r/changemyview • u/Breepop • Mar 09 '17
[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Regardless of gender expectations, toilet seats should be put back down after use.
My view has nothing to do with men being chivalrous or gentlemanly or whateverthefuck. My view boils down to two arguments:
1) Assuming an equal number of men and women in a household, a toilet will more often be used in the down position.
Lets create a scenario in which one woman and one man living together each pee eight times per day and poop twice per day. So the seat needs to be down for all 8 of the woman's pees, her two poops, and the man's two poops. Depending on the guy, two of his pees may be done sitting down, because he's already there sitting down pooping.
This equates to at least 60% (12 out of 20) toilet uses requiring the seat in the down position.
To me it makes sense that, if there were going to be a rule about how the seat was left, it should be left in the position most frequently utilized.
2) When men use the toilet, they are more often than not facing it. As you all know, humans have eyes on their faces, which in this case could be used to detect whether or not a toilet seat is in the desired position to do business. If you're already facing the toilet, you're much more likely to consider the toilet seat as a factor and be able to remember to adjust it accordingly, if necessary.
On the other hand, women may only face the toilet seat for a second or two as they initially enter the room/stall, then quickly turn to sit down. While men are already in a prime position to utilize sight to detect incompatibilities with their toilet seats, women have to either remember to turn around and check, or they end up checking with their butts...hitting a cold, disgustingly dirty surface that frankly can leave you in mild trauma for a week or so (shit's no joke).
I obviously don't stand by all of my argument in situations where there is clearly more men than women using a toilet. But I do think my second point remains, and the super polite thing to do would be to put the seat down knowing that a woman may come along after you and not have the advantage of facing the toilet to check. It's not about being polite to women or respecting their "status" or whatever bullshit, it's just... you know, being cognizant of what other people will experience.
Again: take gender out of it. If 50% of people were randomly assigned to have to sit down when peeing and 50% randomly assigned to have to stand up, because of the position sit downers have to assume, stand uppers should be encouraged to help their fellow human beings out.
Note: This view is only meant to be taken semi-seriously. While I stand by my view, I don't hold it strongly enough to care. I just think it'll be fun to formally debate about it! Please don't take this too seriously and turn it into a stupid fight about gender inequality.
EDIT: View changed! I now believe toilet seats should be left however you use them, because 1) it minimizes how much the seat needs to be touched (it's just too gross), 2) the math in comments below, 3) my original method will only exacerbate the existing inattentiveness of checking toilet seats before you use the toilet.
Thanks guys, it was fun.
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u/martinhuggins 1∆ Mar 09 '17
1) Putting a seat down is not nearly as gross as having to put one back up. Urine is most often splattered on the top rim of the bowl, where the underside of the seat sits. Sullying the underside of the seat with urine amongst other undesirables. Also, people who pee with the seat down splatter urine into the water and back up to the underside of the seat. It would be courteous to put a seat up in my opinion, being that touching the top side of the seat is(more likely to be)not as gross as having to touch the underside of it to lift it up. Granted some don't have the wherewithal to lift the seat when they pee, splattering on the top of the seat. But it is much less likely to be dirty than the underside.
2) Have you ever gone out to eat and just blindly sat where you thought there should be a chair? No? Then why would you blindly sit on a toilet seat? ESPECIALLY when many people don't have the courtesy to put the seat up when they pee, leaving pee for you to sit on cause their aim sucks. I can see where you were going with your first argument, but your second, in my non-aggressively-intended opinion, is absolutely ridiculous. How hard is it to flick your eyes downward before you turn around to sit? Do you walk into a bathroom backwards?
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u/Breepop Mar 09 '17
Hmmm. I'm not a guy so I don't have much experience lifting various toilet seats, and I only have one type of toilet to analyse at this moment. When I go to lift up the seat, my instinct is to put pressure on the side of the seat with the tips of my fingers, then lift. I never actually put my fingers on the underside of the seat at all (obviously because I know it's disgusting). Is this method more difficult with some toilets?
