adapted from Journal 21, p 2-6. Tuesday 8/May/2018
The chair beneath my bed, Arizona. 

One recurring question that comes up in my conversations with women is some variant on the network of questions relating to a man’s unusual relationship with the toilet. So as not to be gender-essentialist I will specify that here I mean specifically cis men, men who both identify as men and were are in possession of a penis. Trans people, in my limited experience, bring a sort of respectful attitude to the entire bathroom experience that cis men generally lack. 

The majority of my friends are women, and after a certain point one begins to receive questions that have difficult or complex answers about how a man pees. For example, in both of my romantic relationships my girlfriend has come into the bathroom, while I was using it, to stare at me peeing. Not in a sexual way, but simply that standing up to pee is really weird to look at if you are unused to it. 

The burning question I get asked by women with whom I have reached a certain level of familiarity is always “Why do men piss everywhere?” I have seen, in the course of my research, diagrams and online discussion that suggests that men do this on purpose, or never learned to use a toilet correctly, or maybe that it is some kind of range game. For me, the answer is much more simple: One does not always know where one is going to end up peeing. Through a lifetime of pissing one can get a rough sense of the potential trajectory your piss will take, but there are often contributing factors that are not always immediately apparent. You can try and aim dead center of the bowl (a strategy which has its own tradeoffs vis-vis noise and splash potential) But if your penis is slightly twisted in your fly, or obstructed in the way of a kidney stone or a small piece of dried cum the pressure and angle of your stream will vary unpredictably. Once, I tried to pee but nothing happened, and I could feel the pee trapped within me. The pressure got so bad that I imagined I would never pee again, or be hobbled, but brutally this situation resolved and my piss veered off sharply and to the left, taking me off guard. 

There are also a host of difficulties related to peeing while erect, something I had to deal with as a teenager and still sometimes in the morning. ‘Morning wood’ is not caused by sexy dreams, as I thought for years, but as a side-effect of your full bladder pressing up against your prostate and “turning you on”. So when you wake up hard, you could jack it and deflate, but generally you have to pee, really quite desperately. This opens a whole ’nother arena of problems because now you have to pee but your penis is pointed straight up in the air as you stand, therefore your pee will go straight up like the fucking manneken pis, so you need to figure something else out, and quickly. There are a number of options at this juncture, the most dignified in my opinion being to simply piss in the shower.  Showers are easy to clean and have the available range necessary for success, while maintaining a certain level of personal dignity. 

At this point in my explanation, whoever asked,  always someone without a penis, will suggest with a horrified expression, as if I am a monster: “Why don’t, if you can’t piss standing up, you simply sit down?” And I have considered this, well before anyone ever mentioned it to me. There are complications, namely that if my erect penis points straight up as I stand, it then points straight out as I sit, and even with coercion refuses to point downward in the way that I would require to comfortably piss sitting. Also, although it is not often considered, there exists a small gap between the seat and bowl, widest at the apex of the curve and located directly in front of me as I sit there, designed to facilitate the lifting of the seat but also complicating everything terribly. 

Bringing all of this into account and even in standard everyday use of one’s penis one can only hope for 80-90% accuracy and reliability of any given pissing encounter. This can be corrected for with vigilance and a quick hand, spilling at most only a few drops of piss on the floor, when suprised. The element of this that frustrates me is how few men are willing to clean up after themselves with a slip of toilet paper. Sure it’s only a few drops, but a few drops from you, a few drops from someone else, and along the course of the day a puddle is created and only grows. It may be gross, but many things are gross. I sometimes wonder how one can reach adulthood and still have a disgust reflex, between younger siblings, friends, sex, and travel, my tolerances for the truly ‘Gross’ have become very high. Please clean up after yourself. 

Side note: the correct thing to do is to close both the seat and the lid of the toilet, to create an equal inconvenience for all.