Shane Rounce: The great Toilet Seat Debate, settled. This is awesome! I have never…

The great Toilet Seat Debate, settled.

This is awesome!

I have never once in my entire life been asked nicely to leave the toilet seat in some specific position.

It seems a sort of XX-hive-mind consensus that women cannot politely request this of someone. The correct orientation of the toilet seat lid has become a fixed, cultural point-of-fact. It’s defenders: dogmatic zealots. Their weapons: guilt, yelling, glaring and occasionally finger wagging. I by no means wish to clump all women into this group. I am not leaving out the possibility that only women I cohabitate with have this problem. So basically, when I refer to women in this little rant, take it with a grain of salt. You know who you are… those women.

Recently, while watching Bill Cosby Himself with my girlfriend, I noted that during a joke he was doing, he said something about leaving the toilet lid down as being a bad thing. I was confused. My girlfriend (ed. now wife) explained, while glaring at me, that leaving the lid and the seat down is just as bad if not worse than leaving both of them up because when a woman has to pee and the lid is down, she plops down on the lid, cannot tell that it is down and begin to pee on the lid.

Every girl who has ever freaked out on me for leaving the seat in the wrong position has one common supporting argument, and it has got to be one of the stupidest admissions that I have ever heard in my entire life.

“We don’t always look before we sit down, and sometimes, at night, we don’t even turn on the light.”

This is a deficiency. This unrepentantly wrongheaded modus operandi says two things to me:

I make unwarranted assumptions.
I am militantly unaware of my environment.

So as a male, apparently I am expected to make up for this deficiency by making sure that the lid is always left in the correct position. Yet in the interest of not falling into the toilet and/or urinating on myself, I always make sure to look before I sit down and am utterly perplexed that I share a planet with 3.3 billion humans that can’t be bothered to do the same. I find the idea of using the facilities while “not looking” intriguing. How exactly does one not see the condition of the toilet before sitting on it? The only solutions I have been able to come up with on my own (since females seem uninterested or unable to tell me) are these:

Women enter the bathroom with their eyes closed or while staring at the ceiling.
Women open the bathroom door and then proceed to back into the bathroom using their rear-end to locate the toilet.
Women only do bathroom business after daylight hours and are incapable of and/or unwilling to operate a light switch.
All women are very cleverly hiding the fact that they are born blind.
Toilets/toilet seats are diabolically engineered to be completely invisible to women.

One time, when I was about seven, my skinny little ass fell into the toilet because I had left the toilet seat and lid up. Having no girth to speak of I fell right in and dipped my bare hiney in the cold (yet thankfully clean) toilet water. Needless to say, the experience was unpleasant. Since that day, I have never fallen into–or even come close to falling into–the toilet. It is noteworthy that this impressive record of dry-assedness–unobtainable by the fairer sex–includes many, many shit-faced-drunk trips to the bathroom.

I am not unwilling to pitch in and do my best to help women with their problem, I am simply upset that onus has fallen upon me to guard the state of the toilet seat. It’s infuriating that because women are seemingly oblivious to their environment when their bladder becomes full, they take this anger out on me. It becomes my deficiency. I am karmically bankrupt because I failed to put the seat down/lid up. I can understand the embarrassment of urinating on ones self and or falling into a toilet, but placing the blame on someone else for this ridiculous folly is an abuse of reason.

Men, there can be only one solution: in households where there can be no compromise, take a hack saw and amputate the source of debate.

Problem solved; everyone must now “hover.”