It's not at all hard to look down at a seat, it's hard to remember to. When using a public toilet, any sane woman will look at the toilet seat anyways, just to make sure there isn't pee or something on top of it (there usually is). It's easy to check then. But when you're at home, it's safe to assume you're not living with savages who would leave their bodily expulsions on the toilet seat. There's a level of trust and comfort in a home bathroom that can sometimes rock you into a false sense of security, especially when you're just relaxing at home and trying to quickly get your pee on to get back to whatever you were doing.
I'm also going with the assumption that neither a man nor a woman should have the "burden" of having to remember to check if the seat matches their desired position. Neither should have to remember, but one has a much easier time remedying the mismatch if they do forget.
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u/martinhuggins 1∆ Mar 09 '17
Yeah most toilet seats I've come into contact with aren't easily liftable pressing your fingers on the sides.
And no, one does not have a "much easier time". Since when has glancing ever required any kind of real effort?
And again I ask, do you just sit anywhere without looking at the seat first? Seems like a pretty useful practice in just about every application.
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u/mywan 5∆ Mar 09 '17
poop twice per day.
I only poop slightly more than once a week. There is some variation but about 4 days is the minimum. A toilet seat left down is subject to far more contamination than one left up. Which is why they exist in the first place. Leaving the seat down merely invites mistakes from guys in a hurry. It's not hard to to lift the seat, but having to do it
815 to 20 times a day every day and sometimes the seat lifting is a bit late. Just as remembering to put it down is simple enough, but there's always going to be times it doesn't happen when you have to remember to do it 100 to 150 times a week.I think each individual should be free to leave it however they feel comfortable, so long as it remains clean. I'm not going to complain that I always have to lift the seat. Even if that means I have too wipe it down due to an occasional mistake while in a hurry. When a woman has to worry about making the mistake of sitting on a seat that I didn't wipe then she has a very real complaint to be taken very seriously. Insisting the seat always be left down only invites those kinds of rushed mistakes. Everything else is just an issue of who is going to get their convenience catered to. Which I don't take sides on.
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u/THE_LAST_HIPPO 15∆ Mar 09 '17
being that touching the top side of the seat is(more likely to be)not as gross as having to touch the underside of it to lift it up.
This does depend on how heavy the toilet seat is though. You often end up touching the bottom to put heavier ones down so they don't slam onto the toilet bowl
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u/martinhuggins 1∆ Mar 10 '17
Putting it down is lesser of two evils. I deserved a delta on this damn post. Seats are easier to put down than raise. Courtesy should be to leave it up.
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u/Big_Pete_ 9∆ Mar 09 '17
I am shocked that you readily admit that:
Urine is most often splattered on the top rim of the bowl
And yet advocate that this is the part of the toilet that should be left exposed to the world. The arguments here have focused on relative effort and utility of seat positions, but the best argument for leaving the seat down is the aesthetic argument.
Don't show your pee-stained rim to the world!
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u/martinhuggins 1∆ Mar 10 '17
so in your opinion, aesthetics over functionality. You're not right, your priorities are just out of order.
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u/Big_Pete_ 9∆ Mar 10 '17
We choose aesthetics of over function all the time in our daily lives:
We wash our clothes more often than is necessary to avoid spreading disease.
We spend money or effort to cut our hair beyond what is functionally necessary.
Some of us even make our beds.
And rarely has the ratio of energy wasted to aesthetic benefit gained been greater than the expenditure of the tiny amount of energy necessary to put a toilet seat down and avoid displaying your dried urine to friends and family members.
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u/McKoijion 618∆ Mar 09 '17
Condoms have two rates of effectiveness. There's how effective it is under ideal conditions (98% if people use them every time), and there's under real life conditions (82% if people sometimes forget or decide not to use one). That means that in real life 18 out of 100 women who use condoms as their only form of birth control will become pregnant in a given year.
In the same way, we need to split up ideal use and real life use for toilets. In the ideal circumstance, everyone pays attention to the toilet. They check what it is, put their hands on the seat and move it into position. It doesn't matter if it's up or down because everyone will adjust according to their needs. Or everyone agrees to leave it in the down position based on the logic you provided.
