Nearly 75% Of Men Have This Gross Habit And Women Are Fed Up
Andrii Iemelianenko | Shutterstock Women of the world, one of your biggest bugaboos is coming to light: A survey found that nearly 75% of men are making a mess of the bathroom because they refuse to sit down to pee.
Whenever I had friends over as a kid, the day would always end with my mom having a meltdown about "why your friends' mothers don't teach them not to pee all over my bathroom!" If you're a woman in a relationship with a man, you are likely yelling, "Exactly!" Is the tide (of pee) finally turning?
A survey shows nearly 75% of men prefer to stand when they pee.
The data comes from venerable polling agency YouGov, which, after being playfully taken to task for never having delved into the eternal issue of men seemingly being unable to not drench every bathroom they enter with urine as if they have a firehose in their pants, decided to finally crunch the data.
The results are actually pretty surprising! YouGov polled 13 different countries to see where on Earth men are finally taking accountability for the way we tend to, um, make an abstract art piece of every wee that we take.
In the top spot are the Germans, where men sitting down to pee is so common, at 62%, that the country actually has a mocking term for them: ‘sitzpinkler,' which literally means someone who sits down to pee, but the implication is that it's embarrassing, despite the fact that standing to pee is so commonly seen as antisocial in German culture that there are often signs in public restrooms telling men not to do it!
America, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not so conscientious. Only about a quarter of us, and our British cousins for that matter, are sitting down. But we're still doing better than Mexico and Singapore, the bottom two countries on the list, who are in there splashing around like it's a water park at unprecedented rates.
One man has invented a special patch to stop men from splashing pee everywhere.
Speaking of the U.K., after repeated complaints from his girlfriend about him peeing everywhere but the bowl, British man Sheldon Weinman decided to create a solution: The Pee Patch. It's a padded patch that sticks to the back of a toilet bowl or urinal that gives men a place to aim, and its rough texture acts as both an absorbent and a splatter reducer.
Weinman says he's heard from moms all over the world thanking him for his invention. "Men say it's a useless product while women are saying to them, 'Just sit down,'" he told Talker News. "But I've had feedback from moms who have said pee is finally staying in the toilet and there are no more wet seats or floors."
We must, of course, acknowledge the elephant in the room: It really is dumb that people are buying a product instead of men JUST. SITTING. DOWN. because they don't want to be considered "effeminate" while doing something nobody is even watching them do. (Theoretically, anyway. No judgments if that's your thing!) Especially because it turns out that men should be sitting down anyway, according to doctors.
Urologists actually say sitting down is better for men's bodies anyway.
For all you men out there who say we gents aren't "supposed" to sit down to pee, bad news: Urologists say you're dead wrong and that the reason we stand is just convention, not an actual biological imperative.
British urologist Dr. Gerald Collins told The Telegraph that sitting down actually empties men's bladders more completely and efficiently, because when a person is standing up, the musculature of the pelvis tenses. When you sit, it relaxes, letting your wee flow free. It's particularly better for men who have any kind of medical condition that affects urination.
Pixel-Shot | Shutterstock
So there, men: Sit down and stop waving that thing around like a pair of nunchucks or whatever it is we're all doing in there! But to women reading this, there's another solution to this problem.
In my brother's house, part of the division of labor is that he cleans the bathrooms. His wife claims she picked this at random from a list of tasks, but I don't believe her for one specific reason. One day, my brother came to me, leaned in conspiratorially like he was sharing a forbidden, arcane secret, and said to me, "Do you have any idea how much easier it is to clean a bathroom when you sit down to pee?!"
As a man who's always lived alone and has always cleaned my own bathroom and always sat because of it, my response was, "oh you big dumb golden retriever of a man, I could have told you that a decade ago."
Regardless, the unbridled glee and wonder on his face at this discovery were palpable, like he'd just discovered how to time-travel or something. So there you go, ladies: Make your man clean the bathrooms and he'll be sitting in no time, and might even find a sense of joy in the discovery!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
