Ladies and gentlemen, a great battle has been lost in the war for equality, and I don't mean Mitt Romney winning New Hampshire (consider the preceding sentence a time-stamp for the foil-wearing space-linguists of two posts ago).
I'm talking, of course, about toilet seats. We really dropped the ball on this one fellas. I don't know which generation is at fault here (I suspect it was the cowardly veterans of World War II, too tired and emotionally scarred to stand up to the matriarchal dictatorships their households had become), but somewhere along the line we all flushed logic into the Atlantic.
Show me a man who has never left the toilet seat up and I'll show you a woman in drag. It's a problem we all face, and I'm not just talking about the Y chromosomes. If anything this is more of a problem for women, as the frustration many women feel seems to lie in the belief, which I admit must be intolerable, that half the population of mankind are rude morons. In order to get to the heart of all this, I'll be speaking in UNVERIFIABLE GENERALISATIONS from this point forward. Anyone who recoils from hard-hitting journalism of this sort should run for cover behind their nearest copy of Well-Evidenced Opinions Quarterly, where I can't get you. Ready?
Women are inherently worse decision-makers!! OK then. On we go.
Let's begin with a bare fact: Many women expect the men in their households to put the toilet seat down after urinating. 'A reasonable request', you might rudely interrupt. After all, every single time a woman uses the toilet, she needs to sit down. 'Its not like with you' they cry, 'with all your standing up and enjoying aiming'. Aiming may well be enjoyable (it is), but that's not the point. If we can safely assume that a man urinates far more often than he does the other thing, then we can also assume he needs the seat UP most of the time. Otherwise he risks committing the far greater and less defensible crime of piss-marking his territory, and if there's one thing we can all agree on its that toilets are for everyone except the very young and very old.
The way I see it, there are four possible scenarios branching off from the initial reprimand:
1. The man completely concedes the point and always, without fail, puts the toilet seat down. 'Great', you might rudely interrupt for a second time. But it's not great, because this amounts to the man almost always having to touch the dirty toilet seat, and the woman never, ever having to. In this scenario, the man is reduced to a kind of toilet elf, constantly predicting his Mrs Claus's next visit and never giving a thought to the fact the HE might be the next one to use the toilet, thereby making more work for himself.
2. The man never puts the seat down. Now this scenario would require a man of a certain mould, large in stature, probably a Conservative, who cares not a jot for his wife's mental health. While fairer in terms of the work involved (although with slight advantage to the man when a no.2 is in order), this isn't a viable option because it amounts to a breakdown of communication. Divorce looms like a giant, 50's father.
3. The man puts the seat down WHEN HE REMEMBERS. All sorts of problems with this one. The woman's annoyance at each failure to follow orders multiplies exponentially. To her, each subsequent act of insubordination is either an inexplicable failure of cognition (understandably, women can't relate to forgetting to put the seat down; the possibility of doing so is already nil by the time they've sat down), or an evil ploy to cling on to patriarchy via the only form of expression it has left: snarky passive-aggressive toilet seat power-plays. In truth, men will always forget to put the seat down because a) it's really hard to remember to act against your own self-interest, and b) as any good liberal child-rearer will tell you, the fear of punishment alone is rarely enough to alter bad behaviour. We need to know WHY what we're doing is wrong!
4. Scenario 4, for me, is utopia: The man retains the option NOT to put the seat down, but does put it down now and again as a simple act of kindness. Like a mint on a hotel pillow. What a wonderful system this would be: everyone could use the toilet in their own special way, taking liberating responsibility for the up or downness of the seat on a per-use basis. Heaven.
Realistically, we're all pretty much doomed to Scenario 3. As much as I love Scenario 4, it's probably going to go the way of most utopias, to the graveyard of dreams. Ah! But what of secret scenario number 5 (which isn't a secret as much as it is a result of poor planning)?! In the near-mythical Scenario 5 (I can barely believe I'm going suggest this even as a pie-in-the-sky theory) WOMEN would be reprimanded, on site, for leaving the toilet seat DOWN! Sweet, hand-sanitized revenge!
I am literally more likely to become Prime Minister, or a dragon, than Scenario 5 is to reach committee.
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