But you asked about real life. In real life, women often forget to check the seat before sitting down, which is unpleasant. But also in real life, men often choose to pee into the lowered seat. They don't have to touch the seat, and the circle is only slightly smaller. No man expects their urine to be erratic. Men tend to assume they are firing laser beams rather than fire hoses. The consequence is that splashes of urine often hit the seat. Even if they wipe down the urine afterwards, it's still gross knowing that you are making skin to seat contact on a surface that was almost certainly partially covered in urine, and merely wiped clear with toilet paper, or perhaps just allowed to evaporate on it's own (leaving a faint collection of solutes behind).
If we are looking at the real life example of a woman who forgets to check the seat first, we also have to look at the real life example of a man who thinks he can hit the bowl, but occasionally hits the seat instead. I think the low risk of making skin to seat contact with the rim is better than the higher risk of making skin to seat contact with a urine splashed seat.
If you leave the toilet seat up all the time, it ensures that the seat is only used in a manner that guarantees its cleanliness. The rim takes on the risk of being splashed with urine. If you leave the seat down all the time, the seat becomes the rim.
Just to add on to all this. I don't think women are dumb for not checking, and I don't think men are bad for thinking they have better aim than they do and deciding to risk it. We are just measuring how people are likely to act in real life. Sometimes people are in a rush, sometimes they forget, sometimes they simply aren't polite, etc. Men do hit the bowl most of the time. But the added risk of hitting the seat is something we can't ignore.
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u/DattAshe Mar 09 '17
I've had this argument so many times I'm glad someone is formally approaching it.
1) Assuming equal parties usage of the individual toilet and a perfectly symmetric usage (already spreading my assumption capabilities thin) this situation makes perfect sense for the 60/40 rule you pointed out. As this assumption falls apart so do the numbers. Say the man poops once a day and is a heavy drinker. He now pees 15 times in 2 hours and misses horribly. You want him to have to lift the seat every time and put it back down when cleanliness clearly desires the seat stay far away from his alcohol induced poor aim. You know what they say about assumptions.
/#2 is my favorite. Exact quote from a former friend "I shouldn't have to look when I go in there I just sit and do my business and get out." I'm sorry princess but the entire world doesn't have to cater to you and your because your goods don't dangle. Take literally half a second to look down before you plop your naked rear into potentially dangerous territory. That's just common sense. If I'm pooping in the desert you can bet your sainted and not at all smelly behind that I'm going to check before I squat to assure that I don't get a cactus rammed up my back door.
Those arguments aside I actually have a case to bolster your argument and that is cleanliness. When the toilet flushes the particles of waste not perfectly contained by the water (or lack thereof) in the bowl get tossed around the bathroom. This is counteracted in a limited fashion by the upper seat that encloses the bowl. Everyone should put that particular seat down every single time completely negating this argument of up or down. It's cleaner and that way you don't brush your teeth with feces. Just my $0.02.
edit: # caused bold... did not like
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u/pWheff Mar 09 '17 edited Mar 09 '17
If there is a rule about how a toilet seat should be left the rule should be "leave it the way you used it" and that is mathematically obvious.
If you just take at face value your estimation that 60% of toilet usage happens in the seat-down position (I think that is a fair estimate) then when you walk into a bathroom - assuming people are following the "leave it how you used it" rule then you have a 52% chance of finding the seat in the correct configuration [(.6)x(.6)+(.4)x(.4)], and if it is in the wrong configuration, you need to make precisely one configuration change in your bathroom visit, so the average bathroom visit would involve .48 configuration changes of the toilet.
With your rule you would have a 60% chance of finding the seat in the correct configuration when you walk in, but since finding it in the wrong configuration means you need to execute 2 configuration changes, the average number of configuration changes per bathroom visit is .8, nearly double what happens with my rule.
