Toilet Wars – Century Three

You will not be very long into a relationship before you have to confront one of the biggest conundrums since the invention of the flush toilet. Seat Up, or Seat Down!  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. Usage of the outhouse was generally restricted to daylight hours. The chamber pot was used at night so that you did not have to brave the outside weather just to relieve yourself. One good thing about chamber pots was that no thinking person ever left the lid off. Those things reeked! Outhouses ruled the landscapes of North America for about four hundred years.  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.

The core design of an outhouse was essentially the same everywhere. The building was about the size of a modern powder room. Inside was an enclosed bench about thirty six inches high, with a hole perfectly sized to fit your butt. Often well sanded to eliminate splinters. Children usually used to have to use a stool to reach, so one was usually left inside for that purpose.

All privies had at least one mail order catalog inside.. It not only supplied reading material, but when you were finished it was the toilet paper of choice for most of North America .

Of course there was a couple of variations of the privy for the more well to do. These designs typically featured a longer bench with two holes cut in it, often called the two-holer for short. For younger families, the second hole was usually cut child sized, and there was a couple of steps in front of it. As the children grew up, the second hole was usually enlarged and the steps removed.. Men were usually relegated to the left hole, and women to the right as you entered the door. Nobody knows where this standard came from, it was just the way it was.

The brilliance of the standard outhouse design was often un-remarked. It was the fact that the bench top was about thirty six inches off the floor. This pretty much eliminated any splatter caused by men urinating. This more than offset the inconvenience of having to use a stool for children and when sitting. This inherent splatter free design would be a boon for modern bathrooms.

John Harrington (later knighted to Sir John Harrington) was the person who invented the first water closet as he called them. This forerunner of the modern flush toilet was installed in the royal palace for his god mother, Queen Elizabeth 1. The phrase 'going to the john' quickly found its way into the normal English culture. 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'. (Incidentally, there was never anyone named 'Sir John Crapper' which appears to be an Urban Myth caused by muddling the names of these two innovators together.)

It is unfortunate that the modern flush toilet is the instigator of so much strife in male-female relationships, because this very appliance was truly the most significant contributor to the wide spread improvements in health achieved in the last century or so. As more houses in North America and Europe converted to indoor plumbing, there was an equivalent rise in life expectancy. The biggest design flaw is the low height. The American standard toilet is thirty inches tall. Although this is an ideal height for most sitting operations, this is a much less than ideal height for most standing operations. Because of this poor choice of vertical dimension, they tried to solve the problem by making the bowl bigger around to minimize splatter issues caused by standers. Unfortunately, increasing the size of the bowl made it so big that you could literally fall into the john. Something had to be done!. So to solve this side effect of trying to solve the design adjustment of a bad height dimension, they designed the flip up toilet bowl seat. The idea was to put an outhouse sized hole on top of the bowl that flipped up for standers so that they would not pee all over the seat! Women all over North America and Great Britain took to the streets and cheered!!

The upshot of all these small design changes was the introduction to society of a controversy as to whether the seat should be left up or down when finished. This has turned into a male versus female battle royal that is unlikely to ever see a resolution any time soon, if ever. As you can plainly see, a poor choice of height in the initial design of the toilet has lead to a series of adjustments that are only fixing the symptom of the problem and not addressing the true cause.

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 reading this do not believe for a minute that men actually think about such things, but lets try to take the high road here for a bit). Men have been conditioned to be more pragmatic. Whatever position the seat is in, they move it to the desireable position for what they have to do themselves.  When done, men will usually leave the seat in the last position that they used it. 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 never complain about the seat being in the wrong position. They just accept the fact that a lot of the time it is in the right position, and sometimes it is not. 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.

If a woman follows a woman into the bathroom, the seat is always in the correct position because women only ever use a seat down. If a woman follows a man into a bathroom, way more often than not, the seat is in the wrong position. If a woman wakes up in the middle of the night with an urge to urinate, they will often use the bathroom with the light off so they do not have to become fully awake. Because of this they are a lot more prone to falling into toilets with raised seats touring the wee-wee hours of the night. Since men always have the light on, there are seldom any traumatic incidents with them.

Up to this point, we have covered the root cause of the problem, and why it is that men and women feel so strongly about their opposing positions.

Now you are wondering why it is that nobody is doing anything about fixing the toilets. Well people have tried everything from self cleaning toilet seats that cannot be flipped up, to toilet seats that automatically lower with each flush. None of these have ever been widely adopted, mainly because of the expense. But a major contributing factor to the failure was that these were only dealing with the symptom of the problem, and not actually fixing the fundamental source of the problem. Most women are sneaky about how they deal with this. They paint the guest powder room shocking pink, and then force the men of the household to use that exclusively.

To my way of thinking, the best answer to the answer is 'When in Rome, do as the Roman's do'. 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. Unlike women, real men never complain about the position that they find the seat in. They just deal with it, do their thing, and move on. Men only complain when faced with complaints directed at them.

So the long and short of it is, to quit carping!
Relationships should be built on love, not crap!




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