Thursday, 26 November 2009
My campaign to teach men how lucky they are to be able to wee standing up
Last week I gave a very impassioned presentation to the Gift, the subject of which was how he should never take his ability to wee standing up for granted. The claim that started this (which in fairness was perfectly understandable) was that as he rarely avails himself of the ability to wee outside, he doesn't feel he really benefits from his manly plumbing.
This was my cue to expound on this topic, and explain how outdoor weeing is only a very minor benefit of the whole male-centric plumbing arrangement. Because the Gift and I have been to festivals together, I was able to draw on our mutual experience of skanky toilets (and a rather graphically elaborate mime which I suspect may have scared him a little bit!) to demonstrate the level of physical contact that one must endure when standing is not an option.
I mentioned the enourmous pressure of trying to hover over a rancid hole whilst hitching up your trousers so that the bottoms don't dangle in anything revolting, the awkwardness of trying to detatch toilet roll (should there even be any!) with one hand whilst trying to trouser hitch and balance and the Sophie's Choice style decision between a toilet with a light, one with a seat and one with toilet roll. We touched briefly on the perils of weeing in a bush (everyone knows someone who's really good at it, but I have never managed it without weeing on my feet), and at that point I relented and ersted my case.
I genuinely think that men's blase attitude towards their physical advantages is one of the things that annoys me most about the horrors of female toilet arrangements - I might be doing battle against an encroaching tide of effluent, but the thing that annoys me most is that I know the men next door aren't giving a second thought to whether they need to take emergency tissues into the loo with them. If we have sons, I will bring them up to be evangelical about their luck, which will probably make their weird names seem like a secondary source of bullying material eventually.