Letters to the Editor
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There is no excuse.
guys ought to wash
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Germ paranoia
Americans are already so idiotically crazy about germs that they spread antiseptic, antibacterial cleaning fluids all over their damn houses, breeding super-bugs in the process. I would not have expected Salon to be dumb enough to perpetuate this nonsense.
When I piss somewhere disgusting, like a train station bathroom, I just want to get out as quickly as possible. My dick *is* clean, thank you very much, and I don't touch anything else while I'm in there.
And the reason people wash hands after food preparation is that they have likely touched *raw* meat, which can be dangerous, and you absolutely need to wash then. So yes, washing after cooking makes more sense than washing after pissing.
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Women's desks
I did recently see a report, though, that women's desks have far more bacteria than men's, including possibly dangerous bacteria. There was no reason given why this would be so, but I think it's because we take our purses into the bathroom with us (and necessarily touch more than ourselves).
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Did they report how many men pee all over the toilet seat compared to how many women pee all over the toilet seat?
Once again we see Broadsheet's policy on science:
Science that maligns men is reported quickly and uncritically.
Science that maligns women is not reported, or if it is, it is uncritically attacked.
What Broadsheet never does? Pick up the phone and call up the researchers themselves to ask questions about the research.
And this is journalism.
I know that when I use the men's room and need to crap, most of the time, the toilet seat is not covered with pee.
I know from my ex (who is a squatter herself) and from my daughters that most of the time they need to use the restroom, the toilet seat IS covered with pee.
Covered with pee? I guess that's just liquid magical vaginal peace rays.
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Shaking my head
Reading something like this always makes me shake my head. I simply cannot comprehend how anyone of either gender would NOT want to wash their hands after using the restroom.
As for that scene in Seinfeld...I have seen restaurants that have signs posted in the restrooms saying that all employees MUST wash their hands before returning to work. That's probably a good idea, though there are certainly questions about how it is enforced.
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Antibiotic craze fault of women
Women are to blame for a lot of things due to their kids are #1 nature:
Antiobiotcs craze
Segregation
Poor slow driving
GWB
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1 or 2
Hand-washing is good, because your hands frequently touch the biggest source of germs on your body: your face. Keeping flu down means frequent hand-washing, but it has nothing to do with bathroom usage. Because flu bugs aren't spread through your genitals. In fact, urine is pretty much sterile; in fact, you'd probably come out cleaner from most public bathrooms by peeing on your hands, and not touching any of the fixtures, gross as that sounds.
But really, its a part of your body your willing to have a sex partner put their mouth in contact with; it can't be all that dirty.
Now not washing your hands after pooping, that is a different matter altogether. As is usual with a instant media release kind of study like this, we don't know if they were tracking hand-washing after which function. Which, in terms of contamination and disease, would be pretty important.
(Oh, and from my time in my youth in the restaurant/bar industry, I can assure you that women's washrooms, by the end of the night, are much much nastier than the men's. It used to be punishment duty, when the boss was mad at you, you had to clean up the ladies'.)
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I'll back up Canuck
I worked a roller rink in the 80s and the women's bathrooms were absolutely filthy at the end of the night compared to the men's.
I don't know what they do in there to make it so, seems women do not respect shared space for some bizarre psychological reason. What else could it be?
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Men, women, public restrooms
Catherine, based on my presumably greater experience in men's rooms than you, I can tell you that men pee not only on the floor, but a good number don't bother to lift the seat in the stalls and pee on those, too. And then there are the guys who don't bother to flush the urinal, and worse, the mutants who don't bother to flush the toilets (yes, we're talking #2). I once witnessed the dean of my frackin' law school exit without flushing the urinal.
On the other hand, my wife complains often about the filthy seats in women's public restrooms, so it may not be a gender thing, but a class thing (as in, too many people lack it altogether).
We men have it better, since we can handle peeing standing up and away from the filth. I never pity my wife more than when we're traveling in a country that has those toilets which are level with the floor -- the old Squat 'n Go.
As for washing up, the United States is devolving into a land of vulgarity and stupidity (Idiotocracy), so it figures that our hygienic habits should go down the toilet along with everything else. Fine, let a thousand plagues bloom.
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And don't forget ATM's.
Considering how many fingers touch ATM buttons, anyone who doesn't wash their hands once they get back home or to the office is playing with fire.
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I have a rational explanation for you...
Women are socialized and pressured to be cleaner and tidier than men. Ta-da, dilemma solved. I mean, is there any doubt about this? Look at the ways girls and boys are stereotypically supposed to play: indoor vs. outdoor, tea parties vs. rough & tumble. Cleaning is women's work, you have to be clean to be pretty but you can be scuffed up with dirt & soot and be rugged & manly, etc. Blah blah blah, the list goes on. Even if these stereotypes don't hold as much sway as they used to and many of us claim to be immune to them, they're still around enough that you wouldn't be surprised to find a statistical difference.
Oh, and I don't know if there's much relationship to how dirty the bathrooms are either. Washing your hands before you leave the germy bathroom is a social act. The mess that's left behind... well it's also social, between you & the other people using it, but people seem to be far less conscious about that since most of those people are strangers, and of the same sex (and therefore cause less anxiety about propriety.)
Lastly, as someone who spent half my life in one kind of bathroom and the other half in the other kind, I have to say that both are pretty filthy. In a men's bathroom, everything is generally kind of filthy, because guys' piss gets everywhere. I would much sooner sit on the floor in an average women's bathroom, because if it looks clean (and is away from the stalls) then it's more likely to BE clean. No such guarantee in the men's, where it smells more too. HOWEVER, the most horrifying messes I've ever seen have been in the women's bathroom, and you're forced into much closer contact with even the average-sized "pee all over the seats" messes, you have to deal with them yourself or hover (which often perpetuates the cycle of mess).
So quick cheat sheet...
- men's bathroom: holistically filthy and smelly from urine all over, stalls generally less so because they don't get used as much
- women's bathroom: may look clean at first, but at least one stall has some awful mess of up to three different body fluids in it, quite likely not all in the toilet, and most of the other seats, when you look closely, are sprayed with pee