversies in any relationship.  Now before the invention of the flush toilet, people used to have only two ways of handling nature call. The outhouse (or privy), and the chamber pot. Outhouses were primarily a daytime convenience.. At night, you would use the chamber pot. One good thing about chamber pots was that no thinking person ever left the lid off. Those things reeked! The privy was a mainstay in the backyards of North Americans since before the pilgrims settled in New England. French colonies in Canada and earlier colonies in Virginia both used outhouses.  The modern outhouse that you see on construction sites is called the port-a-pottie. Please do not confuse these with the traditional outhouse. Port-a-Potties have all of the issues that modern toilets have with respect to the seat up / seat down issue. I digress.

Outhouse design was a masterpiece of simplicity. It was about the size of a closet, and had a door with an obligatory sickle moon cut into the door. Inside was an enclosed bench with a hole of exactly the right size for sitting cut in the top. The bench was about thirty six inches high, and there was usually a small stool inside for children to use.

Placed conveniently beside the seat on the bench was an old copy of a Sears Roebuck catalog (apparently Canadians used the Timothy Eaton's Mail order catalog). It not only supplied reading material, but when you were finished it was the toilet paper of choice for most of North America .

The merchant class of society was not to be denied their social upscale aspirations, so they came up with a couple of enhancements for the common privy. These designs typically featured a longer bench with two holes cut in it, often called the two-holer for short. For young families growing up, the second hole was cut to child size proportions and had a small step in front of it so kids could climb up to the level of the 'one height suits all' bench top. As the children left home, this now unused small hole was usually enlarged for women to use. Sometimes the step height was adjusted as well. The societal norm was for men to use the left hole, and woman the right. Nobody had to be told, and everyone just knew. One of those weird and wacky mysteries of life!

Now the real genius of the out house was the height of the bench top. These were about 36 inches off the floor, and most privies had a two step stool that was used as a foot rest for sitting adults, and as the only viable way for children to do either type of business. That high bench top meant that guys who were standing up could always hit the hole with no splatter. This anti-splatter design would make most modern women stand up and cheer if it were available in a modern bathroom!

The first flush toilet, or water closet as it was called back then, was invented in Great Britain by a person called Sir John Harrington. He installed his first working prototype in the palace for his god mother, Queen Elizabeth 1. ('Going to the John' immediately found it's way into the English language). The original design of Sir John was used for about 75 years. In the middle of the 18 hundreds, a man named Thomas Crapper made several distinct improvements to the design. He managed to get quite wealthy, although never knighted. To this day his name is immortalized in the expression 'going to the crapper'. (The mythical person 'Sir John Crapper' never actually existed. Likely it was an inadvertent merging of these two names.)

The modern flush toilet has been at the center of most of our improved health for the last century or so. But even with its obvious benefits, it is also at the center of the sexual toilet turmoil that rages under the surface of many relationships. The first flaw in the design was the height of the toilet. It is a scant 30 inches tall. Although this is an ideal height for most sitting operations, this is a much less than ideal height for most standing operations. Since standers tended to splatter a lot with the low height, early potty designers increased the diameter of the bowl to make the target bigger. The side effect of increasing the bowl size meant that the bowl was uncomfortable for sitters to sit on. On top of that, people frequently fell in, especially at night if they fell asleep in mid-function. Thus was born the idea of the flip-up toilet seat. The concept of the flip up seat was to have a hole small enough that you did not fall in during sitting operations, but could be flipped up out of the way to give a larger target for standing operations. Women all over North America and Great Britain took to the streets and cheered!!

What nobody realized at the time was that this series of events has forced the 'seat up or seat down' dilemma on society. This is a conundrum that will likely never be solved in our lifetimes. So the culprit here is that a design choice made two and a half centuries ago has caused some band aids to be invented, none of which have ever addressed the root problem that toilets are built too low to the ground!

From the guys perspective, lifting the less than sanitary toilet seat with your hand and then immediately touching your private parts is not the most sanitary thing to do. (Most women are thinking “Yeah, Right!”, But lets assume that you are actually with some guy who is a bit better than a neanderthal). However, men have been conditioned, especially when using a public washroom, to just live with the fact that the seat may not be in the correct position for what they want to do and to just deal with it.  Men will seldom touch a toilet seat twice, so when done they leave the seat in the same position that they used it in. Because men will urinate about 4 times for every sitting operation, there is an 80% chance that the seat is in the correct position for the next man to use.  Men are more accepting of the fact that the seat may be in the wrong position when they go into a bathroom Generally, they just make the adjustment and get on with the task at hand. One big difference between men and women is nighttime behavior. When a man gets up to use the toilet in the middle of the night, they turn on the light. It is an absolute necessity. Because they can now see what they are doing, there are never issues involving falling into the toilet.

Women on the other hand always use the seat down. If they are following a man into the bathroom, there is an 80% chance that the seat will be up, and that gets them steaming. Women who have to pee in the night do not have to actually turn the light on to go to the washroom. In this way they do not have to become fully awake to use the water closet. They will generally feel their way to the toilet, sit down to the task at hand, and then leave after suitable physical and ritualistic ablutions are performed. Ninety percent of accidents in the home caused by women falling into toilets happen in the wee (wee wee?) hours of the morning. Since men always have the light on, there are seldom any traumatic incidents with them.

So now we know the reason for the dilemma, and the perspectives of men and women on the issue.

So what innovations are there to solve this problem? People have tried several schemes, the most popular attacks being self lowering seats, or self cleaning seats. All of these were usually too expensive or too complicated to be widely adopted. But likely a significant component of the failure was the fact that these inventions did not address the fundamental problem at all. They were only dealing with the symptom. Most households with more than one washroom generally solve the problem by designating one for men and one for women.

But likely the best advice for any relationship is to respect each other's space. When you are a guy and at her place, just be sure to put the seat down. If you are a woman at his place, then just take it on the chin. Whether the seat is up or down, just put it in the down position and be done with it. When you finish, walk out and leave the seat down. He will not complain as long as you do not gripe about him not putting the seat down after a stand up performance on his part.

So the long and short of it is, to quit carping!
Relationships should be about love and romance. Relationships should never be about complaints and other petty crap!




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