I have always been grateful to live in a time with flushing toilets. I have, though, asked myself if self-flushing toilets are a step forward in technology. I might add, I am not the first to write about this controversial subject.
We have such toilets at work. Our commodes are unisex. Now I am a feminist. However, I do not want to share a facility with men. They drip. They leave the seat up. They don’t flush—even the self-flushing toilets!!! How is that even possible? Those things flush numerous times when I use them, when I don’t even want them to flush, whish, whirl and away!
I was waiting for the restroom as a male colleague was leaving. There he left the seat up, with those spats of urine glaring at me, leaving me to touch the public seat to put it down for my use. I used toilet paper to actually bring it down because no one actually touches those seats. (I won’t even go for the squatters, because those women are just as bad with their aim and clean up strategies—where is the decorum for public restroom use, anyway? Can we rely on neither sex to be respectful of the spray factor?) I struggled with my own sexism in that moment—is it unfair to ask him to put the seat down?
I did ask him. But then I wondered…if he is so lazy as to put the seat down, perhaps it will back fire and he will no longer put the seat up. I might have just made my fate worse.
There is a scene in the film The Assassination of Jesse James where they have sex in the outhouse. Now, in the Hollywood love addiction world, this is considered hot. But if you really think about it, what woman in her right mind would want to have sex in an outhouse? The smell. The lurking residue. The flinging of clothes and where they may land. Did no one leave the film and think about these things afterward? Is it just me? Really? What do you people think about?
1. the other day, the automated toilet at my work flushed 9 times while I was changing in the stall.
ReplyDelete2. squatting to hover just over the seat with heels on is a fucking workout.
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ReplyDeleteI read an article in a science magazine when I was 11 about how toilet water vapor flies up five feet into the air everytime the toilet flushes, meaning that we not only get it all over ourselves but also ingest it. Since then, I have darted out of the stall right after the foot flush method.
ReplyDeleteRecently an automatic toilet flushed while I was still peeing. I had to force myself to sit there and take it. Horrifying.
It's a pain for guys, too. Either going number one or number two, those automated johns have a mind of their own.
ReplyDeleteSex in an outhouse or any public restroom is repulsive.
I worked my last two years of undergraduate as a janitor in the campus Catholic church. Surprisingly, while the men had more splatters to wipe up, the women's room was harder to clean than the men's. Men's rooms don't have the little metal boxes to clean out and those olfactory reservoirs were much worse than any pee drips.
The worst part was all the pH (cleaning staff code for pubic hair). That stuff gets everywhere in public bathrooms. Like Mrs. Levine's fear of flush vapor, I'm afraid I'll come out of a public restroom having inhaled someone's crab infested pH. Try washing those out of your alveoli.