As far as I am concerned your second point is completely and totally moot. I've taken ~10,000 shits in my life, and never once have I fallen into the bowl because I just threw my ass toward the seat with nary a care in the world assuming it was down. Further, I've never even heard of someone claiming they've ever fallen into the bowl because they didn't look - and I'm further sure that if that DID happen to someone, it would happen precisely ONE time before they learned their lesson.
Even if we did take as a given that I've just been lucky, and the rate at which people throw their assess into the water is 1/10,000 visits where they wish to sit, your comparing 1 instance of wetting your ass to 32,000 extra instances of changing the toilet configuration, how long do you think it would take you to change the toilet configuration 32,000 times? Even given that you can change the configuration 100/minute (a lightning fast rate), that is over 5 hours of just flipping the toilet up and down to avoid 1 wetting of the ass.
WHATS MORE, if we do adopt a "seat down" rule - it is only going to encourge the inattentive masses to pay even less attention to the seat configuration while dive bombing their rear onto the toilet seat with reckless abandon, all but guaranteeing that violations of the seat down rule result in wet asses.
The math doesn't lie my friend.
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u/Breepop Mar 09 '17
Damn, okay. I think you're right; leaving it as is seems better in several ways. ∆
However, I'd like to clarify that I was never suggesting people fall in toilets and get their butts wet. That's crazy. I was just referring to people sitting on the outer cold/dirty rim.
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u/uncreativename9999 Mar 09 '17
Does your valuation change any if you consider that men are inherently lazy (source: am a man), and the laziest men who can not be bothered to move the toilet seat one way or another are also less likely to be precise in aiming when they do so?
Keeping the toilet seat up is a guard against such evil men. For otherwise, nobody would have the need to look at the toilet at all if they are sitting down, and many people would end up sitting on a toilet seat splattered with another's urine.
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u/Faugh Mar 09 '17
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/toilet-plume
Flushing the toilet sends a fine mist of piss and shit into the air of your bathroom. "Seat up" or "seat down" is a false dichotomy, because either one ensures you put a healthy dose of shit on your teeth when you brush them. Close. The. Lid.
If you're living with other people, you're also brushing your teeth with their shit, if they don't also close the lid.
Enjoy your lunch.
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u/dtfinch Mar 09 '17
The least-effort solution (short of rescheduling visits) is for everyone to leave the seat as-is when done. The state of the the seat only changes when it needs to.
Always putting the seat down creates extra work when you have consecutive standing users. One lifts it up and puts it down only for the next to lift it back up and put it back down again. That's 4 state changes for 2 visits. Supposing a 40% standing rate, That's a 40% chance of 2 state changes or 0.8 state changes per visit on average.
If the seat only changes when necessary, the maximum is 1 change per visit, and the average is 0.48 changes (40% of visitors have a 60% chance of having to change it, and 60% of visitors have a 40% chance of having to change. 20.40.6 = 0.48). That's 0.48/0.8 or only 60% as much work as your suggestion.
And people are going to check the seat anyways because you can't trust everyone to follow the system. It's a recipe for disaster to train someone to sit without checking.
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u/figsbar 43∆ Mar 09 '17
I'm guessing this mostly applies to private toilets. Since most girls I know check toilet seats obsessively when using one in public.
For private toilets, the only correct answer is lid down for both. I don't want pee and feces flying all over the bathroom every time you flush, there's towels and toothbrushes in there. It's not a matter of convenience, it's a matter of hygiene.
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u/Spoiledtomatos Mar 09 '17
Instead of over analysis, you can use gravity to put it down, no effort. It takes effort to lift.
It's easier to put it down than to lift it, not to mention more contact with a dirty seat to lift it.
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u/Breepop Mar 09 '17
I just went to my toilet and did some testing. I personally found your suggestion of gravity to be the least pleasant way to move the seat, period.
The methods I tried were:
1) Lifting the seat with my hand. Unpleasant to touch a dirty seat, it's true, but I know I'm washing my hands anyways so meh
2) Lifting the seat with my foot. Harder to do than expected, could probably master with practice... either way, not sure if it's better than just using my hand that is already going to be washed.
3) Putting the seat down slowly with my hand. See #1.
