Bad Habits - Why men don’t put the toilet seat back down

September 18, 2005 by NML

Up? Down? Up? Down? The toilet seat and it’s position represents a permanent thorn in the side of relationships. Jago tells us why men won’t be putting the toilet seat down anytime soon by presenting the symbolic and psychological reasons behind this ‘bad habit’. Who knew that a man putting the toilet seat back down could mean so much?!

First, a disclaimer. I’m suspicious of any attempt to say what men, women, gays, elephants, extra-terrestrial intelligences, think or feel or want in any situation. I hear stuff about what men think or feel or want, and I go, “Yes; yes; yes”; but then !!! “What the f*ck?!… I don’t think that at all mate, that is so alien to the way I think that if you think that is really the way men think, then maybe one of us is not a man at all - I’ll leave that open.” That off my chest, I can address the substantive issue, which is why men don’t put the toilet seat [back?] down.
This is such a complex question that already I wish I hadn’t addressed it. The hinged toilet seat can’t be two hundred years old - before the flushable toilet, men probably pissed wherever they happened to be standing, or against the nearest vertical surface if they were decently brought up. But in those two hundred years, or more likely in the last thirty, this humble O of plastic or wood has become what we might call a locus of the struggle between the sexes. It has become symbolical. I say this because - here I’m assuming a toilet, if not pristine, is at least not straight out of Trainspotting, heaving with fermenting ordure. Lifting or lowering the toilet seat is not a great effort, it doesn’t require special training or diet, it doesn’t even qualify as exercise, unless you’re desperate. So having to lift the seat before you piss, or lower it before you sit, must carry a heavy symbolic freight.
Before examining that freight, let’s just look at the economy. If it’s one person alone in the house, the woman will presumably keep the seat down the whole time. The man will leave it up; even if he is peculiarly anal about energy expenditure, it would be foolish to put the seat down in the anticipation of how he might wish to engage with the toilet next time round, on the grounds that he might be wrong and then he’d have to lift the seat again. And at the other statistical extreme, if it is a woman living with seven men - six sons and a partner for instance - then every male is quite justified in leaving the seat up on the six to one chance that a male will use it next. The opposite applies to a man living with seven women.OK, I know, I’m prevaricating here. It has come to the point. What is it that women understand by a man leaving the toilet seat up? Is it that the man is inconsiderate, like he wouldn’t offer a lady his seat on the bus? That’s a bit retro, surely. Or is it something more feral, that the man is marking territory in a macho way, like a tom cat spraying; and she really doesn’t want to be reminded of this, particularly if they’re round at her place? Or is it a matter of taste and decor, that a naked toilet bowl is a hideous object, whereas a seat in oak or pine or avocado plastic is sheer aesthetic delight?
At this point I conferred. To the question, “Why don’t men put the toilet seat down?” she replied “Why should they?” I said “Exactly, just my point,” – a second too quickly, as usual; just before I registered that this was, if not exactly sarcasm, at least an open question. So it came to me at three this morning, a vision of the naked, unlovely toilet bowl and what it meant.

To face it, you face outwards, out through the wall, out of the house, into the street, the gutter, the forest, the jungle. This free pissing into space confirms an urge for larger freedoms. A man can piss anywhere, and where his penis leads, he can follow. The seat means the opposite; not standing, I am here, I am as you see me, uninhibited by domestic ties. It means sitting, facing inwards, towards the home and all that that suggests in permanence, and order, and predictability. It means turning the backside on the escape route, the way out, the way to freedom and relationship anarchy.

The only thing about this is that, from my very limited knowledge of men and women, there must be many relationships where women keep the toilet seat firmly up and men are always trying to put it down.

Check out Jago’s blog