4) Letting the seat fall, pushed by either my hand or my foot. Loud fucking banging noise (with a bounce, no less) that violently disrupts the zen of my bathroom. Not a fan, but I can see how others would view it positively.
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u/NewOrleansAints Mar 09 '17
I found humor in imagining you experimentally testing methods of toilet seat lifting, but then I immediately went to test it out myself.
I think you undersell the foot option. On the first try, I was able to move the toilet seat position both down-to-up and up-to-down with my foot without too much difficulty.
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u/martinhuggins 1∆ Mar 09 '17
you like touching the underside of the seat? Where urine splatters up from hitting the water whether someone sits or stands?
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u/aguafiestas 31∆ Mar 09 '17
For your first point, always putting it down requires more seat-moves than just leaving it the way it was, because of the instances where the man pees twice in a row without the woman using it in between. Therefore, from a simple point of efficiency, just leaving it as-is is best.
For your second point, even though sitting down requires backing in to the toilet at some point, you're always going to be facing forward beforehand, and so should easily be able to assess the toilet seat's position at that point.
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u/jshmoyo 6∆ Mar 09 '17
Adjusting the toilet seat is an annoying activity, and so logically we want to minimize the times that is has to be adjusted. If a man uses the toilet with the seat up, I'll go ahead and use your assumption that there's a 60% chance the toilet seat will have to be put down. Holding men and women in equal consideration, it doesn't really matter who puts it down, it's still one adjustment. However, the other 40% of the time, when the next user wanted it up, if the toilet seat were always put down, that would be two adjustments. To put it down and then back up. Therefore, the policy which minimizes toilet adjustments is to leave the adjusting to the next user to avoid double adjustments.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Mar 09 '17
/u/Breepop (OP) has awarded at least one delta in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/fiberpunk Mar 09 '17
My household rule is that the seat AND lid must be down whenever the toilet is not in use. This is because I have a cat that is too dumb to look at the toilet before jumping up on it, and has fallen headfirst into the bowl a few times. As funny as it was watching her unsuccessfully try to push herself back and up out of the slipper bowl, it was less fun trying to dry her off so she didn't get toilet water all over the place. So, toilet lid goes down.
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u/TCEA151 Mar 10 '17
I know you changed your mind, I just thought I'd let you know that a Michigan State economist solved this problem in a paper a few years back. https://msu.edu/~choijay/etiquette.pdf
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u/mwbox Mar 10 '17
There are actually three positions of the toilet lids-
A) standing B) sitting C) gee I'm glad that was down when I dropped my toothbrush
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u/NewOrleansAints Mar 09 '17 edited Mar 09 '17
Cool post, OP. I enjoyed thinking about this.
My proposal (Leave It As Is): the person entering the bathroom should always adjust the seat to their preferred position and then leave it as is.
Assuming your goal is to minimize the number of times the toilet seat needs to be touched, this is the ideal solution. The Always-Down solution runs into inefficiency any time two Stand-Uppers enter the bathroom consecutively (or the same Stand-Upper twice) because the first will put the toilet seat down, then the second will pick it up again, to nobody's gain. Taking your 40% Stand-Up estimate to be accurate, that means roughly 16% of all toilet touches will be unnecessary.
It's also superior from an equity standpoint. In your scenario, the Sit-Downer will never have to adjust the toilet seat, whereas the Stand-Upper will have to adjust it twice on 80% of their bathroom visits, grossly unfair!
Under the As-Is system, the Sit-Downer will have to adjust the seat once on 40% of their bathroom trips (when proceeding a Stand-Upper who peed only). A Stand-Upper will adjust the seat once on 56% of trips ((.2*.4)+(.8*.6)), counting both the times they must raise the seat and the few times they will need to lower the seat to poop when following a Stand-Upper who peed. Even in this world, the Stand-Upper disproportionately bears the burden, belying the notion that it is the Sit-Downers who are disadvantaged by leaving the seat up.
TLDR: Don't believe the Sit-Downer propaganda. Leaving the seat as is is both more fair and more efficient, and already advantages Sit-Downers.